• Let’s introduce an asshole tax for the entertainment industries

    No, really. Every time they do something that makes people go “Christ, what a bunch of assholes”, we should choose a record company or film studio at random and force them to hand over a few billion quid. Today’s reason? The “iPod tax” about to hit the Dutch. With rates of up to £2.22 per…

  • Nokia: all your iPods are belong to us

    It’s war! Nokia reckons its new N-series phones will outsell the iPod and pretty much everything else on the planet. They’re certainly nifty – here’s the 4Gb music phone, the N91:

  • Disturbing technology: the defrost-o-plate

    A few years ago, my dad bought a mad thing from JML (they advertise on TV and their slogan should be “we sell weird shit for your house”). I dubbed it the defrost-o-plate: it claimed to defrost food in record time, without heat. Bollocks! I cried. My dad showed me it in action. I bought…

  • Throwing fireballs at Adobe

    Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber gets stuck into Adobe. He’s not very complimentary. Rather than expand into untapped creative markets, Adobe seems hell-bent on expanding into the jerks-wearing-suits market, a market that’s completely at odds with the creative market they’ve dominated for nearly two decades.

  • Offers bloody over

    My lovely wife and I tried to buy a house the other day. We didn’t get it. Am I bitter about it? Bloody right I am. Scotland’s system for buying and selling property is different from England or Northern Ireland. There’s one major benefit to our way of doing things: you can’t be gazumped, so…

  • A question of copyright

    I uploaded one of my articles to this blog yesterday, prompting Derek to ask: “Would I be able to pass that onto some people at work, or would that infringe on the copyright?” The answer is, of course, go right ahead. The whole point of sticking things up on the net is so that people…

  • Politicians and the internet

    I’ve been looking at the various political parties’ web sites for next week’s elections, and while they’re all fairly boring things the Scottish Tories site was particularly bad: the manifestos available were for the 2001 and 2003 elections, the “find out about your area” link didn’t include the new constituency names, etc etc etc. Being…

  • The Tartan Podcast

    If you’re interested in discovering new music, a nice bloke called Mark Hunter has created The Tartan Podcast to showcase new Scots music. The current edition features some friends of mine (Glasgow pop act Gum) along with some bunch of chancers called Kasino.

  • Sage advice from Mr Sun

    Everybody has a favourite comedy bookmark, and my one is Mr Sun: I’m usually guaranteed at least one belly laugh per day. Wandering around his site I found this gem: Mr Sun’s guide to humour on the web. It’s all sage stuff, particularly the section on robots and monkeys. monkeys and robots are to humor…

  • Windows pains: RSI and you

    I’ve been talking about RSI on a journalism forum, which is something I’ve written about once or twice. It’s reminded me that I really need to put an article archive together, and it’s something I’ll do when I get time. For now, though, I’ve uploaded a quick and dirty PDF of the RSI feature I…