Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Technology

Shiny gadgets and clever computers

  • Don’t buy a laptop. Buy a netbook and a desktop, and keep the change

    Back in 2006, I wrote this:

    Many laptops, such as the MacBook Pro, are real desktop alternatives. But they also cost an awful lot of money, and they’re hefty things to carry around. Any time I’ve used a laptop when travelling – on planes, on trains, on ferries – I’ve wished I had a smaller computer (particularly on planes, where you get less room than a veal calf). Unless you need serious horsepower from a mobile PC, a top-end laptop is a daft buy: even the titchiest machine is perfectly capable of DVD playback, office applications and anything else you might need on your travels.

    That was before the invention of the netbook, which is the smaller computer I wanted whenever I tried to unfold a Powerbook or MacBook Pro in a plane seat. With netbooks becoming so handy (particularly in the battery life stakes) and cloud computing making it easy to share and/or sync stuff between multiple machines it’s bordering on insanity to buy a fully-featured laptop for travelling: with netbooks going for £300 or less (and refurbs starting to appear from the likes of EuroPC) you really need to be rich or daft to buy anything bigger.

    As my 2006 post put it:

    The little laptop will be smaller, lighter and therefore more portable than a big beast of a machine – and you’ll be less upset if it gets broken, nicked or blown up by terrorists because you’ll still have a working machine at home.

    I’ll be testing a Samsung NC-10 fairly soon, so I’ll eat my words if it’s a load of crap. But I suspect it won’t be.

  • Is the Safari 4 beta any good?

    Yes. Yes, it is. Guess where the link goes? That’s right! Techradar!

    Overall, we like Safari 4 a lot. We’re not convinced we’ll actually use Top Sites or the visual History Search, but flashy gimmicks aside it’s a fast and pleasant way to do stuff online.

  • Techradar Tuesday: don’t be a dumbass

    Last.fm isn’t telling the RIAA that you’ve pirated the new U2 album. But you might be.

    Why go to the hassle of trying to get data from websites when the users will hand it to you on a plate?

    We’re sure that some of the people listening to the leaked album simply forgot that Last.fm tells other people what you’re listening to, but we’re also sure that a fair number of them were boasting. Look at me! I’ve got something I shouldn’t have! I am cool!

  • Daddy? What was the world like before the internet?

    There’s a huge discussion on Fark.com based on a brilliant question:

    Youngish [Fark user] has no comprehension what her adult life would be like without the internet or computer technology. Describe your pre-internet life

    It’s a brilliant question because the potential answers are so big. Baby Bigmouth wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the internet – I met Mrs Bigmouth online – and my job wouldn’t exist without it either. And yet the whole thing has happened in a very short space of time, so Baby B was born into a world where the things we already take for granted – broadband, YouTube, Google, iTunes, Facebook – are all just a few years old. And eventually she’s going to ask me, what were things like before the internet?

    What would you say? Would you sound like a Daily Mail reader, hankering for a simpler time? Or would you be more like the Yorkshiremen in the Monty Python sketch where they exaggerate the awfulness of their upbringings? Is answering the question like trying to explain what the world was like before fire, electricity and the wheel?

  • 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, the Combine Citadel looks like it’s been glued into the background with Pritt Stick and we’re pretty sure that none of the $500 budget was spent on the script.

    Overall, though, it works – and to our eyes it’s no worse than the CGI in the most recent Hulk movie, which cost $150 million to make and still looked like it had been thrown together on a ZX Spectrum by an angry toddler.

    Six companies Microsoft should buy:

    Microsoft isn’t short of cash, and it recently – and unsuccessfully – offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion.

    The idea was to catch up with Google, but the big G isn’t the only firm doing well in areas where Microsoft isn’t. So perhaps Microsoft should widen its net.

    From video and music to shopping and social networks, we think these six firms should be on Microsoft’s shopping list.

  • 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 would use. The second is that Amazon has removed some key features, making it less flexible than before. And the third is that it simply isn’t good enough when you compare it to other gadgets.

    I thought using the full product name as per Amazon’s own listing – “Kindle 2: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)” – throughout the piece would be funny, but it seems I’m the only person who does.

    I’m still really excited about e-books, but I don’t have any gadget lust towards this one at all.

  • Windows 7 should be Vista’s final Ultimate Extra

    A nice rant from Paul at Techradar:

    Windows 7 should be given free to owners of Vista Ultimate as a final ‘sorry we screwed you over’ Ultimate Extra.

    Ultimate users! Let’s head for Microsoft HQ with flaming torches!

  • 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 be competing in Dancing With The Stars, we had two thoughts: one, could we get Steve Ballmer to go on, too? And two, is there anything Woz won’t do for a laugh?

    The answer to both questions, it seems, is no. For the tech industry’s very own Joker, tomfoolery is never far away.

    And here’s one about blogging for money.

    Is there an alternative to ads? Not really. Citizen journalism photo agency Scoopt shut its doors last week because it couldn’t persuade papers to pay a decent whack for images – it seems that major media outlets would rather get you to send in your snaps for free – and the wages offered by firms via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk are pathetic. Write a review? Five cents. Do some digging into historical figures? Three cents. Build a space rocket, fly to Mars, discover intelligent life and bring it back in a cage? Seven cents.

  • One day all tech journalism will be like this [language NSFW]

    The Onion, via Paul @ Techradar.com:


    Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work

  • 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? Windows 7 Home Premium. Home worker or small business? Windows 7 Professional.

    Also on the site: Become an App Store millionaire: how three iPhone developers made it big.

    “Look at it this way: most people show up to work, or school, or whatever, and they are eager to show their friends what cool new things they’ve got on their iPhone. Of the 50 apps they may have on their iPhone, they may only get a chance to show five of them to their friends. If your app is one of those five, and it can prove its worth in ten to fifteen seconds, then you’ve got yourself a successful app.” [Steve Demeter, developer of Trism]