Y'know things that are all the rage? Blogs. Everyone has one; or at least had one before Facebook, Twitter et al diluted the realtime pool.
Since I'm nu-old skool — and watching endless streams of people waste their lives telling each other about their shockingly tedious days makes me long for a 'Shut up' button — I figured why not make a blog? The main difference here compared with other people's blogs is that instead of being limited to one topic, you get a little slice of everything all mashed up. I'm too good to be tweeting.
Driverless cars: an accident waiting to happen
· 1680 words (munches about 8 mins)My distrust of code and programmers fuels scepticism over driverless vehicles. It’s up there with my hatred of automated checkouts. “Unexpected person in driving area”.
I lost my heart to Agnus, Denise & Paula
· 1458 words (kills about 7 mins)What has 16-bits, exuded cool and made PC owners cry? Why, the Amiga of course. After tiring of BASIC on the Vic20 and typing strings of hex from the back of magazines into the Spectrum, the Amiga was my new main squeeze.
Proof of irrelevance
· 959 words (vacuums up about 5 mins)You know those signs “You don’t have to be mad to work here… but it helps”? Those are in every room at the European Court of Justice. Nowhere else would someone float the idea of a ‘Right to be forgotten’ Internet law and have it taken seriously.
The smoking PC: lessons in dust and fans
· 839 words (sucks up about 4 mins)In twenty years of building and maintaining computer systems I’ve never seen this level of damage due to heat. The devil is in the dust, it seems.
Desperation in spam world
· 305 words (sucks up about 2 mins)It’s official, spam companies are getting desperate to attract people’s attention in order to sell products. Just look at these subject lines.
Mobile devices make it easy to hack passwords
[4 comments] · 949 words (wastes about 5 mins)If you use your mobile phone or tablet for any kind of Internet application that requires authentication — Facebook, Twitter or online banking, for example — you’re setting yourself up to get hacked.
The rusty nail of UI
· 909 words (laps up about 5 mins)Yet another case of bad user interface design was brought to my attention this evening. How is it possible to design a land line handset wrong? Easy if you’re BT.
Map musings
[1 comment] · 656 words (devours about 3 mins)My old map book is falling to bits, but I have a suspicion I soon won’t be able to buy a replacement. No, I don’t have sat-nav. There’s a jolly good reason for that.