• Stupid woman does stupid thing for cash

    If it’s a story about people selling stupid things on eBay, you just know it’s going to involve casino site Golden Palace – after all, this is the site that snapped up a bit of toast with Jesus’s face, and which has paid people to display the site URL on various bits of their anatomy.…

  • Moving mouse

    Advance warning: I’m going to be reorganising my web server a bit this week and moving the blog to a different domain name, so there’ll be a new address for the blog as soon as the housekeeping’s done. The RSS feed will have a new URL, too. Naturally I’ll post when the move’s taken place…

  • Pop will sue itself

    Industry watcher Mark Mulligan reports that the BPI, which represents record labels, is going after the MCPS/PRS Alliance, which represents music publishers, over digital music licensing fees. The BPI has joined forces with iTunes Music Store, Napster, Connect, MusicNet, AOL, Yahoo and RealNetworks (OD2/Louedye are conspicuously absent) to take the MCPS/PRS Alliance to the Copyright…

  • Why Apple’s kicking Creative’s arse

    Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber explains that Apple’s all-conquering iPod isn’t just about marketing. This emphasis on simplification is at the core of the iPod success story. Fast Company recently talked to designers and executives at six companies producing rival products to iPods. Creative Technology CEO Sim Wong Hoo, for example, quite obviously does…

  • Punning headline about smoke and ire

    Scotland’s Parliament decides on whether or not to ban smoking today, and if they vote in favour of the ban – which they will – it’ll come into force next Spring. This morning’s news programme on BBC Radio Scotland reminded me of why I’m in favour of the ban and contemptuous of the people behind…

  • Who are all these people in my way?

    David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest (which, one day, I might even finish) gave a fantastic speech to graduating US students. It’s long but well worth reading: I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through…

  • Cash machines really do screw the poor

    Most sensible people already realised as much, but today’s Evening Times has a nice bit of proof showing the way cash machine charges screw the people who can least afford to be screwed. In the Hyndland Road bit of Glasgow’s West End, an area that’s home to people in the range between “doing quite nicely,…

  • MGM, Grokster and the future of file sharing

    The US Supreme Court has spoken, and it’s bad news for Grokster and Streamcast: they can be sued because their users have been breaking copyright. However, on first reading of the verdict it doesn’t seem like the end of file sharing; rather, the judges have ruled that if firms’ marketing efforts are based on encouraging…

  • What the papers said

    Some interesting tech stories in the Sunday papers this weekend: the ID card fiasco bubbles on, and there’s a terrifying story about the Operation Ore porn crackdown. ID cards first. I won’t bother linking because there’s far too many stories, but to summarise: the cost could now be as high as £16 billion, EDS –…

  • Too much coffee

    Bill Hicks used to joke about his smoking and say that he was a two lighters-per-day man. I think I may be the coffee equivalent: I’ve just burned out yet another coffee making machine, which brings the coffee machine death toll for 2005 to three. If I were my new coffee machine, I’d be scared.