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Me at Techradar: What we’ve got, then, isn’t a case of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted: it’s a case of locking the stable door after the horse has evolved opposable thumbs, learnt to drive cars and driven through the stable in a Challenger tank. It’s far too late for Netscape and… [more]
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As long term readers will know, I’m amazed by the way in which the music business spent more than ten years missing every business opportunity the Internet brought them, effectively handing their entire business over to the pirates. Services such as Spotify should have turned up a long time ago. Could the same kind of… [more]
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It’s Tuesday. It’s Techradar time… Sagem’s Cosyphone is aimed at the over-50s. Not only does it have really big buttons and numbers, but it has near field communications technology, too. Need to call somebody? Why not wave a big picture of them in the air, like a simpleton? “It uses cards, which can be customised… [more]
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Photoshop is 20. Happy Birthday, Photoshop! From whitening teeth in billboard ads to foisting yet more lolcats on the world, its influence is enormous. Inevitably that influence has been bad as well as good. In the right hands, image manipulation can be undetectable, but all too often Photoshop falls into the hands of the overworked,… [more]
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Me, on Techradar: Hopefully this is part of a bigger trend. For years, technology has become more and more complicated, often for no good reason. I do a monthly radio surgery where listeners phone in with their technology troubles, and more often than not they’re being driven daft by something that should be simple, but… [more]
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A year ago today, I said that Facebook had jumped the shark. Now, I’m eating humble pie. Sort of. So, Facebook is brilliant, I’m a great big numpty and everything in social networking land is groovy. Not so fast. Facebook isn’t popular because it’s good. It’s popular because it’s popular. Facebook is the budget airline… [more]
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Hi! How are you? Also: up yours! Screw you! Get stuffed! Welcome to the wonderful world of web comments, where telling somebody to get bent is an acceptable way to say hello. A wee piece by me over at Techradar about Engadget switching off its comments system due to “trolls and spammers”. [more]
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I wasn’t entirely convinced by the iPad until Steve Jobs announced the price: at $499, it’s a pretty amazing bit of kit. That’s netbook money, and that means it could be a pretty big deal. I’m quite excited about it, because I can think of three people who’d like it a lot: me, Mrs Bigmouth… [more]
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Andy Ihnatko is one of my favourite tech writers, and this Chicago Sun-Times piece is a doozy. It’s about tablets, and hype, and fun. I like Apple for any number of reasons but at the top of the list is the fact that they’re capable of raising people’s expectations and restoring a sense of joy… [more]
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Over at Techradar, I’ve interviewed the head of digital at Hachette UK, one of the world’s biggest publishers. Are publishers learning from the music industry’s decade of mistakes? One of the things that sent people to the pirates with music was the problem of file formats: your player wanted X format, the pirate sites had… [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.
