Author: Carrie

  • A visit from Bat Hound

    My daughter is a little bit obsessed with the Cartoon Network’s Krypto The Superdog, a cartoon caper featuring the titular Krypto – Superman’s childhood pet, apparently – and Ace the Bat Hound, who goes up against the Joker’s hyenas and various other supervillains’ super pets. It’s funny stuff, but the funniest thing of all is…

  • Poverty porn? Maybe. The Scheme is back on the BBC

    Last year I blogged about BBC Scotland’s The Scheme, a fly on the wall documentary series filmed in Kilmarnock. It was pulled for legal reasons – people featured in it ended up in court, and the episodes including them couldn’t be shown until the legal process was complete – and it’s back tonight. If you…

  • “I swear if someone touches my kids I’ll do time”

    I’m increasingly convinced that, with the honourable exception of this site, you should never read beyond the end of a product listing or online article. Comments are where the crazies live. As you may have noticed, Kate McCann has written a book about her daughter’s abduction and the aftermath. Over to you, Amazon reviewer Matthew…

  • Cloud computing and Pippa Middleton’s arse

    Me, on Techradar, about Google’s brand new Chromebooks: Ah, says Samsung. “With nothing stored directly on the Series 5, malicious spyware, trojans and viruses are a thing of the past.” They’re a thing of the past on my Windows 7 PC too, because I’m not an idiot who opens unsolicited files that claim to be…

  • Coming to a Kindle near you very soon

    The book isn’t ready yet but I thought Ronnie Brown’s cover design was too good to keep under wraps. More soon.

  • A wee plug for some nice guitar people

    I don’t play as much as I used to, or would like to – RSI tends to rear its ugly head fairly quickly – but one of my most treasured possessions is my electric guitar, a 1989 Fender Telecaster. I bought it second-hand a loooooong time ago, and I’ve been meaning to get it sorted…

  • This is why some of us worry about copyright cops

    When people like me get worked up about ISP censorship, national firewalls and other wonderful ideas, it’s not because we condone theft. It’s because the people who do the censoring are often idiots. Here’s yet another example: the UK Music Publisher’s Association (MPA) managed to get an entire public domain music site taken offline because…

  • “You’re all our bitches now”

    Good news for the BPI: BT and TalkTalk’s appeal against the Digital Economy Act has been rejected. It turns out that the Act is perfectly fair and decent and nothing to worry about whatsoever. Amazingly, I have an opinion about that. “Shareholders and customers of BT and TalkTalk might ask why so much time and…

  • Mobile phones and brain cancer

    There’s an excellent feature about the cellphones/cancer controversy in the New York Times magazine. Executive summary: there’s no persuasive link yet, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a link; conversely, there may be no connection at all. If you’ve even a passing interest in things that may or may not cause cancer, the article’s well…

  • Record companies: sell records? Us? Don’t be silly

    An illuminating piece by David Hepworth: When you have built up some anticipation around the release of anything, what on earth is the use of delaying that release and allowing that anticipation to fade into disinterest? Public attention is a finite resource and it is quickly diverted on to something else.