Sir Terry Pratchett
I was going to continue my series of book posts with a review of the last book we read for bookgroup, but then I heard the news that Sir Terry Pratchett had died and decided…
Competition hurts us
Competition is good for the consumer, right? That’s the idea. Unfortunately that’s increasingly not the case in the computer world, where the big companies are competing to tie us in completely to their products. The…
Book Review – The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Let’s be clear here. This is not science fiction. The author says so. It’s “speculative fiction”, positing an alternative future to explore ideas about our world as it is now. Science fiction, according to Atwood,…
Book Review – The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith
As the entire world knows by now, Robert Galbraith is actually a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books. I was pleased when this one came up for the book group, as…
Book Review – The Cyberiad
The second in my occasional series of brief book reviews is The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem. I skipped a month, so Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo went both unread and unreviewed. The Cyberiad centres around two robotic…
OSX Yosemite
The new version of OSX, Yosemite, is out now and frankly I’m not overly impressed, at least as far as the design is concerned. Everything has been simplified and I just think it looks… simple….
Book Review – Perdido Street Station
In addition to photography, web development and miscellaneous geekery, I’m a member of a bookgroup. We meet once a month to discuss books chosen originally from the 2003 BBC Big Read top 100 and now…
Impulse buying is harder than ever
I’m a bit of a gadget geek and impulse buying is one of my weaknesses. The thing I’ve noticed lately is that it’s harder than ever. Oh, it’s simplicity itself to order stuff online but…
Is Apple playing catchup?
The new iPhone 6 models are now out and there seems to be a feeling amongst Android users that Apple is playing catch up. In some ways they’re not even matching what Android had a…
So, why not iOS?
Last time I wrote about the shortcomings of Android’s permission system and how iOS sandboxing is inherently more secure. So why not use iOS? What does Android have that iOS doesn’t? The first answer is…