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Despite reports, Girls Aloud are not planning to recruit a new member – at least, not according to the official site: Over the weekend the papers have been filled with false stories on the girls. But instead of the tired old ‘split’ stories, they have invented rumours of a brand new Girls Aloud reality show.… [more]
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An unusual request: does anybody know of a crystal case for the first-gen iPhone that *doesn’t* let you use the touch screen? I want to use it as a portable video player for baby bigmouth, but the touchscreen means she turns off the clips in seconds and then beats me around the face with the… [more]
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My Xbox 360 developed the dreaded Red Ring of Death the other week, and after trying the various troubleshooting tips it was pretty obvious that the ‘box was broken. So with a sinking feeling I called tech support to try and arrange a repair. What I expected was this: Hours on the phone being passed… [more]
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An interesting post on Broadstuff about Pandora, the web-radio service whose extremely high royalty payments may force it out of business: it’s clear that Pandora and its ilk will live – it’s far too good to lose – [so] it will just go to the P2P freenet if this practice continues, thus hurting the Industry… [more]
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Last year, I wrote a column for .net about the increasing importance of clicks – that is, judging the success of something not by how good or bad it is, but by how much traffic it generates. A few weeks ago, the music reviewer from The Herald newspaper went to see My Chemical Romance and,… [more]
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As I mentioned earlier, O2’s 3G network has gone to crap today in my bit of Scotland – but talking to customer services, they were very keen to send me a checklist for 3G problems anyway. “We’ve sent this to a lot of iPhone customers”, the rep told me. Here’s the checklist exactly as it… [more]
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…or at least, it might not be if you’re in the West of Scotland. O2’s data network has gone tits-up and there’s no red-hot 3G action for anyone round these parts. O2 network issues aside, is anyone else following the reports of iPhone problems and getting a flashback to the first Xbox 360 red rings… [more]
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Slate magazine journalist gets a tip that one of his pieces has been plagiarised. It turns out that it’s not just one piece, and it’s not just him. with the exception of the local events listings, every single item in the June 3-July 10 Bulletin is suspicious. Indeed, I wonder: In purely statistical terms, do… [more]
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It seems that AOL’s intrepid army of bloggers has been told to stop posting in order to save money – so some of them are continuing to blog unpaid. [more]
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An interesting and typically inflammatory piece from Mr Doctorow in the Guardian: The original Napster had a fine proposition: they would charge their users for signing onto their network and write a cheque for as-many-billions-as-you-like to the record industry every quarter… The record industry sued them into a smoking hole instead… [here is] the tried-and-true… [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.
