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I bought an Apple TV in an attempt to free my huge home video library from its Mac-shaped prison: I can’t be bothered unplugging everything and moving the Mac downstairs when I want to watch a clip of Baby Bigmouth, and life’s too short to burn your own DVDs. It’s been in daily use since… [more]
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Apple’s unveiled some new MacBook Pros, and the big news is Thunderbolt, also known as Light Peak. It’s very clever, and could enable some very interesting things: The new Macs look like iPads with keyboards. They’re clearly the latest iteration of Apple’s current design language, but what if they’re more than that? What if the… [more]
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In the early 2000s, when internet piracy was killing the recorded music business, some record companies had an idea. “Let’s keep doing what we’re doing,” they suggested. “But let’s do it with slightly better sound quality and a much bigger price tag”. Enter DVD Audio and Super Audio CD. They offered better sound quality than CD,… [more]
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Not a surprise, I know, but the graphs in this article are still eye-opening. Short version: the recorded music business makes its money from albums; people don’t buy albums any more. [more]
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Long-time readers will know of my borderline-obsessive love of Irish band The 4 of Us, so I’m quite delighted to see that the solo album from their singer, Brendan Murphy, has made its way to iTunes. If you like low-key, late-night acoustic songs, it’s definitely worth your time. More details and previews here. [more]
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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… [more]
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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… [more]
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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… [more]
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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… [more]
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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.… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
