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Reviews of the new Nokia N8 are coming in thick and fast, and they’re not good: the consensus is that it’s a great piece of kit hobbled by not so great software. Via The Guardian, here’s a piece in the Helsingin Sanomat that attempts to describe the problems facing Nokia and what caused them. I… [more]
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My friend Chris Mitchell runs Spike, a most excellent books-and-interesting-things site on the Internet. And now, he’s put together a most excellent ebook version with some of the best bits from Spike’s last 15 years. And a few things I’ve written too. It’s a lovely thing to look at and and to read, and it’s… [more]
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Me at Techradar: there are still areas where netbooks are better than iPads. … [Adobe] Flash. Sure, there are reasons to loathe it, but in my house my wife matters more than Steve Jobs, and many of my wife’s favourite sites use Flash. Until they see the light and switch to something else, the iPad… [more]
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Orange and T-Mobile customers can now roam across each firms’ networks, although for now it’s only 2G (ie. calls and texts, not Internet). You’ll need to sign up for it. If you’re on Orange, you need this link. If you’re on T-Mobile, you need this one. [more]
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Books are rubbish. They just sit there with their words and their plots and their characterisation and their background detail. Where’s the fun in that? What books need is… 3D audio clips! From the press release: Pan Macmillan Marketing Director Becky Ikin said: ‘We wanted to celebrate the phenomenal global publication of Ken Follett’s Fall… [more]
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Want to know the key differences between Apple’s iPad, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and BlackBerry’s PlayBook? You do? Well, looky here then. You won’t be able to buy a PlayBook until well into 2011, and by then Apple should have iPad 2 ready to roll. The second generation iPad may well address some of the apparent… [more]
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And I don’t mean a few copies of Microsoft Office. Symbian is looking increasingly isolated, so perhaps Nokia needs to kill it. [hardware bossing the software guys about] wouldn’t be such an issue if specs were all that mattered, but in smartphones the reverse is true. In hardware terms the iPhone was and is rubbish… [more]
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This has been doing the rounds on Twitter, but just in case you missed it: Martin Robbins shows how to write a newspaper article about science-related topics. In this paragraph I will provide balance with a quote from another scientist in the field. Since I picked their name at random from a Google search, and… [more]
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Some more articles by me have made their way to the Internet. First, has Apple sold out? It seems that Apple can’t do anything right nowadays. It has been accused of censorship and bullying, and implicated in subcontractor suicides and heavyhanded policing. Despite creating the most impressive, most popular products in its entire history in… [more]
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Jane Smith’s How Publishing Really Works is worth a read at the best of times (if you’re interested in publishing, of course), but her five-part demolition of a “self-publishing is the future” screed is particularly delicious. Part five has just gone up; here are parts one, two, three and four. But the people that you… [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.
