Me on Techradar:

I’m gutted. A gadget that cost me over £300 has packed up, and it’s taunting me with a flickering LED. I called the manufacturer and they’ve told me that since it’s out of warranty, it’s going to cost me money for an engineer to look at it – and if I’m right and it is gubbed, it’ll cost a small fortune to repair it.

PS3? Nope. Dishwasher.

Symantec has published a survey about kids’ use of social networks, suggesting that they don’t know or have forgotten that what they put online can hang around forever. I think Symantec is wrong.

They do know. They haven’t forgotten. They just don’t care.

Young people do lots of dumb things, but it’s not that they don’t know better. I knew that smoking was dumb and dangerous, but I still started smoking.

I knew drinking two bottles of Buckfast and surfing on top of a Ford Transit wasn’t very bright, but I still did it.

I knew that driving like a complete idiot wasn’t particularly sensible, but I did that, too. I knew that pouring petrol over myself and lighting it was a bit risky, but WHOOMPH. And so on.

Here’s a pair of pieces I’ve written for Techradar. First, Snow Leopard versus Windows 7. Which is better? It’s a bit more complicated than that:

So which is better? We think that’s the wrong question. Snow Leopard is better than Leopard, and Windows 7 is better than Windows Vista. If you aren’t planning to buy a new computer in the not too distant future, that’s all that matters: whichever platform you’re currently running, upgrading is well worth the money.

Secondly, why does Opera bother making a desktop browser?

Whenever we write about a new version of Opera, we feel like Top Gear‘s James May updating the audience on the Dacia Sandero.

Opera isn’t a bad browser by any means – quite the opposite – but like the Dacia, it’s something foreigners go for while we don’t.

Oh yes it is.

The information superhighway, as pundits described it in the dark days of the 1990s, was going to change not just the way we lived and worked, but the way we thought.

No longer would we languish in the darkness of dumb despair. The internet would shine the Torch of Truth on each and every one of us, and it would feed our minds with the Flan of Facts.

Didn’t quite work out that way, did it? All over the internet people are saying really stupid things, and the problem seems to be getting worse.

So what’s going on? There are only two possible explanations. It’s either simple demographics, or the internet works exactly like our brains – and that means its mental age is seven.

You know who, you know where:

For one tenth of the money it would have cost to buy Twitter, Facebook has got itself some of the best brains in the social networking business – brains who are used to building things to a Google scale.

Why, you’ll have to read The Sad, Slow and Entirely Predictable Death of Friends Reunited to find out.

ITV bought Friends Reunited in 2005, by which time it was pretty obvious that free social networking was going to be a big deal: MySpace was already attracting millions of users, and Facebook was catching up fast.

Despite this, Friends Reunited was convinced that charging people to get in touch with other people was a really brilliant idea. Until April 2008 if you wanted to harass your first love or send a cheeky “I’m rich and you’re not! HA HA!” message to your teenage tormentors, you had to pay for it.

Amazingly, a lot of people did: subscriptions accounted for around 40% of the site’s revenues in 2008.

I think augmented reality is ridiculously exciting.

My brain crashed yesterday. I was sitting in the BBC, waiting to blab about gadgets, and I was next to a distinguished-looking chap who looked incredibly familiar.

“I know him,” I thought. “I know that face.” But my brain wasn’t playing, and it was only when I asked somebody later on that I discovered I’d been sitting next to one of the greatest novelists in the entire universe.

Wouldn’t it have been great if I’d been able to surreptitiously point my mobile at him to discover who he was, Google what I should and shouldn’t say to him, and then post geotagged ransom notes to his publisher as I kidnapped him and bundled him into the boot of my car?

Augmented Reality promises all that and much, much more.

Words on the Internet? I writes ’em!

First up, what will we be able to watch on Sky TV when it goes 3D next year?

7.00pm Bruno
Sky Movies Premiere 3D
You know that bit where the focus group sees Bruno’s pilot for a TV programme? Remember THAT bit? Now you can see it again – in 3D!

Six things Ofcom could do to fix the sorry state of UK broadband:

ISPs that deliberately throttle traffic – such as peak-time iPlayer nobbling – or block entire protocols should say so up-front. Ryanair isn’t allowed to replace its planes with trampolines, although we suspect it’d like to. ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to do the tech equivalent, either.

Just when you thought the EU launch of Windows 7 couldn’t get any more confusing, it gets more confusing.

it seems rather silly to wait until you’ve started manufacturing install DVDs before deciding that a browser-free Windows is a donkey.

It’s the tech equivalent of getting married, climbing into the marital bed on your wedding night and telling your partner: “I’ve just realised something. You’re a minger! God, I wished I’d noticed that earlier!”