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Flat Earth News
As one of the cover quotes puts it, if even half of what Nick Davies writes in his expose of the news industry is true then things are truly terrifying. The stuff on Iraq, the neutering of the Sunday Times Insight team and the problems of “churnalism” have been covered elsewhere, so I won’t go…
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Sodding spammers, again
I’ve disabled user registration (temporarily) because the bloody spammers are back, and I don’t have time to do major security stuff today. Sorry for any inconvenience and/or crap in your RSS feeds… [Thanks for the heads-up, Kyle]
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A messageboard for time travellers
This cracked me up (via Metafilter): posts from the WWII subforum of the International Association of Time Travelers.
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Even better than the real thing
This is brilliant: Fake Steve Jobs takes on Wired reporter Leander Kahney and wins spectacularly. Leander, you are a hopeless pussy. This kind of attitude is why you’re a hack at Wired and not running your own multi-billion-dollar company. It’s not just that the interview is funny, although it is: it’s that in these days…
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Pathetic, I know
When you blab about things for a living you occasionally float briefly into the orbit of famous people – so you’ll interview a famous writer, or the drummer from a famous band, or someone else your mum might actually have heard of. If you do radio, you’ll often meet celebs of all kinds – the…
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iPod porn and news that isn’t news
An interesting article (Salon.com, via Fark) on a rash of iPod-porn stories that appeared on US TV. Now, iPod/iPhone porn does exist – the porn industry isn’t exactly slow to embrace new technology – but what’s interesting is the content of the news reports. Nine stations aired Raskin’s warnings. Her segments had the look and…
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A great book, but the people who need it won’t read it
I mentioned this briefly before, but I’d like to mention it again: Suckers, by Rose Shapiro, is a wonderful demolition job of the alternative medicine racket. Like all polemics, it sometimes crushes things that perhaps don’t deserve to be crushed – so it’s very hard on acupuncture, despite some indications that it can be useful…
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Hey, musicians – it’s time for the machines to take over
If you thought Autotune was clever, this will blow your mind. Direct Note Access is a technology that makes the impossible possible: for the first time in audio recording history you can identify and edit individual notes within polyphonic audio material. The unique access that Melodyne affords to pitch, timing, note lengths and other parameters…
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Serious anti-spam
If any of your feed readers get weird results accessing this blog in the next wee while, can you let me know? I’ve installed some heavy-duty anti-spam stuff on the blog to cut down on comment/trackback spam and site scraping.
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A little bit of politics: replacing the council tax
I know, I know, I’ll be back to posting about Girls Aloud and Macs in a bit. But I was listening to the morning show on Radio Scotland (The Angry Pensioners show – (c) Tony Kiernan) today, and they were talking about the Scottish plans to replace council tax with a local income tax. Well,…