Category: Media

  • Protect yourself from Facebook Cancer with online porn

    If the Daily Mail’s going to print a load of wank about the internet causing cancer, somebody needs to talk about a load of wank fighting cancer. Or something… you could equally say that MySpace increases your risk of being killed by a vampire because you’d be too busy stalking Lily Allen to spot Dracula…

  • This is nearly the ultimate Daily Mail story: Facebook causes cancer

    All that’s missing is a reference to house prices or immigrants. How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer: Social networking sites such as Facebook could raise your risk of serious health problems by reducing levels of face-to-face contact, a doctor claims.

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • Blabbing on about journalism, writing for free and, er, Britney Spears

    The other week, designer/developer Jamie Rumbelow interviewed me for his podcast. It’s online now, and provides a startling insight into just how many times a Scotsman can say “um” during an interview. I was on to talk about journalism – how to get into online journalism, what scams to watch out for, why books don’t…

  • Techradar Tuesday: Woz’s wind-ups and blogging for bucks

    Is it Tuesday already? To celebrate the news that Woz is doing the US equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing, here’s a cheery look at some of the other daft things he’s done. Sadly there wasn’t enough time to Photoshop a pic to make him look like The Joker. When we discovered that Steve Wozniak would…

  • Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross and MMR

    I will shut up about MMR in a minute, but I wanted to link to this post by Scots Law Student: Saying that children’s vaccines cause cancer is a sure fire way to terrify parents and this should have been as well received as Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s Radio 2 phonecall. It’s a fair…

  • Mummy duck said “Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack!” and all the MMR crap came back

    The other day, LBC broadcast a breathtaking programme where presenter Jeni Barnett used her expertise as a parent to pooh-pooh the entire medical and scientific community. MMR is dangerous. There’s no evidence for it, but it’s a scientific fact. You know the kind of thing. That first link is to the audio; there’s a transcript…

  • Make money from blogging? Spamming’s easier and more lucrative

    Dan Lyons on – spit! – monetising blogs. My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I’d kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I’d ever had—and through Google’s AdSense program I earned…

  • Windows 7 versions: come on, it’s not that complicated

    Me, on Techradar: OMG! 132 versions of Windows 7! We’re the first to mock Microsoft when the firm deserves it, but the Windows 7 line-up simply isn’t as complicated as some reports would have you believe. For the majority of us there will be two choices, just as there were with Windows XP. Home user?…