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Scotland bans cheap booze in supermarkets
For crying out loud. DEALS and offers on alcohol sold in supermarkets and off-licences will be banned after new licensing laws were given the go-ahead. The Scottish Parliment has unanimously backed the move which will end certain types of promotions ahead of a drinks law shake-up. Ministers had already announced constraints for drink promotions in…
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Turn yourself into a South Park cartoon
Dumb fun for a rainy day: South Park Studio.
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Is someone nicking your words?
The gorgeous, pouting Chris Mitchell has found a fantastic resource for bloggers: CopyScape. It’s a search engine that enables you to see if people have ripped off your blog entries, online articles or other text. Chris writes: I idly put in my Laos: Plain Of Jars article and discovered it’s been ripped off wholesale by…
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TonyK on 12A
In his typically incisive review of Batman Begins, TonyK goes off on a brief tangent to discuss the menace of the 12A certificate. For those of you outside the UK, 12A means that a film isn’t suitable for children under the age of 12, unless their parents decide otherwise. The result tends to be a…
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Going on holiday? Watch out for SPIES!!!!
MI5 is warning British tourists that they are at risk from spies abroad and it has published advice on its website on how to thwart their efforts. The site claims that even something as seemingly innocent as a smile or the offer of a little old-fashioned hospitality could be an attempt to recruit the unwary…
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“A misguided and potentially dangerous publication which should be taken out of print”
No, that’s not a book review – it’s the author of the infamous Anarchist’s Cookbook publicly disowning his book on Amazon. Contrary to what is the normal custom, the copyright for the book was taken out in the name of the publisher rather than the author. I did not appreciate the significance of this at…
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How touts get their tickets
There’s an interesting article in today’s Guardian that explains how the online ticket touts manage to snap up tickets before most of us even knew about the concerts in question: According to an Office of Fair Trading study the more sophisticated traders use “high-speed dialling equipment and other methods” to get tickets before ordinary customers.…
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Customs moves in on cut-price CDs, DVDs and games
According to The Inquirer, HM Customs isn’t too chuffed with companies such as Tesco setting up offshore CD/DVD/games shops to dodge VAT. A crackdown seems inevitable; expect Bittorrent downloads to go up, then… Update, 27 June The Inquirer reports that Jersey’s authorities are moving to close the tax loophole.
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Feed me, feed me, feed me
I was updating my big list’o’links this morning and realised something: of the sites I’ve linked to, I’ve barely visited the ones without RSS feeds. It’s not intentional, it’s just that when you get used to newsreader software you spend less and less time using your Web browser. I wouldn’t go as far as Microsoft’s…
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eBayers strike back
Today’s papers mention that Bob Geldof is appalled by the online touts flogging Live 8 tickets on eBay, but what the stories don’t mention is that the eBay community is already doing something about it. While a search for tickets uncovers hundreds of listings like this: Most of them now look like this: This isn’t…