It’s Apple’s new iPhone event tomorrow, and we know what that means: most of the internet is publishing “ten things Apple will announce tomorrow” articles, most of them split into eleventy-nine pages to rip off advertisers.
Category: Media
Journalism, radio and stuff like that
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The next iPhone needn’t be fancy
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Amazon’s Kindle Fire is going to burn Android
In times of great excitement, I like to paraphrase Noddy Holder – and today is one of those times. Ready?
So here it is, Merry Christmas
Everybody’s Having Fun
Apart from all the Android firms
Who are probably chucking themselves off bridges right now
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“Self-doubt convinces us that our own failure is inevitable, an unavoidable recourse based on our own screaming lack of talent.”
Chuck Wendig wrote this post for writers, but I think it’s relevant to any kind of creative activity:
Suddenly Old Mister Doubt is jabbering in your ear.
You’re not good enough.
You’ll never make it, you know.
Everyone’s disappointed in you.
Where are your pants? Normal people wear pants.
…self-doubt is the enemy of the writer. It is one of many: laziness, fear, ego, porn, Doritos. But it is most certainly one of the worst, if not the worst, in the writer’s rogue gallery of nemeses.
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The A to Z of ebook publishing
I thought it might be an idea to do a huge ebook-advice post based on the various discussions we’ve had here and on other sites, so that’s what I’ve done: an enormous A to Z of ebook publishing aimed at would-be ebook publishers. If there’s anything I’ve missed or got hopelessly wrong, I’m sure you’ll let me know in the comments.
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Steve Jobs steps down as Apple CEO
They reckon that we’ll never have another Beatles or another Rolling Stones: the world is too different, too fragmented, and the perfect storm that created them will not happen again. Jobs and Bill Gates are tech’s Beatles and Stones. I’ll let you decide which one’s which.
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Alan Sugar’s nervous breakdown
It’s far too long, but this is still a great illustration of how you can tell any story you like on TV with careful editing. It’s the UK version of The Apprentice, re-edited and subtitled to tell the story of Lord Sugar’s mental problems.
[via b3ta]
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David Hepworth on growing older
I loved this bit of Hepworth’s post about liking The New Yorker:
For most of your life the world is a frustrating place because it appears to be run by people older than you are. Then one morning you wake up and find that it’s a frustrating place because it’s run by people younger than you are.
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Facebook is the Windows of the Internet
Oh yes it is. Me on Techradar:
Social networks also benefit from lock-in. I hate Facebook: I hate its horrible UI, its overly complex privacy settings, its photo albums, the algorithm that seems hell-bent on hiding important and interesting updates. Given the choice, I wouldn’t use it. Unfortunately I don’t have a choice, because for now everybody I know does use it. Cutting off Facebook would mean cutting them off.
Sooner or later, though, a strategy of “ha ha! We’re the only game in town!” will bite you in the backside.
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Probably the last thing I’m going to blog about The Scheme
I’ve blogged about fly on the wall documentary series The Scheme a few times here, but the news that it’s now going to be broadcast in the rest of the UK made me want to add another bit.
Having seen the whole series now – including a final episode that made it very clear that the media attention had made some participants’ lives worse – the thing that struck me most about The Scheme was the sheer hopelessness of it all. The families weren’t entirely representative – the programme makers have chosen the most TV-worthy people, so you get people whose lives are slow-motion car crashes – but I’ve met enough people from similar situations to know that life for some people starts off shite and gets progressively worse.
It was summed up for me in one throwaway remark when a teenage boy was being sent back to prison – he hadn’t expected to be sent back so soon. Going back to prison was a given. The only thing that he could even slightly influence was the gap between incarcerations.
There’s an argument that by showing people rotating in and out of prison, trying and failing to get off drugs, self-medicating in various other ways and trying to find things for the local kids to do The Scheme was providing an important service: asking us to look at the affordability and availability of alcohol, for example, or the effectiveness of anti-drug legislation, regulation and intervention, or the links between unhappy childhoods and adult substance abuse, or the way in which some parts of Scotland have effectively been left to rot.
Then again, I know of somebody with real money and real power, riches of the “oh I don’t know, my butler takes care of that” variety. And to that person, The Scheme is quite simply the funniest programme ever made.
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Cloud computing and Pippa Middleton’s arse
Me, on Techradar, about Google’s brand new Chromebooks:
Ah, says Samsung. “With nothing stored directly on the Series 5, malicious spyware, trojans and viruses are a thing of the past.” They’re a thing of the past on my Windows 7 PC too, because I’m not an idiot who opens unsolicited files that claim to be details of tax refunds or photos of Pippa Middleton’s arse.