Category: Media

  • 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…

  • OMG you’re fired

    Once upon a time, I saw something on the Internet that annoyed me. I thought I was immune to disturbing online images, but apparently not: I saw something today that had me jumping round the room in fury. It was a redundancy letter, uploaded to Flickr, and was signed not by hand, but in a…

  • Fembots, bats, twats

    A few things I’ve written are online: first up, I’m doing Techradar’s weird tech section and I’ve got scary fembots, splattered bats and USB sticks as art. If we were asked to describe the last seven days in one word, we’d say “week” – but if we weren’t allowed that word, we’d say “roboty”, “batty”,…

  • Politicians and the Internet. It’s never good

    Hello. Sorry if I’ve been quiet lately – Baby Bigmouth was a bit unwell last week so it’s all sleep deprivation around these parts. Not that that’s stopping me from getting angry about tech things. Far from it. Here’s my take on the government’s latest ISP-related idea. Rather than, say, reining in Google or telling Facebook…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Some articles about Apple and Google Android

    Some more articles by me have made their way to the Internet. First, has Apple sold out? It seems that Apple can’t do anything right nowadays. It has been accused of censorship and bullying, and implicated in subcontractor suicides and heavyhanded policing. Despite creating the most impressive, most popular products in its entire history in…