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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… [more]
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Sorry I’ve been quiet: still ill. But not too ill to predict doom! DOOM! in order to exist, Spotify has to pay the bills – and you can be confident that it’s paying rates that the BBC would laugh at. By all accounts the going royalty rate for streaming music is around 1p per stream,… [more]
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iTunes 9 is out. It does some interesting things. Still crashes a lot though. Here’s a review I’ve written. iTunes 9 feels snappier, the column browser is a much-needed improvement and the Home Sharing feature works very well, although on our Mac at least iTunes 9 doesn’t seem any less crash-prone than its predecessor. [more]
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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… [more]
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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… [more]
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I went to see U2 last night. They weren’t very good. Part of it was the sound – maybe it’s just me, but when I go to see a four-piece guitar band I quite like to hear the guitar and bass guitar – and part of it was that they seemed a bit lacklustre. Most… [more]
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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… [more]
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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. [more]
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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.… [more]
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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… [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.
