Harriton High’s privacy nightmare

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Two things occurred to me when I read about the high school accused of spying on one its students through their laptop webcam. The first was that it’s amazing how much fuss could have been avoided with a piece of sticky tape. The second was that, if this story pans out, evolution is utterly wasted on us.

For evidence let’s revisit the details of the story as they’ve been presented thus far. Blake Robbins, a 15-year-old student of Harriton High School in Pennsylvania is dragged into the vice principal’s office, where he is disciplined for “improper behaviour”.

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A minute’s applause for the passing of my awful PC

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

My desktop computer is dying. It’s contracted some sort of virulent tech plague that’s sweeping through the components, knocking out my graphics card a couple of weeks ago, and causing my RAM to wobble – though not fall down – over the weekend. It’s even developed a death rattle from somewhere behind the fan.

Computers are like cars in this respect, they tend to teeter on the verge of death for a while and then collapse in a spectacular heap overnight. And while I should be wringing my hands, consulting priests, shamans and witch doctors while tearing the labs apart for replacement parts, I find myself blissfully unconcerned. You see, I don’t like my desktop PC and I’m going to watch it die with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.

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Is the Droid really a “racehorse duct-taped to a scud missile”?

Friday, December 4th, 2009

Television advertising fascinates me. Stripped of the gloss, it’s basically street hawkers screaming for your attention while you pass through a busy market on your way to somewhere more interesting.

They’re rarely effective and often irritating, which is why an advertisement telling me that a smartphone should be faster than a “racehorse duct-taped to a scud missile” is one I take notice of.

This inspired lunacy is lifted from Verizon’s ad for the Android-powered Droid smartphone, and is worth watching before we continue. Go on, I’ll wait.

Welcome back. Now that we’re on the same Fight Club-inspired page, I think the question we’re all dying to have answered is “Should a phone be pretty. Should it be a tiara-wearing, digitally clueless, beauty-pageant queen?” After all, wouldn’t you rather have a phone that “rips through the web like a circular saw through a ripe banana”?

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Tabbed documents: Office 2007 is now great

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

I wrote a blog post the other day whinging about the lack of tabbed documents in Office 2007. At which point, something remarkable happened. One of our readers (hello Greg, cheers) pointed me in the direction of a plugin that brings just such voodoo to Word, Excel and Powerpoint 2007. Then something even more remarkable happened. It worked, and it was bloody good to boot.

Unfortunately, this means I can’t be scathing and sarcastic – except about Microsoft which should include this feature by default, the big sillies - so I’m just going to point anybody who’s interested towards the plugin at OfficeTab.

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Tabbed documents: how to make Office 2010 great

Friday, November 20th, 2009

Online-overlord Barry Collins has been fiddling with the Office 2010 beta for the last couple of days, and his reaction to it has been terrifying. Barry greets technology in only two states: the apoplectic fury of a man for whom every hollow promise is the death knell of another dream, and the rapture of somebody who’s just discovered that Nirvana’s a theme park with a £35 admission price.

What terrifies me is that he’s greeted Office 2010 with an almighty ‘meh’. There’s been bafflement and a few half-hearted jokes, but not once has the office fallen still at the ominous ticking of the Barry bomb which sits at the core of his being.

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Could people learn to love Microsoft once more?

Monday, September 14th, 2009

It wasn’t so long ago that Microsoft was generally considered a dirty word. Dare defend the company and the outpouring of scorn was enough to leave you wondering whose puppy you’d just shot.

To be fair, the software giant hadn’t done itself many favours. Its response to antitrust investigations stopped marginally short of certifiable paranoia, while Vista turned out to have all the charm of a broken bottle being waved at a bar fight. Office 2007 was brilliant, but conspicuously so among a product list that had come to represent the best cure for insomnia.

Microsoft seemed adrift, bereft of ideas or inspiration as its empire was systematically hacked to bits by Google, Apple and Mozilla. And yet, two years later and the company is once again the toast of the tech press. Windows 7 is good, but one product’s not enough to rescue an enormous company’s reputation. What on earth has happened? Is it really okay to like Microsoft again? (more…)

Xperia Pureness: beautifully shallow

Friday, September 4th, 2009

It’s lovely watching a company go completely mad. Case in point, Sony Ericsson which has just revealed the world’s first smartphone with a transparent screen.

Dubbed the Xperia Pureness, it’s certainly a good looking handset though quite whether it justifies the following piece of PR fluff is a matter of debate.

“The Xperia Pureness approaches the mobile phone as a work of art rather than technology. The company’s designers aimed to sculpt an object of design that reflected the purity of water and a sense of calmness when not in use.”

Eh? What’s utterly brilliant is that it’s quite literally all style and no substance, with Sony Ericsson unleashing a barrage of stylish press shots backed by absolutely no technical details whatsoever.

The company is promising to reveal more details closer to the November 2009 release date. Until then, I suggest you peruse the following pictures and bask in the phone’s reflected glory, following the secret story contained within.

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Hands on: Sony’s superb Reader Touch

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

“I want my books to be made of paper, to have a spine, and a cover. I like the feel of them in my hand”

This was the first comment I heard this morning when I returned to the office after visiting the British Library to play with Sony’s new Reader Touch. As an eBook advocate, I’ve been hearing this refrain ever since the original Sony PRS 505 dropped on my desk last year. People who like to read adore paperbacks. They’re cheap, perfect at what they do and are pleasingly tactile. We like how they feel, the way they smell; we like to run our hands over them in a book shop.

eBook readers have failed to convince because books don’t need upgrading. It’s brilliant that an eBook reader can hold 350 books, but the majority of people don’t carry around 350 books. The majority of people won’t read 350 books in their lifetime. If eBook readers are going to break out of their niche and really scar the public psyche they need to start offering useful features their paper brethren don’t. And with the curtain raised, let me usher the Sony Reader Touch to centre stage.

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Beck strokes The Velvet Underground

Friday, August 21st, 2009

I’m not writing a series of blog posts entitled “the best thing I stumbled across on the web this week”, but if I was, Beck’s Record Club, would be number four in the series.

As baffling as that opening paragraph may initially seem, it’s a mere tickle of oddness next to the backhanded slap that is Beck covering The Velvet Underground and posting the recordings on his website. They’re part of a larger experiment in which the restless musical waif works with a rotating group of musicians to “reinterpret” classic albums – beginning with The Velvet Underground and Nico. There’s two more planned for the series and if this is anything to go by, they’ll be notable for their kamikaze-like courage and utter failure.

JUDGED! But not really, because Beck has failed at an impossible task – he was trying to erect a monument of mist – which makes the fact he tried in the first place all the more impressive. At the core of this problem is the fact that Lou Reed (lead singer of the Velvet Underground) lived the sort of life that made angels fall from the sky in envy and dread.

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The Twitter freak show

Monday, August 17th, 2009

PC Pro’s online overlord Barry Collins is, as we speak, trying to be on holiday. This is something he’s not very good at, as evidenced by the fact that 12 minutes after the official start of him not being here, he emailed me about being here. The worst part of this is that he’s actually getting better.

However, in an attempt to prove that he really was going on holiday and wouldn’t be doing any of the things he’s so obviously doing, Barry handed over the keys to PC Pro’s beloved Twitter account, which he nourishes with the sort of obsessive care that even Gollum would consider a little excessive.

Before he “left” Barry instructed me to install Tweetdeck – which is essentially a window wiper allowing you to make sense of Twitter’s endless word rain. He couldn’t have done me any more damage if he’d stirred heroin into my tea. Once installed, Tweetdeck demands all of your attention and I’ve actually developed a tweet twitch from constantly flicking my glance to my second monitor looking for updates. What’s worse is that most of what flashes on my screen I don’t care about, and would live happily without ever having read.

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