Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Here’s a thing. It’s illegal for UK firms to spam UK email addresses, provided said addresses are personal – businesses can still be spammed silly. Anybody know how self-employed people are classified in terms of anti-spam law?

Originally published in PC Plus magazine We live in a world where technology delivers a multitude of little miracles. From the ubiquitous Blackberry to the sat-nav systems in our cars, we’re living in an always-on world of instant global communication, on-demand data and computing power that would have been undreamt of a few decades ago.…

On sale in twelve days (in the UK – it’s out on the 21st in the US). Yes! Update I’m living in the past! Today’s the ninth, not the eighth, so it comes out in eleven days! Double yes with a great big shiny yes on top and a side order of woo-hoo!

Remember toothing, the “craze” that was apparently sweeping the nation as people used their bluetooth phones to locate potential partners for no-strings sex? Despite being widely reported, it was a hoax. This story reminded me of it: apparently “randy teens” have “sparked a new craze”, which has been dubbed “happy shagging”. According to the Daily…

This time last year, I wrote about the Engadget awards and said: There are some interesting differences between the readers’ choice awards and Engadget’s own picks, which suggests the power of the online Mac community – typically if Apple makes something in any of the categories, the readers overwhelmingly voted for it while Engadget tended…

Google has delisted bmw.de for trying to artificially inflate its pagerank. There’s a good discussion developing about this on MetaFilter, which is where I found the story in the first place.

A family friend has a lovely G5 iMac, which is just short of its first birthday. The headphone socket’s in pretty much constant use, and a few weeks back it broke. Due to a mix-up over warranties (said Mac is under warranty but the shop thinks it isn’t), my friend has been invoiced. For £700.…

The publisher blames the Internet, but the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis unmasks the real villain: in the past decade, rounded, interesting, flawed human beings have vanished entirely from teen pop. Record companies, cleaving to the American model of perfection, began media-training their stars – “media-training” being a technical term for surgically depriving someone of their personality.…

I don’t normally post this kind of stuff but Yorkhill Hospital’s a national treasure, and I know that some of you lovely people have games industry contacts. From the Evening Times: GAMES consoles have been stolen from a hospital ward for sick kids in Glasgow. Nurses on Yorkhill’s ward 4B discovered a number of items…

Beta 2 is out, and the beta’s open to the public*. I haven’t had the chance to play with this one yet, but the first beta was a big improvement over IE6. * Beta software can do weird things, install at your own risk, if it eats your computer don’t blame me, etc etc etc.