Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Freelancing in interesting times

    I’m finishing off my last few commissions for 2012 – I thought I’d finished yesterday, but Freelance Santa dropped off some last-minute work, a present that’s very much appreciated – and I can honestly say this has been one of the weirdest years I’ve had, work-wise.

    There’s a famously sarcastic curse: “may you live in interesting times”. It’s certainly been an interesting year for freelance tech writers. Some much-loved magazines have closed (thankfully the people on them have found other gigs), many new titles expect everybody to contribute their efforts for free, and online cesspools such as Mail Online have crashed the tech reporting party because Apple stories generate enormous amounts of traffic. And like every freelance with a website, I’ve been approached by 432,728 PR companies wanting to publish their editorial on this blog.

    I really didn’t think I’d end 2012 still working as a freelance – the summer was particularly worrying – but I’m still hanging in there, doing a bit of copywriting, a bit of blogging, my weekly BBC Radio Scotland thing and lots of magazine and online work.

    I’ve been writing for some interesting new launches – if you haven’t already checked it out, the iPad magazine Tech. weekly [iTunes link] is essentially The Week for technology, so you can read that and get hard information instead of spending loads of time wading through linkbait headlines, and Creative Bloq is a cool mix of design advice, inspiration and stuff to drool over – and while many great magazines have folded, old favourites such as .net, MacFormat and Official Windows Magazine continue to do really nice work both in print and in digital form.

    Then there’s Techradar, whose mix of fast facts, expert analysis and taking the piss – guess who does a lot of that last one? – is doing astonishing numbers. I’ve never worked on a daily newspaper, but Techradar’s internet-speed deadlines give me the kind of adrenalin rush I imagine print hacks get from going to press.

    I’ve been doing this since 1998, and one thing’s remained constant throughout: I know how lucky I am to be able to do what I do. Journalism, whether print, online or broadcast, is an exciting industry full of really cool, creative people, and it’s a joy to be part of it.

    If I’ve worked for you or with you this year, or if you’ve enjoyed reading or listening to anything I’ve done, then thanks. You’re awesome.

    Merry Christmas, everyone.

  • Changes to UK copyright law are coming – and they’re good

    Some rare common sense:

    Changes to create greater freedom to use copyright works such as computer games, paintings, photographs, films, books, and music, while protecting the interests of authors and right owners, were announced today by Business Secretary Vince Cable. These form part of the Government’s response to creating a modern, robust and flexible copyright framework.

    New measures include provisions to allow copying of works for individuals’ own personal use, parody and for the purposes of quotation. They allow people to use copyright works for a variety of valuable purposes without permission from the copyright owners. They will also bring up to date existing exceptions for education, research and the preservation of materials.

    Given the lobbying that’s been going on over this, it’s a pleasant surprise to see that the private copying bits haven’t been torpedoed.

  • The web we lost

    A great post on tech changes by Anil Dash:

    The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we’ve lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.

    So here’s a few glimpses of a web that’s mostly faded away…

  • Apple maps can get lost

    Easy joke, I know. Me on Techradar: Google Maps is back on iOS, and it’s great.

    There’s a famous bit in the classic film Crocodile Dundee when a mugger pulls a knife on him. “That’s not a knife,” he chuckles, and pulls out an enormous Bowie knife. “THAT’s a knife.”

    Today Google is Crocodile Dundee…

  • A quick plug for something really cool

    I’m a big fan of The Week, a weekly digest of the world’s key news stories, and I’ve always thought a similar publication for technology would be a really good idea. Other people clearly think the same, and here it is: Tech., a weekly iPad magazine from the nice people at Techradar. I haven’t seen the finished version yet but I’ve seen some of the content, and I think it’s going to be really good.

    Update, 30 November:

    Tech. is now in the app store, and while I’m a little bit biased – I’ve written some of it – I reckon it’s really, really good. It’s cheap, too.

  • Kinecting the kids

    I’m writing this while my daughter explores Disneyland – not the real one, the one that resembles Hell with cartoon characters, but the Kinect one. Kinect Disneyland Adventures is really rather good if your child is the right age for it.

    I bought the Kinect motion controller a long time ago, partly out of curiosity and largely because I thought it’d be fun for my wee girl. She was a little too young for it, though, so what I’d hoped would be fun was just endlessly frustrating. It seems that, for us at least, five is the right age – so instead of wandering around, getting lost and frustrated as she used to, she’s currently dancing with the space monster Stitch.

    Get the age right and Kinect really is brilliant for kids: titles such as Pixar Rush and Once Upon A Monster are fantastic fun, their jumping around assuaging any parental guilt about letting the children play videogames.

    For grown-ups, though, it’s the same kind of thing as the Nintendo Wii’s motion sensing, with the initial excitement and wow factor fading until it’s gathering dust. That might just be me – voice control of the console needs more volume than I can risk when the family is in bed, which is pretty much my only gaming time, and it’s patchy anyway; I don’t use my console for video so Kinect control of that doesn’t matter; Kinect fitness titles require the same enthusiasm as a trip to the gym, but unlike the gym I don’t have anyone forcing me to do it; I prefer to do my gaming from the sofa, in low light, not standing in the middle of the living room until I get gorilla arms – but I do think it’s clever tech that’s of limited appeal to grown-ups.

    For kids, though, it’s great. If you have an Xbox, children and spare cash – and don’t mind buying something that’s likely to be revamped next year for the next Xbox – it’s not a bad investment now that lots of good titles are really cheap. It’s a good time to get the kids Kinect-ed.

  • With tablets, small is beautiful

    I wrote a wee thing about tablets for Techradar, in which I suggest that for most people, buying a full-sized tablet is an unnecessary expense.

    You may be thinking that I’m having a Damascene conversion: when Apple didn’t make seven-inch tablets I said small tablets were rubbish, and now Apple does make a seven-ish-inch tablet I’m saying that small tablets are ace. But I’ve changed my mind because tablets have changed.
    …The biggest obstacle to seven-inch tablet adoption was that seven-inch tablets were terrible. Now that they aren’t, for most people they’re the best choice. They’re more portable than their bigger brothers. They’re lighter to hold, easier to fit into a large pocket or handbag, easier for kids to handle – and they’re much, much cheaper too.

    I do hope I’m right, because if I’m wrong I’ve promised to buy and eat an iPad mini.

  • He who pays the piper

    There’s been a big scandal in the world of videogames writing, and the short version goes something like this: comedian Robert Florence wrote a column about writers and PRs being a wee bit too close together, legal threats were made, the column was edited and Florence quit. Then it all exploded.

    Stuart Campbell has a detailed post about the whole sorry saga, which is worth a read if you’re interested in journalistic ethics and that kind of thing. I thought this bit was particularly true:

    games journalists are merely serving the people who pay the bills, and that isn’t the readers any more, because they demand all their journalism for free. If you’re not even prepared to pay peanuts, you’re going to get something less than monkeys.

     

  • Review: SuperTooth Disco Bluetooth Stereo Speaker

    Update, 2013: I decided not do to any more of these, for anybody, because I realised I was being a silly arse. Reviewers should be paid for their reviews, not allowed to keep the things they review: otherwise you’re in the Scoring Free Stuff business, not the Telling The Truth business. For what it’s worth I reckon I told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth here, but payment-in-kit isn’t a road I’m comfortable travelling down.

    Phones4U gave me a thing and said I could keep it if I blogged about it. The thing is he SuperTooth Disco Stereo Speaker, which the firm was selling for £99.

    Here’s the blurb:

    The stylish SuperTooth Disco can be connected wirelessly to any Bluetooth A2DP mobile phone, PDA, or Bluetooth A2DP enabled computer. Once connected, simply stream your favourite tunes through the high efficiency subwoofer system.

    And here’s what it looks like.

    There’s lots to like about the SuperTooth Disco. First of all, it’s loud – properly, neighbour-annoyingly loud – and when you turn off the pointless bass boost the sound is very good. It can’t quite cope with, say, the low frequency “wub” sounds of Muse’s Madness, which cause it to rattle a bit, but you can solve that by turning it down slightly. Bluetooth pairing is quick and painless, battery life is pretty good (10 hours at reasonable volume or three hours turned up; it takes three-ish hours to charge and has a standby time of 1500 hours) and while it’s not the prettiest speaker you’ll ever see it hasn’t been beaten by the ugly stick either.

    There are some negatives, though. The first is that it’s really big (bigger than a grown man’s forearm) and really heavy, tipping the scales at a horrendous 1,140 grams. For me at least that rules it out as a holiday speaker – that’s a big chunk of your baggage allowance, and I wouldn’t fancy carrying it around in its fancy case for too long either – and puts it firmly in bedroom/office/barbecue territory.

    The other big negative is the Bluetooth. It might just be my house, where there are stacks of gadgets in the same 2.4GHz frequency as well as next door’s Wi-Fi leaking through, but the Bluetooth Disco suffers from constant and very noticeable interference when you’re using it wirelessly. I’ve tried it with two iPads, an iPhone 4, an iPhone 4S and an iPhone 5, and it’s the same thing with each one, noticeable hissing, fizzing and fluttering in the higher frequencies. You know the way a poorly encoded MP3 sounds, with squishy guitars and drums? It’s very much like that, and if that kind of thing annoys you as much as it annoys me then you won’t be able to listen to it for very long.

    I’ve read other reviews suggesting that the Disco suffers from the same problem with cabled connections, but I didn’t find that: if I hooked it up to something using the supplied 3.5mm cable, the sibilance disappeared.

    It’s worth mentioning here that there is a newer (and to my eyes, much uglier) version of the Disco, the excitingly named Disco 2, which ups the Bluetooth version from 2.0 to 4.0. That may well solve the interference problem, although it’s a mono rather than a stereo device. It’s more portable, though, 552 grams instead of 1,140.

    Whether you’ll like the SuperTooth Disco, then, depends on what you want it for. If it’s wireless that really matters to you, I don’t think this is the speaker for you – and if you want something for your holidays that won’t have you frantically swapping luggage around at the Ryanair check-in, the same applies. However, if you want something really loud for your flat, bedroom or barbecue and don’t mind connecting with a cable, it’s worth considering.

    Five months on and I still agree with this: it’s far too heavy to take anywhere, but it’s worthwhile as a spare speaker – for example if there’s a do on at my in-laws’ house, I take the speaker and my phone rather than armfuls of CDs. It’s awfully expensive, though, even if you do shop around.

  • That “leaked” Jimmy Saville TV transcript is a hoax. An old hoax

    The supposed Jimmy Saville / Paul Merton TV show transcript is doing the rounds again. Here’s some news from 2000:

    Paul Merton is always a man to push the televisual boundaries of libel laws as far as they will stretch but the transcript went a lot further than anything you would have seen on the show. The trouble is – according to sources – a huge chunk of the middle section of the email is fabricated.

    And here’s one of the perpetrators:

    we decided it would be fun to stick some obviously fake stuff on the site, just to see whether or not people would actually question it. Part of the site’s remit was to get comedy fans questioning the media, refusing to accept everything at face value, etc.

    Faking some HIGNFY out-takes was originally going to be part of that initial plan. We probably decided on it after watching the ‘Unbroadcastable Have I Got News…’ video (which itself features rushes material), but mainly because we enjoy the idea of rushes per se. The original idea was to stick the page on the site in Hidden Archive and see if anyone noticed/cared. Emergency Lalla Ward went off and wrote the actual page – based on a tape of the broadcast itself (if you watch the show in tandem with the fakery you’ll note that he’s specifically ‘filled in’ stuff where there was an obvious edit-point).