Sport and Twitter isn’t always a disaster

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Twitter has been in and out of the mainstream press headlines over the last few month for a number of sport-related reasons. Some stemmed from ill-judged comments, others from a lack of understanding of how Twitter actually works, and the media seems to have pounced on the fact that an interesting tweet can make for a very cheap story.

Two jump out above the rest. In football, then-Spurs striker Darren Bent grew frustrated during protracted negotiations over his move to Sunderland and vented a series of irate tweets in the direction of club chairman Daniel Levy – not a great idea with the transfer still very much in the balance.

“Do I wanna go Hull City NO. Do I wanna go stoke NO do I wanna go sunderland YES so stop f****** around levy”

Spelling and punctuation issues aside, the papers jumped at the chance to write a story that contained both controversy and that newfangled web thing the kids are all talking about, so Twitter became the tool that earned Bent the move he wanted. (more…)

PC Pro printer giveaway

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

We get a lot of kit in the PC Pro Labs and, despite what many people assume, it all goes straight back to PR companies and manufacturers when we’re done with our testing. But on very rare occasions there’s a hitch in the supply line.

If you buy this month’s issue of PC Pro (in all good newsagents from today) you’ll find an extensive all-in-one printers Labs on p60, with eight home and seven business devices put through their paces.

Unfortunately, HP could only supply us with two of the three printers we wanted, and after much deliberation we decided the Home section wouldn’t be complete without this major name present – so we went online and bought the Photosmart C7280 ourselves.

Now we’re done with it, rather than leave it under a desk until it’s outdated and worthless we thought we’d find it a home out there in the real world. Obviously, it wouldn’t be right to give it away as an official Competition item in the magazine – after all, the packaging is open and we’ve been through a few sets of cartridges so it doesn’t have a full tank of ink. But aside from that it’s in perfect working order.

*** COMPETITION NOW CLOSED ***

So all you have to do is email your name and address to me at davidb@pcpro.co.uk before 5pm on Monday 17th August and I’ll pick a winner at random. Good luck!

Firefox 4 looks awfully familiar…

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Firefox 3.5 is still fresh, but Mozilla has been busy mocking up its early concepts for the big move to version 4. Now, these images come with a great big disclaimer that “These are NOT FINAL! THEY ARE ONLY FOR BRAINSTORMING/EXPLORATION!“, but it’s interesting to see which direction Firefox could be taking. Take a look for yourself and form your own opinions, but from where I’m sitting it looks like a certain other browser seems to have had an influence on Mozilla’s designs.

The first design is fairly typical Firefox, with the tabs beneath the address bar (click to enlarge):

The Aero effect looks nice, and it’s a very clean interface, with only minor changes from the Firefox 3.7 concept images which Mozilla recently released. But there’s also a mockup with the tabs – unusually for Firefox – moved above the address bar: (more…)

The people vs Wolfram Alpha

Monday, May 18th, 2009

Since Wolfram Alpha launched at the weekend, I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve read in which the author asks it inane questions and laughs when it falls flat. Even our own Darien Graham-Smith (along with several others in the office) seems almost delighted to prod and poke at it to find instances where Wolfram’s big pre-launch claims can be mocked – usually by comparison to Google or Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, this is something that was bound to happen given the publicity the site has received in recent weeks from the mainstream press. The big problem occurs because most people are attempting to hastily test the new engine without any real reason to be using it. (more…)

First look: Samsung’s new display range

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

Samsung’s monitor range has been hugely successful over the last couple of years, combining excellent image quality with living room design, and after seeing the 2009 additions today I can safely say that winning formula looks set to continue.

The majority of the displays on show were impressive refreshes, such as the polished and angular ‘Lavender’ line and the ‘Ecofit’ low-power models – all of which we’ll be reviewing over the coming months. But in amongst them a few interesting additions caught my eye.

The first was the so-called ‘lapfit’ display (LD220 and LD190N), which is essentially a widescreen monitor without the traditional stand. Instead it rests on an arm in the same way as a picture frame.

(more…)

Lost Zombies: the DIY movie apocalypse

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

The Blair Witch Project used the web to build word-of-mouth hype with incredible success before its release back in 1999, and since then it’s become a bit of a cliche for film studios to do the same. The usual process is to create cryptic teaser websites to whip the fans into a frenzy of chattering excitement before releasing an ultimately disappointing, prosaic film to a near-universal ‘meh’. (I’m looking at you, Cloverfield.)

But Lost Zombies is taking a much more ambitious approach to using the online community, by actually getting the community itself to make the movie.

“In 2007 the flu pandemic began. The flu strain spread quickly, mutating out of control and causing a global zombie apocalypse. Today 75% of the population has been wiped out. We want to hear your story.”

At its heart the site is an online community, with members posting messages and writing articles, but it has the potential to be much more than that – which is why it’s just picked up the Community and People’s Choice Awards at the South by Southwest Web Awards in Austin, Texas.

(more…)

The £250 Challenge: Vote for the internet PC

Monday, March 16th, 2009

I know, I know, it’s a bit bland. And it doesn’t have a monitor. And that chassis is mostly empty as it doesn’t really have much inside it. And it can’t keep up with the other PCs. And there’s actually nothing behind that little door on the front.

But my £250 PC – bought fully formed and totally new from Ebuyer.com – has at least TWO strengths that propel it past the garish nastiness of Mike’s monster, the ageing unreliability of Darien’s pile of tat and Mr Fearon’s little portable non-PC oddity.

(more…)

Do you actually want 3D?

Friday, February 27th, 2009

While researching an upcoming feature, I found a link from the BBC. Entitled “Why 3D is about to break through“, it explains the exciting world of 3D movies and projection, before concluding that it “looks like the future of 3D is firming up.”

Only trouble is, the article was from over a year ago. Since then I’ve been to see Beowulf at the IMAX, and toyed with an old game on one of Zalman’s monitors, but I can hardly say 3D leapt out at me through 2008.

This year, though, is different – one look at the barrage of 3D TVs launched at CES is enough to realise that. But while the industry hypes it, I’m intrigued to know whether you, the consumers, are actually interested in 3D at all. Going to a movie once in a while is one thing, spending your own money on kit is another entirely.

So, is it something you’d consider investing in? And, gaming and movies aside, are there any applications for which you see 3D being genuinely useful?

All the week’s reviews

Friday, February 13th, 2009

The big launch of the week was AMD’s move to its AM3 platform. Finally allowing the use of DDR3 with its CPUs, we received a motherboard and several new triple and quad-core processor models, which we promptly fired through our intensive benchmark suite with pretty impressive results.

At the more budget end of the scale we saw HP’s Compaq CQ2000, a beautifully designed small-form-factor PC with a 20in TFT for a mouth-watering price of just £286 exc VAT. We’ve seen cheap mini-PCs and nettops before, but this is the first we’d really want in our living room.

We also reviewed Toshiba’s latest business model, the Tecra R110-112, which came in bright white with a vast array of security features and reasonable power too. (more…)

So this is what Twitter’s for…

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

As you may have read, after much head-scratching about just what it’s actually supposed to do, PC Pro has bitten the bullet and joined Twitter. With the whole team contributing I’m sure it’ll work well, but on an individual level I’m just not a fan – I’ve tried it for a bit with my own personal account and found it a bit, well, pointless.

But then I was told about Cursebird. Built by a web developer who saw a few of his friends cursing on Twitter and realised he was finding it unfeasibly funny, Cursebird was quickly born with one very particular purpose: like Twitter’s disowned step-brother, it exists to bring you only those Tweets containing swearing.

WARNING: THIS LINK IS PROBABLY BEST AVOIDED IF YOU DON’T FIND RUDE WORDS FUNNY…

(more…)