Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • Digital data insurance, or: don’t let your memories die when your hard disk does

    My Apple Time Capsule packed up yesterday. One minute it was working fine; the next, it sounded like a washing machine full of hammers. The hard disk is gone, which is a pain – it had my iTunes library, three years of home movies and ten years of digital photos.

    I had a backup, of course, so it’s just a pain in the arse rather than a complete disaster. But if I’d put my trust in my Time Capsule, if I hadn’t assumed that it would pack up eventually, I’d be up Shit Creek without a boat – and quite possibly divorced. Losing every single video of your daughter is not the sort of thing that makes you popular with your better half.

    I can’t stress this enough: hard disk failures are more common than you might think. I’ve had two in the last six months. If you don’t have a backup of all your irreplaceable files – the digital photos, the footage of baby’s first steps, the novel you’re going to finish this Christmas – Murphy’s Law says that sooner or later you’ll lose the lot.

    So I’m down to a single external drive, which leaves me with a choice: buy another external drive to mirror my libraries (my MacBook Pro’s hard disk is too small for iTunes, iPhoto and videos; even an upgrade would run out of room pretty sharpish), or sign up for a remote backup service.

    I’ve gone for the latter: Mozy. It looks good, it’s reasonably priced, it’s encrypted, it’s offsite and it does incremental backups (so you’re not hurling tens of gigabytes around the place every time you update), so it appears to tick all the boxes. More to the point, at just under five quid per month it’s a pretty cheap way to protect priceless files.

    I’ll let you know how I get on. I just have to upload 282 gigabytes of data first.

  • Gratuitous Half Man Half Biscuit references in tech columns

    I’m writing about unlimited mobile phone data plans today.

    This is not, it’s safe to say, an industry famed for putting customers first.

    If the other operators decide to follow Three’s lead and get rid of their monthly data caps without small print or weasel words, I’ll eat my iPhone.

    I hope I don’t end up regretting that last sentence.

  • You 2.0

    When I write columns I often find I can’t quite articulate what I’m trying to say, but I think I got pretty close with this one for .net.

    For most of us, there’s a difference between the person we really are and the person we play on the internet. I don’t mean in a mild-mannered janitor/ Hong Kong Phooey way (or in a mild-mannered janitor/Dennis Nilsen way either). I mean that unless you’re ridiculously honest, American, or 14, then you practise a certain amount of self-censorship. What people see is still you, but it’s a toned-down, smartened up, edited highlights version of you.

    Sometimes that censorship is a temporary thing, so you’re posting hilarious things online when in the real world you want to hurl yourself off a bridge, or hurl somebody else off a bridge. Sometimes it’s a self-preservation thing, where you know that telling the truth about your boss will change nothing other than your employment status. And sometimes it’s because the whole point of your online identity is that it lets you leave behind the bits you don’t like.

    I think that last one is why I loathe the popular social networks so much… slowly but surely they’re filling up with the very people I, and perhaps you, went online to get away from in the first place.

  • Google’s Windows-killer is a bit meh

    Have you been following the launch of Google’s Chrome OS? I’m finding the whole thing a bit underwhelming:

    Most questions to which the answer could be “Chrome notebook” can also be answered “iPad” or “Android tablet”.

    What boots faster than a traditional PC (the answer to that one also includes “MacBook Air” and “Anything with solid state storage”)? What runs web apps from an App Store? What sleeps and wakes instantly? What’s very secure and very unlikely to get viruses? What’s really portable? What has great battery life? What can access the enterprise systems from a secure yet friendly interface? Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

    What I don’t get is, why limit your options? If the kit costs roughly the same as any other notebook, which I assume it will, why go for a Chrome-only system when you can get a Windows or Linux system and run the Chrome browser on it?

  • Vanquish is a very good bad game

    I’ve just finished playing Vanquish, a truly demented Gears of War-style shooter. I think Eurogamer’s review is spot on.

    Sure, Halo: Reach gives you a jet pack. But Vanquish gives you the ability to slide 40 yards on your knees along concrete, ducking through the legs of a giant bipedal robot while firing rockets at point-blank range into its groin.

    The acting consists entirely of ham, the characters are ridiculous, the story is incomprehensible and it often feels as if somebody’s dropped a dustbin on your head and is beating it with a baseball bat, but it’s an absolute hoot.

  • Nokia: making smartphones smarter

    This has lots of potential: Nokia Situations.

    Nokia Situations helps your device tie more into your life. You can manually define situations, like “In a meeting”, “Sleeping”, “Watching TV”, or “Playing with kids” and define how you want the device to act.  With the application running in the background, your device automatically senses the situation you are in and adapts to it according to your preferences.

    The clever bit is that it’s not just a case of you selecting a profile; it can use location sensing to work out where you are or its clock to find out what time it is and adjust your phone’s behaviour accordingly.

  • I think I’m right about iPad killers: there aren’t any yet

    Reviews of the various so-called iPad killers have been disappointing. I think I know why.

    manufacturers appear to be looking at the wrong things. They’re like musicians who think buying a Gibson Les Paul will turn them into Jimmy Page, or that being a big gobby pain in the arse makes them Bono.

    What makes the iPad special isn’t the hardware. It’s the software.

    My esteemed colleague Craig Grannell agrees with me and adds something I really wish I’d thought of:

    It’s telling that most of the top-selling apps on Android are admin tools, whereas on iOS they’re games, entertainment apps and productivity tools.

  • Wrong about the Beatles

    Last week, I said that The Beatles on iTunes wasn’t a big deal. What kind of diddy hadn’t ripped the CDs or torrented the discography already?

    The kind of diddy that buys 450,000 Beatles albums and 2 million individual tracks, it seems.

    Oops.

  • Beatles for sale. So what?

    About 200 years after it stopped mattering, The Beatles’ catalogue is finally available on iTunes.

    Do you remember where you were when Apple made its world changing, unforgettable Beatles announcement? I was right here, on this chair, in front of this computer, making this face: meh.

  • Fembots, bats, twats

    A few things I’ve written are online: first up, I’m doing Techradar’s weird tech section and I’ve got scary fembots, splattered bats and USB sticks as art.

    If we were asked to describe the last seven days in one word, we’d say “week” – but if we weren’t allowed that word, we’d say “roboty”, “batty”, “flashy” or “printy”.

    And here’s a wee piece about the government’s exciting new plans for “Silicon marshes” in London’s East End and some Google-friendly changes to our intellectual property laws.

    Is it just me, or is there something horribly unethical about all of this? Having Google and Facebook throw Shoreditch a few crumbs while avoiding hundreds of millions, even billions of pounds in tax is a bit like someone stealing your dinner and then offering you a half-chewed chip.