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See you next year
This’ll be my last post before Hogmanay, the Scottish version of New Year. Being Scots we take New Year very seriously, and on New Year’s Eve we resolve to cut out bad habits, embrace a healthier lifestyle and become better people. To demonstrate our commitment to these lofty aims, we then try to kill ourselves…
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Is a headless Mac on its way?
I got slammed a few months back for suggesting (in print) that Apple needed to sell a cheap and cheerful Mac without a monitor, and for suggesting (in this blog) that Macs were too expensive compared to PCs. However, according to Think Secret, a super-cheap headless Mac is on its way. With iPod-savvy Windows users…
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Crippleware
Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow makes some good points about BitTorrent, DRM and the role of tech magazines: …the recent Wired spin-off, Wired Test, featured page on page of reviews of music players, media PCs, and PVRs with hardly a mention of the fact that all of these devices were fundamentally crippleware, and all controlled…
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Pointless gadget joy
One of the great things about the festive season is gadget joy, when you get a pointless gadget that you really, really want. My gadget joy this year comes from a Starck Weather Station: It tells the time, the air pressure, the current moon phase, the temperature and the humidity, and thanks to the included…
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Digital music: Flat Fee Futures
Writing in The Register, Andrew Orlowski writes about the way in which radio-style royalty arrangements could solve music and movie piracy.
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Journalists are bad for your health
The Guardian’s Bad Science Awards give a well-deserved kicking to some of the charlatans, snake oil salesmen and clueless hacks who fill page after page of our newspapers with health news that’s wrong in many cases and completely invented in others. But it also raises a serious point: journalists are bad for your health. There…
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You learn something new every day
Sometimes when jet planes take off or land, or do dramatic aerobatics, they create clouds of condensation on their wings. This gallery of such clouds is strangely fascinating, as is the gallery of clouds caused by supersonic flight. [Via MetaFilter]
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A f–king disgrace
Warning, contains lots of swearing A recent issue of the Rocking Vicar newsletter included a tale from one reader describing how the world is going to hell in a handcart: out shopping with a friend and the friend’s 10-year-old daughter, the reader was in a boutique where the in-house sound system played – at high…
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Sympathy for the record industry
I’ve been pretty scathing about the music business in this blog and elsewhere, which raises the obvious question: “why do you hate the music industry so much?” And the answer is: I don’t. I’m actually a big fan. Music matters, whether it’s U2’s Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own catching you at a…
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Merry Christmas, everybody
Blimey, where’s the year gone? Last time I looked it was February. Just a quick note to wish you all a very merry Christmas, a hugely entertaining Hogmanay and a happy and prosperous 2005.