Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Technology

Shiny gadgets and clever computers

  • Content farms and Google results

    A wee piece by me on Techradar:

    Google’s success has created a new kind of industry. Content farms are firms who produce what Google’s Matt Cuts calls “shallow or low-quality content”.

    Cutts is a funny guy, and his screenshots show the parody site The Content Farm, but the point is a serious one: often, when you search Google for something, you don’t necessarily get content that’s been created for you; you get content that’s been created for Google’s search algorithm.

    There’s nothing unethical or illegal about content farms – they’re not wicked, or dishonest, or evil – but their prominence in Google results means they can be an enormous pain in the backside.

  • Nokia. Connecting (Microsoft) people

    I wrote about Nokia’s fading fortunes a few months ago and got into trouble for suggesting Nokia should embrace another OS – Android, say, or Windows Phone 7. Today, Nokia announced that Windows Phone 7 would be the central plank of its smartphone strategy. Naturally I think that’s a great idea, and I explain why over on Techradar.

    Nothing in tech is certain, of course, and the whole partnership could end in disaster. But I’m really excited about this. Nokia makes stunning hardware, and Windows Phone 7 is a really nice mobile OS.

  • If I were the sort of person who used the phrase “paradigm shift”, I’d use it here

    Me: why the HP TouchPad is another nail in Windows’ coffin.

    What’s happening is incredible, and it’s happening incredibly quickly. Until very recently, personal computing generally meant Windows running on Intel, with a smattering of AMD, Linux and Mac OS X to keep the internet in arguments. Now, though, personal computing often doesn’t involve traditional computers at all.

  • Bye bye Microsoft Word

    I’ve been using Word on the Mac for a long time, but since Office 2008 I’ve encountered an extremely annoying problem: documents get corrupted. It doesn’t happen very often, and it appears to be connected to the Send File button: when I send a file by email, Word does something to the document that means it can’t be opened: it’s not a valid file any more. It won’t work in Word for the Mac, Word on PC, any Office clones or anything else. It’s a dead file.

    It’s annoying, but it’s not the end of the world: I can retrieve the emailed copy from my Sent email folder and resurrect it.

    Still, it’s annoying enough that I was ready to buy the New! Improved! Microsoft Office for Mac to stop it happening again.

    Unfortunately the problem hasn’t gone away in the new version; it’s got worse. Yesterday I was working across eight Word documents. Nothing fancy, just plain text. Several thousand words in all. And Word corrupted six of them beyond repair (I don’t have Time Machine running at the moment so I couldn’t roll back time, unfortunately). The files couldn’t be moved, or copied, or emailed, or anything. They were completely and utterly screwed.

    It’s a known problem, it seems, and it *may* have something to do with unusual characters in filenames or folder paths. However, my documents didn’t have unusual characters in filenames or folder paths, and no other program on my Mac does this. Just Word.

    I like Word, but I can’t have the electronic equivalent of a family dog that mauls the kids. So it’s off to Pages I go.

  • Reports of the Kindle app’s demise have been somewhat exaggerated

    The hills are alive with the sound of tech writers going “OMG! Apple will kill the Kindle app!” I’m not convinced.

    The bit about Apple refusing to “let customers to have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store” isn’t a quote from Sony. It isn’t included in the Sony Reader blog’s explanation either.

    Since such a policy would make Apple look quite exceptionally evil, you’d think Sony might have mentioned it.

    I think the NYT is right and wrong at the same time. When it says Sony users can’t access content they’ve already bought, it’s perfectly correct: if you can’t have the app, you can’t have any content that’s delivered via that app.

    Apple hasn’t banned the content. It’s rejected the app.

    Of course, the fact that so many people think it will kill the Kindle app doesn’t say much for Apple’s public image…

  • The iPad is one year old today

    Me, on Techradar:

    In December 2009, on this very website, I wrote a very silly thing. “There’s no way any device, not even an Apple one, can live up to the hype the long-awaited Apple Tablet has generated,” I grumbled.

    Oops!

    Elsewhere on the site I’ve written a wee piece on the NGP, aka the Sony PSP2.

    Sony’s codename for the PSP2 is NGP, which stands for Nice Gamey Playtime.

  • Black Eyed Peeves

    Me, on the news that Intel has hired will.i.am as some kind of creative powerhouse:

    For the finale of last month’s Paper Clips and Metal Fastenings 2011 show, they wheeled out the pint-sized popstress Pixie Lott.

    “All the paper clips, they’ve got it going on,” she sang to a crowd of chubby middle-aged men, tears visible in the corners of her eyes.

    “And when you clip that paper the feeling in your bones,” she added, dancing awkwardly, looking for all the world like someone praying for an early death.

    No, not really. But it’s not that far from the truth. Like a rubbish Rutger Hauer, I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe.

  • You can’t trust tweets

    Me, at Techradar:

    Social media Chinese Whispers and thoughtless retweets tend to be more innocuous than tales of crazed gunmen, but they can still be annoying: a few days ago otherwise sensible people were retweeting “an actual letter that was sent to a bank by a 96-year-old woman”, a newspaper humour column that has been floating around the Internet for the last 12 years.

    Still, it made a change from hoaxes claiming that X person had died in a hangliding/gardening/snowboarding accident: this year’s crop already includes Justin Bieber and Nelson Mandela, both of whom are very much alive.

  • i (the newspaper), reading on the iPad and a few words about Kindles

    Before getting my iPad, I promised to dump my expensive newspaper habit. It didn’t really work, because I missed the serendipity of a printed newspaper. So I came up with a compromise. I’d get a daily paper again, but instead of the full-fat Guardian I’d get i, the abridged Independent.

    From tomorrow, I’m back to the Guardian.

    i is a nice idea, but it’s not the paper for me. There’s very little comment, which I’ve come to realise is something I really want from a paper. It’s good for exactly 20 minutes of reading, so it’s not something you return to throughout the day – which, again, is something I want from a paper. And some of its supposed innovations are a pain in the arse, such as wasting two pages to tell you what’s in today’s issue (along with a daily “Ooh, this paper’s great, isn’t it?” editor’s letter), quoting tweets from ten randomly chosen people, having a “from the blogs” section that crams the entire blogosphere into 150 words or a TV guide that fails to answer the question, what’s on the bloody TV?

    The other problem with i is that if you get it delivered, you’re probably paying more than the cover price for delivery. My newsagent charges 27p; i‘s cover price is 20p. There’s something enormously annoying about that.

    So I’m back to the Guardian, for now at least. Financially it doesn’t make sense – it’s £1 a day for something I can get for free online – and there’s the constant danger of encountering an article by Tanya Gold, but I’ve definitely found that I read differently in print and on screens. For all its joys the iPad has a screen and reading on it feels like work: I speed-read, and pop in and out of apps, and look at Twitter, and…

    Print doesn’t have that, and I think that’s a big plus. When I need to read, I read on a screen. When I want to read, I want to read without distraction.

    That’s one of the things I like about the Kindle. Its additional features – its web browser, its MP3 playback – are rubbish enough that I don’t want to use them, so it works as a pure reading device. I do hope Amazon resists the temptation to add extra features in the next version.

  • More sadness

    Dave Pell:

    I think about a lot of things before I share online. But here’s one thing I never think about:

    The unthinkable.

    Daniel Miller didn’t think of that either. So he shared photos on Facebook and Flickr, wrote anecdotes in his blog, and managed his finances using Mint. And then his one year-old daughter died.

    And the machine wouldn’t turn off. Every now and then he just wanted to take his mind off his grief and focus on something happier. But he was constantly reminded of his daughter by the sites and tools that were so integrated into his connected life.

    Daniel explains what he calls the “infinitely connected triggers of her memory and the dumb machines” in a blog he writes to share experiences related to his family’s loss.