Author: Carrie

  • 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…

  • Panorama and videogames

    Last night’s Panorama programme – the BBC’s flagship current affairs show – was dedicated to the evils of videogames. I haven’t seen it, but I do know that John Walker of Rock, Paper, Shotgun is an eminently reasonable and trustworthy writer, so I’m linking to this piece he wrote about it. I believe that there…

  • T in the pack

    The clothing website Last Exit To Nowhere is based on a simple and brilliant idea: create promotional t-shirts for the products, organisations and places you’ll find in famous films. Fancy a t-shirt plugging the Devil’s Tower from Close Encounters, The Overlook Hotel from The Shining or OCP from Robocop? You know where to go. If…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • The Ministry of Stories, and Monsters

    This is absolutely wonderful. If I were a kid I’d go crazy for this. The Ministry follows the model of the 826 centres: a writing centre where kids aged 8-18 can get one-to-one tuition with professional writers and other volunteers; with the centres being housed behind fantastical shop fronts designed to fire the kids’ imaginations (and…

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • Twitter trials and tech tomfoolery

    Two things online, one serious and one less serious. First, why the Twitter joke trial is a travesty. If you can be arrested for saying something unpleasant, if obvious attempts at comic hyperbole can get you prosecuted, then Charlie Brooker, Frankie Boyle and Jimmy Carr had better get out of the country fast. Also, it’s…