Recently I was in Seoul in the middle of three weeks of travel and my laptop died on me. Since I had some work that needed doing fairly urgently I took myself over to Yongsan Electronics Market and got myself a cheap replacement to tide myself over. What I ended up with was an Acer Aspire […]
Internet of Things seems to be trendy these days, people like the shiny apps for controlling things and typically there are claims that the devices will perform better than their predecessors by offloading things to the cloud – but this makes some people worry that there are potential security issues and it’s not always clear that […]
Recently I’ve been using ebook readers rather a lot – mostly the Kindle DX, though I have given iBooks a spin as well. Obviously, as with MP3 players, the main win they offer is the ability to easily carry about an entire library without the inconvenience of the physical media. I’ve been reading an awful […]
I’ve had the opportunity to use a bunch of different smartphone OSs for extended periods recently. They’ve all taken interestingly different tacks on some of the key stuff, normally all within the bounds of reasonable implementation decisions but with very different results and useful to different people. One of the most interesting decisions I’ve noticed […]
I recently finished David Simon and Ed Burns’ book The Corner, a piece of extended reporting about life around a Baltimore drug corner. There’s one thing about the way they write it which really gets me: every so often they’ll have a section explaining the absurdity of the situation they’ve been talking about, how futile […]
The Mac OS X version of Twitteriffic has a shareware style registration model: the idea is that if you like the software you’re supposed to register it. Apparently one of the benefits you get from this is that when you start the registered version up it will, instead of prompting you to click through a […]
One of my recent DVD acquisitions was Festen, the first of the Dogma 95 films. In spite of not having seen the film since it came out more than a decade ago (though I did re-watch it once then after first seeing it at the EIFF) it’s been one of the films I think back […]
It’s been so long since the film festival that I keep on forgetting half the good films I saw there when talking to people about it, so for the record here’s a brief list of my personal highlights: Encounters at the End of the World: Werner Hertzog goes to Antarctica, making a film more about […]
I used to read a moderate amount of fantasy but apart from this series I’ve mostly drifted away from it, mainly due to an over-familiarity with genre standards and the fact that these are exacerbated by one of the standards being to present everything in the form of lengthy, multi-novel serieses. Worse, the individual novels […]
Paradoxical Undressing is a mostly spoken word show by Throwing Muses/50 Foot Wave front woman Kristin Hersh. A series of ten minute autobiographical fragments covering the time up until about the first Throwing Muses album read over guitar riffs, interspersed with excerpts from songs (mostly hers but a couple of covers). The texts have much […]