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:

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20 good and 20 bad things about Twitter

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

PC Pro’s great Twitter adventure is barely a fortnight old (sign up for our Twitter feed here) but already we’ve found a great number of things that both amaze and annoy us about the micro-blogging site.

Here, in no particular order, are things we like, and can’t stand, about Twitter. Ideas suggested by others on the PC Pro Twitter feed and elsewhere are duly credited in brackets.

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What’s the point of Twitter?

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

We’ll throw our hands up. We just didn’t get it. Until now, Twitter has been largely regarded in the PC Pro office as Facebook status updates, without the rest of Facebook.  Or as Charlie Brooker put it in The Guardian this week: “a monumentally pointless ‘social networking’ thingamajig that lets you type 140-word ponderings or questions to an audience of other timewasters.”

But a few things have helped sway our opinion on this seemingly unstoppable internet phenomenon. First, our sister site IT Pro’s excellent guide to Twitter for business, which opened our eyes to some of the advantages Twitter has over Facebook, not least it’s potential reach.

As one of my colleagues noted when we were talking about this yesterday, Twitter is, if nothing else, an almost unrivalled internet broadcasting platform. Barack Obama (or more likely his flunkies) can post a tweet about his latest initiative, and a quarter of a million people will be instantly updated. Stephen Fry can get trapped in a lift and hundreds of people are sending him suggestions of how to pass the time.

Twitter’s also become a breaking news service. From planes doing a belly flop on to the Hudson River to snow falling in Scarborough, the first many people learn of the latest news events is a Twitter update. I learn from none-other than Guardian columnist and PC Pro contributor Jack Schofield’s tweet today that Twitter is now in the UK’s top 100 most popular sites, for example.

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I missed the meetings…

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

Much as people may not believe me, us back-pages Beardies don’t get to see what’s in the rest of the mag until it hits our doormats. Really! It’s not just that we are halfway up a sheep, or Dibnahing about with our fleets of Crewe’s finest old english alloy: the way the mag comes together means that we have to deliver at a point when feedback is just too late, and certainly we can’t do cute things like comment on one another’s current columns, except during those odd periods when Honeyball and I start turning up like Lemmon & Matthau at Really Big Events.

So I’ve been noticing, like the rest of you, that the lining-up between contents in issues is getting more and more accurate. I was gobsmacked to find that the gnomes in the labs had gone Atom crazy, just as I was writing about what Atom is going to do to the marketplace in ‘09. So banish all thoughts of connivance from your minds. I don’t even have a poverty-model Eee to plaaay with…

(Oh, and any home proofreaders who snorted over the “quarter of a gigabyte” quantity on the last page of my column this month: it should say “quarter of a terabyte”).

Computeractive: an apology

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

Yesterday, we ran a blog post suggesting that Computeractive may have gleaned the inspiration for its latest cover from a recently published copy of PC Pro.

Make your own mind up from the picture below:

Last night we received an email from the group publisher of Computeractive, reminding us that “scanning our cover falls into copyright infringement”.

We would like to take this opportunity to apologise to the publisher of Computeractive. Copying content from a rival publisher is, of course, utterly reprehensible.

Computeractive flatters to deceive?

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

If you’re passing through a newsagents this week and get a sudden pang of deja vu when you see this:

(SADLY, WE’VE HAD TO REMOVE OUR IMAGE. CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT WHY)

Don’t worry. We’ve not gone mad and decided to reprint the same cover we had three months ago…

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and so to our colleagues at Computeractive, can we just say we’re very flattered indeed. And to Computeractive’s readers, can we suggest you save yourselves £1.59 and read our Double Your Broadband For Free feature here.

And if you’re curious to know what’s likely to be on the front cover of the next issue of Computeractive, here’s our prediction:

On sale at all good newsagents now.

About the authors

Sunday, May 18th, 2008

Find out more about the team bringing you the PC Pro blogs below:

BARRY COLLINS is the news, features and online editor of PC Pro, and only needs the reviews editor’s job to complete the PC Pro full house. He started his career on Pro in 1998, before embarking on a seven-year tour of duty on Fleet Street, and returning to the Pro fold in 2006. He is morbidly fascinated with making his broadband connection go faster, determined to find a Wi-Fi radio that he likes and most likely to be found uttering “what’s the point?” in the PC Pro office.

DARIEN GRAHAM-SMITH is PC Pro’s components editor, and one of the magazine’s most flagrant self-publicists. Besides PC components he is particularly interested in relationships between ordinary people and the world of technology, including interface design, marketing and issues arising from DRM. He is also PC Pro’s resident security expert and produces the weekly podcast.

CHRISTINE HORTON is editor of PC Pro’s sister title, Channel Pro, the one-stop shop for the UK’s IT channel community. As well as being an experienced editor of business-to-business titles, her proudest moment came when judging the Fish & Chip Shop of the Year (not quite as bizarre as it sounds – she was editor of a fast food trade magazine at the time). History, sadly, does not remember exactly which shop won her vote.

DAVEY WINDER has been PC Pro contributing editor since the very first issue, and along the way have won awards for writing in the magazine, such as Technology Journalist of the Year and IT Security Journalist of the Year. His new book, Being Virtual, is part auto-biography and part virtual world interview and analysis nerd-fest.

DAVID BAYON is PC Pro’s peripherals editor. He’d love to say, “ha ha, no, that doesn’t mean I’m constantly left on the sidelines”, but having spent his first two years down in the windowless PC Pro Labs he thinks the editor’s trying to tell him something. Now up in a real office, with real daylight and actual people to talk to, he spends his days chasing around after the latest monitors, printers and anything else that plugs into a PC. Yes, three years into the job and he’s the man in charge of mice!

DAVID FEARON is PC Pro’s deputy editor, having been writing about computers for over a decade. He dislikes gadgets for gadgets’ sake and sees PCs as tools, scowling at fetishistic people who say they love their Macs before ambling to the garage and gazing at his bike for twenty minutes. When people are over for barbecues he’ll only confess to interests in green computing, digital photography and processors. But secreted under the floorboards in the garden shed are a fascination with embedded computing systems, environmental sensing and datalogging.

JONATHAN BRAY is PC Pro’s reviews editor and is in overall charge of (almost) every review that flows through the magazine. Like Barry, he’s another returnee, having begun his career at the magazine back in 1996, taking an eight year break to work in ‘New Media’ (hey, remember those days?), then pounding the freelance treadmill. Has an unhealthy obsession with hi-fi, large unwieldy smartphones that need a suitcase full of batteries to run, and everything and anything GPS-related; he’s always getting lost, y’see.

KEVIN PARTNER is a contributing editor to PC Pro, writing a bi-monthly column on web applications. Day-to-day he’s a PHP/MySQL developer and Flash Programmer for NlightN Multimedia Ltd, a Milton Keynes-based internet development and e-learning company. He’s also a Google Qualified Advertising Professional and is fascinated by marketing in all its forms.

MATTHEW SPARKES is the staff writer on PC Pro, which means he gets to write news here, reviews there, features back over here again and even some columns, over there, back where he writes those reviews. Variety is the spice of life, and his job is particularly piquant. At its best he finds technology fascinating and exciting, and at its worst as a waste of time, money and cheap plastic. Prior to joining Pro he spent five years and many tens of thousands of pounds learning all about computers. What a terrible waste that turned out to be…

MIKE JENNINGS is a staff writer who recently graduated from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth with a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing, with a minor qualification in loafing around on the beach with a barbecue and plenty of alcohol. His interests stretch to plenty of technological wonders: high-performance PCs, interesting and innovative design and powerful, boundary-pushing components will always attract his attention. Then again, so will a healthy supply of cake or chocolate.

PAUL OCKENDEN wears several hats: He runs a successful new media agency called CST Group, he’s a director of the online survey company Demographix, and he’s also PC Pro’s mobile & wireless Real World columnist. His home and work lives tend to blend a bit because Paul is an avid collector of gadgets and ‘toys’, but also specialises in advising large companies how they can commercially exploit new technologies. For a gadget fan like Paul it’s a case of “living the dream”.

SASHA MULLER has spent the past seven years scything sideways through the ranks of Dennis Publishing’s glittering IT cognoscenti to finally arrive on PC Pro’s desks as laptops editor. Little flashing lights, touch sensitive buttons and evidence of fine, thoughtful design excite his finer instincts, while rubbish keyboards and hazy displays often court his journalistic wrath. Tipping the scales at 16 and a half stone, he is more desktop replacement than ultraportable, and to perform at his best, often requires a full eight-hour recharge.

SIMON JONES is an independent IT consultant specialising in office software, databases and user interface design. He writes the advanced office column for the Real Word Computing section of PC Pro, alternately praising and lambasting the makers of office software and helping users make the most of their investment. He lives up a mountain in West Wales with many animals, only some of whom are allowed in the house.

STEVE CASSIDY is PC Pro’s Networks Contributing Editor. He’s been doing this since before Oasis was either a drink or a rock band, and, like the other beardies, he does it alongside a day job: originally in a merchant bank, then inside a (financial!) modelling consultancy, and since 2000 as a freelancer. His clients include Patent attorneys, international property firms, two different 100,000-person Scottish banks in the same building, a wine importer, and some Brazilian drag queens in Covent Garden. But we don’t mention them.

STUART TURTON is PC Pro’s news reporter, a job which generally involves drinking lots of tea, heckling the world, hassling folk and bearing the brunt of Tim and Barry’s sudden, inexplicable editor-based fury. When not doing stints in the ER and rehab, he writes news for the web, and features and analysis for the magazine. Prior to being adopted and broken by Pro, he was wandering littlest hobo style across the world.

TIM DANTON is editor of PC Pro, having joined the magazine in 1999 when manufacturers were still getting excited about brave new shades of beige. He suffers from a never-quite-satiated thirst for new laptops and smartphones, and a minor obsession with Outlook. His name first appeared in a computer magazine in 1978, when pictured alongside the MSI 6800 System One – hand-built by his dad, who reviewed it in the UK’s then leading computer magazine (for the record, PC Pro is now the UK’s number one monthly).