Tech & Geekery

This online thing’s a bit … well …

August 19, 2010

I decided to take advantage of my local GP surgery offer to sign up for online booking of appointments. Step 1 struck me as a little odd: I had to go in to the practice and fill in a paper form. Oh, well, I reasoned. They wanted a real signature. The form duly filled in, [...]

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Lightroom, Aperture and the fanboy mentality

August 16, 2010

Following his post of feature requests for Lightroom, Scott Kelby – a Mac user and photographer who is also a renowned Photoshop guru and author – got deluged by comments from Apple fanboys saying he should simply switch to Aperture. Today he responds with a very clear post emphasising that Lightroom is the professionals’ choice, [...]

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We have the technology – but do we use it?

June 17, 2010

Periodically I find myself moaning about many of the various ways in which people use their PCs (include Macs in that as a generic term). It’s often the typical “the PC is not a typewriter” type of moan, as I wrestle texts full of double spaces between sentences, multiple line breaks or paragraph returns into [...]

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Was this an attempted hack?

June 4, 2010

Longer term readers will remember that not long after this blog got started it got hacked. I’m wondering if someone tried again this week. I had a very odd set of stats when in the space of a couple of hours a very high proportion of visits were registered, while at the same time no [...]

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Defining the Apple fanboy

June 1, 2010

It doesn’t take long to get at least one response from someone to any post that is perceived as “knocking Apple” – even if all that post does is praise some Windows feature. I note that in (a generally fairly-biased-but-trying-ever-so-hard-to-be-a-bit-more-even-handed) discussion the other day Apple fan site (and a very helpful one that anyone wanting [...]

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Am I getting jaded with OS X?

June 1, 2010

The other day I had to setup a laptop for someone. I’ve never used Windows 7, and yet setting this up was a) straightforward and b) full of those “how do I do that, oh cool” moments I had moving from Windows XP to OS X and c) able to give me little pleasurable shivers [...]

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An iPad headline you won’t be reading

May 28, 2010

Hundreds of people queued yesterday in the UK to buy a mobile phone that won’t make calls and is too large to put in your pocket. The BBC story is a piece of ridiculous puffery for a product which probably will need at least one generation to become properly useful, and even then will be [...]

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The worst virus in the world: you know when you’ve been panicked

April 22, 2010

What is it about the word “virus” that drives all common sense out of people’s heads? Today I received yet another of those panicky “send this to everyone you know” emails. But shouldn’t the opening line have alerted everyone just as much as the “I’m a poor Nigerian widow” one does? Dave’s brother is a [...]

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My top five apps – what would you recommend that’s different?

February 28, 2010

I find that some apps move in and out of my top five list while others are very long term residents. My top two are long term residents, accompanying me from Windows days into my Mac incarnation. Two are Mac only, and have been on my list from soon after switching. A fifth is one [...]

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Birthdays and the passage of net time

February 16, 2010

There are some birthdays in the software world: YouTube is five – well sort of, since that’s when the domain was registered. The first video wasn’t uploaded for a couple more months. Photoshop is 20 – that’s some going, and that anniversary refers to the release. The thing is, that’s not a long time, yet [...]

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