Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Arena closes, men’s magazines still suck

    mar_09_coverI wrote this four years ago:

    Arena’s confused – it can’t make its mind up whether it’s going after GQ readers or Loaded readers, and falls flat between the two

    Today’s Guardian reports that Arena is to cease publication after 22 years.

    In the same post, I wrote this:

    Perhaps the problem is that there’s no real need for a men’s magazine, because most other magazines are for men. Computer magazines are largely read by men. Car magazines are almost exclusively read by men. Music, film… men men men men men.

    I think that’s still the case. Any sign of this?

    A magazine that isn’t aimed at sniggering schoolboys, that doesn’t write ten-page features on the correct way to wear cufflinks, that doesn’t tell me that I need to spend 18 hours a day in the gym to get the perfect body, that doesn’t cover a single subject (cars, gadgets, books, music) and that doesn’t hate, fear or envy women. A magazine that doesn’t make me skip 90% of its pages. A magazine that I wouldn’t be embarrased to have in my house.

  • Belated Techradar Tuesday: seven reasons why Apple should make a netbook, and why laptops are just handbags

    First up, a feature: seven reasons why Apple should make a netbook (and a few reasons why it shouldn’t). Here’s one of the reasons why it shouldn’t:

    An HD Touch would be more compelling

    Take one iPod Touch, make it twice the size, give it some desktop-style apps and you’ve got something that no other computer firm can deliver (or, we suspect, even imagine). You’d have all the things you expect from an iPhone, plus decent e-book reading and document editing. How great would that be? Bluetooth support for an external keyboard, 3G modem as an option, best computer ever.

    Then, a column: if Confessions of a Shopaholic was about tech instead of handbags, we’d think it was great. Tech Firms! You’re doing it wrong!

    …the tech industry is just like the fashion industry. It sells you stuff and tells you you’ll look like Audrey Hepburn or Brad Pitt; six weeks later it’s shouting “You look like your gran!” and telling you to buy something else or kill yourself. An overpowered laptop is no different to a £1,000 It Bag: it’s just more crap that helps fuel credit crunches and contributes to climate change. When we’re eating each other for food and having fist-fights with polar bears in the High Street, we’re going to regret it.

    The column isn’t up yet. I’ll post the link when it is.

    Update

    Here’s the link: why netbooks prove that the tech industry’s gone nuts.

  • Techradar Thursday: cool things in the labs, clown computing and 3D gaming

    Two by me, one by Neil Mohr that I thought was really interesting. First up, Cloud Computing – or Clown Computing?

    So much for the cloud.

    Can we really rely on web-based services and software? If you’re expecting us to say no, surprise!

    Then a look at some of the interesting things Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and Mozilla have got cooking in their labs including:

    4. Google Mars
    Fancy looking for Martians or discovering whether The Watchmen really do have a base on the Red Planet? Google Mars brings the power of Google Maps to nearby planets. Sadly Street View and Local Search aren’t yet available, so if you’re trying to find a kebab shop you’re out of luck.

    This piece by Neil Mohr caught my attention: 3D gaming. Is it ace, or is it arse?

    At its best with Left 4 Dead, some primal instinctive part of the brain lights up as you realise you now have depth perception. Zombies flailing towards you suddenly have a natural order and a beauty as they spiral in space with a well-placed shotgun to the head. Blood spurts in awesome Jackson Pollock-esque fashion onto your virtual camera lens that views this apocalyptic world. This is the 3D at its best; it works straight out of the box complimenting the gameplay, even enhancing it.

    Yay! But it’s a qualified yay:

    At its worst, though, it’s a frustrating mess. A crosshair that makes you feel you’ve drunk five pints, constant ghosting from lights and effects, while struggling to make the stereo effect work at all without inducing eye-strain. Somewhat akin to magic-eye pictures, it’s an effect that you gradually get more and more used to or not at all.

  • Don’t buy a laptop. Buy a netbook and a desktop, and keep the change

    Back in 2006, I wrote this:

    Many laptops, such as the MacBook Pro, are real desktop alternatives. But they also cost an awful lot of money, and they’re hefty things to carry around. Any time I’ve used a laptop when travelling – on planes, on trains, on ferries – I’ve wished I had a smaller computer (particularly on planes, where you get less room than a veal calf). Unless you need serious horsepower from a mobile PC, a top-end laptop is a daft buy: even the titchiest machine is perfectly capable of DVD playback, office applications and anything else you might need on your travels.

    That was before the invention of the netbook, which is the smaller computer I wanted whenever I tried to unfold a Powerbook or MacBook Pro in a plane seat. With netbooks becoming so handy (particularly in the battery life stakes) and cloud computing making it easy to share and/or sync stuff between multiple machines it’s bordering on insanity to buy a fully-featured laptop for travelling: with netbooks going for £300 or less (and refurbs starting to appear from the likes of EuroPC) you really need to be rich or daft to buy anything bigger.

    As my 2006 post put it:

    The little laptop will be smaller, lighter and therefore more portable than a big beast of a machine – and you’ll be less upset if it gets broken, nicked or blown up by terrorists because you’ll still have a working machine at home.

    I’ll be testing a Samsung NC-10 fairly soon, so I’ll eat my words if it’s a load of crap. But I suspect it won’t be.

  • Is the Safari 4 beta any good?

    Yes. Yes, it is. Guess where the link goes? That’s right! Techradar!

    Overall, we like Safari 4 a lot. We’re not convinced we’ll actually use Top Sites or the visual History Search, but flashy gimmicks aside it’s a fast and pleasant way to do stuff online.

  • Techradar Tuesday: don’t be a dumbass

    Last.fm isn’t telling the RIAA that you’ve pirated the new U2 album. But you might be.

    Why go to the hassle of trying to get data from websites when the users will hand it to you on a plate?

    We’re sure that some of the people listening to the leaked album simply forgot that Last.fm tells other people what you’re listening to, but we’re also sure that a fair number of them were boasting. Look at me! I’ve got something I shouldn’t have! I am cool!

  • Daddy? What was the world like before the internet?

    There’s a huge discussion on Fark.com based on a brilliant question:

    Youngish [Fark user] has no comprehension what her adult life would be like without the internet or computer technology. Describe your pre-internet life

    It’s a brilliant question because the potential answers are so big. Baby Bigmouth wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the internet – I met Mrs Bigmouth online – and my job wouldn’t exist without it either. And yet the whole thing has happened in a very short space of time, so Baby B was born into a world where the things we already take for granted – broadband, YouTube, Google, iTunes, Facebook – are all just a few years old. And eventually she’s going to ask me, what were things like before the internet?

    What would you say? Would you sound like a Daily Mail reader, hankering for a simpler time? Or would you be more like the Yorkshiremen in the Monty Python sketch where they exaggerate the awfulness of their upbringings? Is answering the question like trying to explain what the world was like before fire, electricity and the wheel?

  • Techradar Tuesday: Half-Life 2 The Movie, and a shopping list for Microsoft

    The days run away like horses over the hill…

    Is Half-Life 2 the future of indie movie-making?

    The potential is mind-boggling, but let’s be honest: we’re not quite there yet. The constant fast-cutting in Escape from City 17 can’t disguise the fact that some of the in-game footage doesn’t quite gel with the real footage, the Combine Citadel looks like it’s been glued into the background with Pritt Stick and we’re pretty sure that none of the $500 budget was spent on the script.

    Overall, though, it works – and to our eyes it’s no worse than the CGI in the most recent Hulk movie, which cost $150 million to make and still looked like it had been thrown together on a ZX Spectrum by an angry toddler.

    Six companies Microsoft should buy:

    Microsoft isn’t short of cash, and it recently – and unsuccessfully – offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion.

    The idea was to catch up with Google, but the big G isn’t the only firm doing well in areas where Microsoft isn’t. So perhaps Microsoft should widen its net.

    From video and music to shopping and social networks, we think these six firms should be on Microsoft’s shopping list.

  • The 4 of Us: come to Scotland, you bastards

    The 4 of Us are playing a bunch of gigs in February to support their forthcoming live album, but they’re only doing Irish dates. Again. Bastardy bastardy bastard.

    You can listen to one of the live tracks, Sunlight, here.

  • Kindle 2: meh

    Me, on Techradar:

    Leaving aside the fact that the paperback book is pretty much perfect, Amazon’s device doesn’t do colour and you’re not going to use a $359 gadget to kill wasps, there are three big problems with it.

    The first is that despite the redesign, it still looks like something Noddy and Big Ears would use. The second is that Amazon has removed some key features, making it less flexible than before. And the third is that it simply isn’t good enough when you compare it to other gadgets.

    I thought using the full product name as per Amazon’s own listing – “Kindle 2: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)” – throughout the piece would be funny, but it seems I’m the only person who does.

    I’m still really excited about e-books, but I don’t have any gadget lust towards this one at all.