Author: Carrie

  • Will Twitter get shitter?

    Twitter is five, and like all good five-year-olds it’s about time it paid its way. Me, on Techradar: I was in Glasgow’s famous Sauchiehall Street on Saturday night. If you haven’t been recently, it’s like a Hieronymus Bosch painting where the demons wear too-short skirts or G-Star Raw. It’s genuinely unpleasant, a seething mass of drunken,…

  • Here’s what Apple’s up to with the iPad

    Andy Ihnatko: Many of you were around for the transition from text to graphical user interfaces. Some of you were even around when the world shifted from mainframes to personal computers. Well, congratulations: you’ve lived to see your third revolution in computing. I think the good Mr Ihnatko is bang on the money: the iPad…

  • “An opportunity for Gary to take cheap shots at a band he doesn’t like and sneak in a mention for one he does”

    Jon Bon Jovi reckons Steve Jobs has killed the music business. Sometimes I love my job. By a happy coincidence, I reckon Jon Bon Jovi represents everything that’s wrong with the music business. I think there’s a reason why Bon Jovi albums don’t sell like they used to. It’s because they’re rubbish. And thanks to…

  • Why should you pay more to use your iPhone as a portable hotspot?

    The latest iOS update enables you to turn your iPhone into a wi-fi hotspot, sharing your 3G connection with other devices – and even though iPhone data plans are capped, you still need to pay extra to use the feature. Why could that be? I think I know the answer. There are only two possible explanations.…

  • Quitting cigs is hard. Let’s not pretend otherwise

    On Radio Scotland earlier there was a discussion about stopping smoking. Every single person I heard said how easy it was. Pick a date, get a wee bit hypnotised. No cravings. No irritation. No nothing. Amateurs! Proper smokers don’t quit like that. When proper smokers quit – and by proper smokers I mean two lighters…

  • The kids are all right

    I did an interesting thing last week: I was asked to be one of the judges at the Glasgow “celebration and assessment day” of Go4SET, which aims to make school pupils more interested in science, technology, engineering and maths. It was a bit like a science fair: S2 pupils had been given the task of…

  • ‘Contribute to my website’ is the new pay to play

    The nice people at .net magazine have a spanking new website, and one of my pieces is on it: “What are words worth”, where I… well, you saw the headline. In the age of social media and user-generated content, suggesting that your name on someone else’s website is “exposure” is like suggesting membership of the…

  • iPad 2: it’s about sex appeal, not specs appeal

    I’ve decided to compete with Rihanna in the international pop market, so for the last few weeks I’ve been building a rival in my shed. It’s not going too well, to be honest. I don’t know what the problem is. I mean, I’ve got the specs exactly right: there are bones, and guts, and teeth,…

  • “It is now clear to me that the folks who miss the satire may be a tremendous source of income”

    A superb post by Famous Monster in a thread about self-publishing: One of these days I will get around to writing just the absolute most loathsome right-wing Clancy-esque military scifi I can possibly muster. I mean somewhere between John Norman and John Ringo and maybe Terry Goodkind. Like all about a guy who is the best…

  • Two months with an Apple TV

    I bought an Apple TV in an attempt to free my huge home video library from its Mac-shaped prison: I can’t be bothered unplugging everything and moving the Mac downstairs when I want to watch a clip of Baby Bigmouth, and life’s too short to burn your own DVDs. It’s been in daily use since…