Author: Carrie

  • A good book you can have for free

    My friend Chris Mitchell runs Spike, a most excellent books-and-interesting-things site on the Internet. And now, he’s put together a most excellent ebook version with some of the best bits from Spike’s last 15 years. And a few things I’ve written too. It’s a lovely thing to look at and and to read, and it’s…

  • Stripper boots – y’know, for kids

    Is it just me, or are these Lelli Kelly boots — currently the subject of near-constant advertising on kids’ TV channels — utterly inappropriate for the under-tens they’re aimed at?

  • On Facebook, you’re a twat

    Dave Pell is always worth reading, and his latest post on social networking is particularly good. Aren’t there some people about whom your opinion has changed since you started communicating online? There are several old friends who I now like a lot less because they sort of suck at Facebook. So I hide them from…

  • iPads are ace, but we still need netbooks

    Me at Techradar: there are still areas where netbooks are better than iPads. … [Adobe] Flash. Sure, there are reasons to loathe it, but in my house my wife matters more than Steve Jobs, and many of my wife’s favourite sites use Flash. Until they see the light and switch to something else, the iPad…

  • Orange owners, meet T-Mobile. T-Mobile owners, meet Orange

    Orange and T-Mobile customers can now roam across each firms’ networks, although for now it’s only 2G (ie. calls and texts, not Internet). You’ll need to sign up for it. If you’re on Orange, you need this link. If you’re on T-Mobile, you need this one.

  • The problem with books: they’re too quiet

    Books are rubbish. They just sit there with their words and their plots and their characterisation and their background detail. Where’s the fun in that? What books need is… 3D audio clips! From the press release: Pan Macmillan Marketing Director Becky Ikin said: ‘We wanted to celebrate the phenomenal global publication of Ken Follett’s Fall…

  • “By this light, your car is as much a crashing machine as a driving machine”

    A chilling and very well-written analysis of a car crash from Men’s Health. The quote I’ve lifted here is interesting, but it doesn’t really reflect the urgency of the writing… As technology develops and our cars gradually morph into rolling computers with built-in Internet, navigation, and entertainment consoles, experts see distraction as the big threat…

  • Keep taking the tablets – iPads, PlayBooks and Galaxy Tabs

    Want to know the key differences between Apple’s iPad, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and BlackBerry’s PlayBook? You do? Well, looky here then. You won’t be able to buy a PlayBook until well into 2011, and by then Apple should have iPad 2 ready to roll. The second generation iPad may well address some of the apparent…

  • Maybe Nokia needs to buy in some software

    And I don’t mean a few copies of Microsoft Office. Symbian is looking increasingly isolated, so perhaps Nokia needs to kill it. [hardware bossing the software guys about] wouldn’t be such an issue if specs were all that mattered, but in smartphones the reverse is true. In hardware terms the iPhone was and is rubbish…

  • How to write about science

    This has been doing the rounds on Twitter, but just in case you missed it: Martin Robbins shows how to write a newspaper article about science-related topics. In this paragraph I will provide balance with a quote from another scientist in the field. Since I picked their name at random from a Google search, and…