-
I thought I’d say something constructive in an op/ed for once, so I’ve written about Opera 10. It’s moved from alpha to beta, and it’s really rather good. Internet Explorer 6, the gurning half-wit of the browser world, has nearly 17 per cent of the market. Opera, a truly great browser, has 0.72 per cent.… [more]
-
Should ISPs advertise broadband services that don’t – can’t – deliver what the ads promise? Of course they shouldn’t. If you aren’t unemployed or self-employed, BT is choking your connection at the very times you’re most likely to use it. On the subject of iPlayer’s bandwidth demands BT says “We believe there is a real… [more]
-
Could be… Have you seen the demo of Spotify on Android yet? If not, check it out and listen really carefully. That sound you can hear in the distance is Steve Jobs swearing. It looks like Android has found its killer app. [more]
-
Isn’t it? Yes. This… is the same firm that decided to call its security suite Microsoft Wanker. Sure, it says OneCare when it’s written down, but go on. Read it aloud. [more]
-
Moblin, the Intel-backed Linux for netbooks, looks pretty nifty. Which makes a change: With most technology, looking into it is like shopping for a new and exciting car. We’ll happily spend days scanning brochures, reading reviews and coming up with increasingly imaginative and expensive configurations. With Linux, though, it’s more like shopping for a new… [more]
-
Well hello there. Sorry for the lack of non-work postings recently – I mentioned a while back that there was a reason for it, but I didn’t explain what it was. So here we go. For the last five or six months I’ve been killing people. I’ve killed so many people I’ve lost track of… [more]
-
Will humans of the future have extra ears? Probably not, but cyborg technology is still fascinating. Sadly the “bionic arms race” owes much to a very real arms race. In 2005, the US military announced a multi-million dollar investment in prosthetic technology after a surge in the number of US soldiers losing limbs in Afghanistan… [more]
-
It’s that man again. And by that man, I mean me. We’re rushing into a world where everything depends on an internet connection, whether it’s your email, your online apps, your Xbox Live or your TV on demand. Most of the time, that’s absolutely fine. Great, even. But it means that we’re more vulnerable to… [more]
-
Two of my things have hit the internet. First up, an op/ed on Google’s ever-increasing usefulness: There’s no doubt that search engines are getting smarter, which is generally a good thing. However, they’re guilty of something called Mission Creep: that is, they’re doing more and more work. In the good old days search engines were… [more]
-
Here’s a thing. If the sites you regularly visited started charging, would you stick with them? I’ve been mulling over some stuff Rupert Murdoch has been saying. Essentially he’s arguing that the free, ad-supported content model for online news and magazines isn’t sustainable, which I think is right – The Guardian website is brilliant, but… [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.
