Category: Media

  • Cover me in axle grease and throw me to the sexbots

    Sexy robots. Oh yes. Yours truly picks five lady robots, and T3’s Katherine Hannaford picks the boy-bots. How good is Summer Glau? She’s so good that we’ll happily ignore Sarah Connor’s endless moaning and the fact that Glau is so thin her arms couldn’t contain a Duracell battery, let alone a robot skeleton. She’s gorgeous,…

  • Hey, ISPs! Why not tell the truth?

    Should ISPs advertise broadband services that don’t – can’t – deliver what the ads promise? Of course they shouldn’t. If you aren’t unemployed or self-employed, BT is choking your connection at the very times you’re most likely to use it. On the subject of iPlayer’s bandwidth demands BT says “We believe there is a real…

  • Spotify: Android’s killer app – and bad news for iTunes?

    Could be… Have you seen the demo of Spotify on Android yet? If not, check it out and listen really carefully. That sound you can hear in the distance is Steve Jobs swearing. It looks like Android has found its killer app.

  • Bing is a terrible name for a search engine

    Isn’t it? Yes. This… is the same firm that decided to call its security suite Microsoft Wanker. Sure, it says OneCare when it’s written down, but go on. Read it aloud.

  • Good god. It’s sexy Linux!

    Moblin, the Intel-backed Linux for netbooks, looks pretty nifty. Which makes a change: With most technology, looking into it is like shopping for a new and exciting car. We’ll happily spend days scanning brochures, reading reviews and coming up with increasingly imaginative and expensive configurations. With Linux, though, it’s more like shopping for a new…

  • More things I’ve written: Cyborgs and Chrome

    Will humans of the future have extra ears? Probably not, but cyborg technology is still fascinating. Sadly the “bionic arms race” owes much to a very real arms race. In 2005, the US military announced a multi-million dollar investment in prosthetic technology after a surge in the number of US soldiers losing limbs in Afghanistan…

  • Google fail: it’s the new blue screen of death

    It’s that man again. And by that man, I mean me. We’re rushing into a world where everything depends on an internet connection, whether it’s your email, your online apps, your Xbox Live or your TV on demand. Most of the time, that’s absolutely fine. Great, even. But it means that we’re more vulnerable to…

  • Are search engines bad for the Web? And: what’s the future of the internet anyway?

    Two of my things have hit the internet. First up, an op/ed on Google’s ever-increasing usefulness: There’s no doubt that search engines are getting smarter, which is generally a good thing. However, they’re guilty of something called Mission Creep: that is, they’re doing more and more work. In the good old days search engines were…

  • Things I just don’t understand: unboxing

    Unboxing, for those of you who don’t spend all day on gadget blogs, is the practice of taking a thing out of a box, taking photos of the whole process and posting them as a news story. It’s very popular and to me, completely incomprehensible. Fast forward a few months. Apple’s latest iPhone is not…

  • Journalism: can pay, won’t pay?

    Here’s a thing. If the sites you regularly visited started charging, would you stick with them? I’ve been mulling over some stuff Rupert Murdoch has been saying. Essentially he’s arguing that the free, ad-supported content model for online news and magazines isn’t sustainable, which I think is right – The Guardian website is brilliant, but…