Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • New Sony Reader e-book: better, still not perfect

    According to Mobile Tech Review, the new PRS-700 is better than the previous Reader:

    Sony has worked a near miracle with their touch screen and touch-centric user interface. The Reader is simply a joy to use in terms of ergonomics, control and navigation. This is by far the most natural way to manage, navigate and read books we’ve seen so far. Alas, its lesser contrast doesn’t warm our bookish hearts, and for those in love with e-ink’s paper-like look, that’s a tough one to swallow. For those new to eBook readers or those who don’t mind reading from matte notebook displays, the PRS-700 has greater appeal. As always, the Reader is a great way to carry around a huge library of books and avoid the storage issues of traditional books.

    I was actually playing with the current model yesterday, and while it’s a lovely wee gadget it’s still not the right reader for me. What I want is the Reader’s form factor with the iPhone’s wireless and two apps: NetNewsWire and Instapaper. That’d work.

    As Engadget says:

    with no wireless of any sort you’re stuck filling this one via USB, SD, or MS Duo. In other words there’s still no perfect choice in the world of the e-ink reader — but it is awfully hard to ignore the Reader’s sleek exterior when compared to the Kindle’s distinctively sci-fi doorstop look.

  • Happy pop music

    This week, I am mostly liking Fascination by Alphabeat.

    The rest of the album isn’t much cop, but there’s more joy in this one song than most bands cram into a career. Hurrah for pop!

  • Buying a camcorder? Don’t get a Panasonic

    I bought a video camera just before Baby Bigmouth turned up – a Panasonic VDR-D250. I wasn’t greatly bothered about specs, so I quickly checked that it was Mac compatible before buying it.

    It turns out that it *was* Mac compatible, sort of, on the day I bought it. A few weeks later Leopard came out, and my camera was no longer Mac-compatible.

    Unlike many cameras (including most other Panasonics), my camera is only Mac compatible via Panasonic’s bundled software, which doesn’t work with Leopard and which hasn’t been updated since before Leopard shipped. That means it’s only able to communicate with OS X if you finalise the discs (in the case of DVD-RWs) and get it to act like an external DVD player, and even then iMovie chokes on the files. If you’re using DVD-R things are worse still, because OS X doesn’t like the .vro file format unless you shell out extra cash on the Quicktime MPEG Component – a prerequisite not just for QuickTime, but for other OS X video programs such as MPEG Streamclip.

    Luckily for me I’ve got a copy of Toast, the all-singing, all-dancing OS X video software, and that can convert pretty much anything to pretty much anything. Otherwise I’d be scunnered.

    I’m serious about not buying Panasonic, though. This is a camera that only came out in late Spring 2006, and which cost around £500 at launch. If a firm can’t be arsed ensuring that fairly pricey hardware stays current for 18 months, it doesn’t deserve your money.

  • The lost years and last days of David Foster Wallace

    A superb (and very sad) bit of journalism from Rolling Stone.

    His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. Wallace was an A student through high school, he played football, he played tennis, he wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published the novel, made a city of squalling, bruising, kneecapping editors and writers fall moony-eyed in love with him. He published a thousand-page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive in the contemporary world, accepted a special chair at California’s Pomona College to teach writing, married, published another book and, last month, hanged himself at age 46.

  • Amazon’s experimental interface: WindowShop

    A few months back I blogged about a tech demo that made browsing Amazon more shop-like. It seems Amazon spotted it too, because its new WindowShop interface does much the same thing.

    I’m not sure it’s actually useful (at least on a PC – it would probably make more sense on a TV), but it does look pretty.

  • Get a free Eels live EP (if you do it before the 28th)

    Want a free Eels EP? Of course you do. So click on this link and give them your email address before 28th October.

    The 4-LP Deluxe Vinyl Ltd Edition set of Blinking Lights – which this EP is promoting – is a thing of beauty, and I’m sorely tempted to buy it even though I don’t actually have a record player.

  • “There is clearly far more money in touting than in actually being a musician.”

    Another interesting post at Broadstuff:

    …about 40% of the UK ticket market goes through touts (people who buy tickets at face value, typically from organisations that get allocated tickets and then on-sell them). This creates the calculation below, where there is clearly far more money in touting than in actually being a musician.

  • Nokia’s “Comes With Music” translated for the UK

    Thanks to the ever-entertaining No Rock’n’Roll Fun:

    Comes Without Music But You Can Pay For Music If You Like. Just Not Too Many Tunes, Eh? Don’t Go Mad Or Anything. Two Songs A Week.

  • Sage advice for astronauts

    If you’re in the future, and you work on a spaceship, and you get a call telling you to go and check out some remote colony because contact has mysteriously been lost, do yourself a favour and call in sick that day. Skive for your life. The only reason space colonies, and the drifting spacecraft spookily orbiting above them, stop communicating is because they’ve been overrun by bloodthirsty monsters. This is scientific fact.

    Eurogamer reviews sci-fi horror game Dead Space.

  • Blackberry Storm: better than the iPhone?

    If you do a lot of typing, it could well be.

    the BlackBerry Storm, Research In Motion’s first attempt at a touchscreen device, is a triumph. It’s a really powerful device with plenty of clever features, but let’s set that to one side for the moment and focus on the question people really want to know the answer to: what’s it like to type on?

    A revelation, is the short answer. RIM has managed to develop a touch-screen keyboard that’s as close to typing on real buttons as you’re currently likely to get. Every time you touch a key, the whole screen feels like it’s pressing down under the weight of your finger, and a sharp clicking sound is emitted. You can switch between a full Qwerty keyboard layout in portrait or landscape mode, or opt for BlackBerry’s SureType keyboard configuration (where two letters appear in a single Qwerty keyboard button), and best of all, you can copy and paste between applications – a simple feature sorely lacking on Apple’s iPhone and many other touchscreen devices.