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I bought a video camera just before Baby Bigmouth turned up – a Panasonic VDR-D250. I wasn’t greatly bothered about specs, so I quickly checked that it was Mac compatible before buying it. It turns out that it *was* Mac compatible, sort of, on the day I bought it. A few weeks later Leopard came… [more]
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A superb (and very sad) bit of journalism from Rolling Stone. His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. Wallace was an A student through high school, he played football, he played tennis, he wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published… [more]
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A few months back I blogged about a tech demo that made browsing Amazon more shop-like. It seems Amazon spotted it too, because its new WindowShop interface does much the same thing. I’m not sure it’s actually useful (at least on a PC – it would probably make more sense on a TV), but it… [more]
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Want a free Eels EP? Of course you do. So click on this link and give them your email address before 28th October. The 4-LP Deluxe Vinyl Ltd Edition set of Blinking Lights – which this EP is promoting – is a thing of beauty, and I’m sorely tempted to buy it even though I… [more]
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Another interesting post at Broadstuff: …about 40% of the UK ticket market goes through touts (people who buy tickets at face value, typically from organisations that get allocated tickets and then on-sell them). This creates the calculation below, where there is clearly far more money in touting than in actually being a musician. [more]
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Thanks to the ever-entertaining No Rock’n’Roll Fun: Comes Without Music But You Can Pay For Music If You Like. Just Not Too Many Tunes, Eh? Don’t Go Mad Or Anything. Two Songs A Week. [more]
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If you’re in the future, and you work on a spaceship, and you get a call telling you to go and check out some remote colony because contact has mysteriously been lost, do yourself a favour and call in sick that day. Skive for your life. The only reason space colonies, and the drifting spacecraft… [more]
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If you do a lot of typing, it could well be. the BlackBerry Storm, Research In Motion’s first attempt at a touchscreen device, is a triumph. It’s a really powerful device with plenty of clever features, but let’s set that to one side for the moment and focus on the question people really want to… [more]
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John Gruber hits the nail on the head: Here is a complete list of what Apple must do to increase developers’ trust in the App Store system: State the rules. Follow the rules. That’s it. [more]
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Good: The new Christopher Brookmyre, James Lee Burke and Ian Rankin novels. Bad: The new Girls Aloud single. [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.
