Palm should leave Apple alone

Monday, October 5th, 2009

I challenge you to name something – anything – more ludicrous than the war of attrition being waged by Palm against Apple.

I realise that looks the wrong way round. Palm is the smaller company. The weedy David to Apple’s giant Goliath. But each time the chance to go to war with a company several times its size has been presented, Palm has reached for it with both hands like a 19-stone man lunging for cake.

I’m talking, in case you’re not following the smartphone market as closely as you should, about Palm’s moronic battle to keep the Pre compatible with iTunes.

(more…)

Why Outlook 2010’s conversation view doesn’t work

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Let’s be clear: Outlook 2010 is good. Very good, actually. And, certainly, if you instructed me to write an email client I’d come back to you with a white box with “INBOX” written on the front in biro.

But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been driving me up the wall.

Outlook 2010 tries to be all clever by bundling messages into “Conversations”. This is useful for when someone in the office CC’s everyone in on which pub to go to and you spend Friday afternoon battling a deluge of witty put-downs. In Outlook 2010 everything with the subject line “Let’s go to the pub!” is rolled into one conversation and you have to scroll through your inbox less. (more…)

The PC Pro Spotify playlist: the results

Friday, May 15th, 2009

You know it’s Friday afternoon when a hastily-written blog post asking for inspiration for PC Pro’s Spotify account gets nearly 20 responses before four in the afternoon. The result is a barkingly-mad list of music which takes in artists from The Beastie Boys to Tina Turner, and from Styx to Korn.

A quick reminder of the rules: all the songs had to have some connection to computers and they had to be found in the Spotify library. 

The winners are:

(more…)

Street View: a flat-hunter’s charter

Friday, April 24th, 2009

I’m going flat-hunting this weekend. Mostly the process is unchanged since the last time I did it: estate agents are a still a bunch of overpaid liars with too much hair-gel, silly little cars and the wrong-headed idea that just because they like the sound of their own voice, I will too. It is, in short, a Kafka-esque nightmare that makes me wonder if I wouldn’t be better off hollowing out the space under my desk and staying put. It would be free, and I’d be close to the pub.

(more…)

Don’t pirate anything! (Unless you have to)

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

I’ve just finished reviewing the QNAP TS-119 NAS drive. It’s interesting, in a geeky, all-your-stuff-on-one-device kind of way, and the review can be found here.

Among the drive’s long list of features is the ability to run BitTorrent downloads in the background. This is great news for anyone who currently leaves their PC running overnight. But before you do, the manual has the following warning:

(more…)

Where have all my files gone? An appeal

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

I turned on my PC this weekend. Nothing remarkable about that: I’ve been turning PCs on and off since I were a lad, mostly without unexpected consequence.

But I’ve been away for a year, and my PC has been turned off the whole time.

In a way it was like greeting an old friend. All the familiar sounds and lights came on when I pushed the button, Windows sprang into life, and I was reminded of how I really, really needed to take something pointy to the blue LED that adorns one of the system fans.

(more…)

Piracy plea bags Twitter fan free film tickets

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

The war on film piracy is a tricky one. The pirates have a convincing lead, courtesy of their mastery of technology and the plodding response of big film studios.

But it’s nice to see the latter has a sense of humour.

Amanda Music (her real name, apparently), looked unsuccessfully for a Torrent of indie flick Adventureland. Frustrated, she vented to Twitter: “Ugh WHY IS ADVENTURELAND NOT ON TORRENTS YET?”.

Forget the irritating use of ALL-CAPS for a moment; this is the kind of thing that might provoke a heavy-handed response from distributor Miramax. Instead, Amanda heard from the company’s Twitter team.

(more…)

How to add punch to your digital photos with the Levels and Curves tools

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

A common complaint from new DSLR owners is that their cameras leave their images looking rather dull and washed out: not like the punchy, eye-catching images they used to get from their cheaper compact camera.

The complaint isn’t baseless. Most DSLRs, by default, do less in-camera processing than compacts; the assumption being that you’d rather start with as exact a replica of reality as possible and edit it later.

Still, there’s little worse than a perfectly-composed, perfectly-exposed image that nonetheless doesn’t look as exciting as you thought it would. The answer is to get to grips with the Levels and Curves tools. The good news is that virtually every photo editor includes these, from Photoshop and Lightroom, to Photoshop Elements, and even free applications such as the GIMP.

(more…)

How to use Accelerators and visual search in Internet Explorer 8

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

Two of the big new features in IE8 are its Accelerators and visual search facilities. Microsoft, unsurprisingly, claims that both will make a big difference to your browsing habits. But what does it all mean?

Accelerators are the headline act. Think of them as contextual searching: the ability to do a search related to any piece of text on a page. But IE8 doesn’t simply perform the equivalent of copy-and-pasting your highlighted text into Google: you can do plenty more.

(more…)