Category: Technology
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Online Privacy
A couple of weeks ago, I started playing with Geode – a Firefox plugin that allows your browser to use geolocation technology to determine whereabouts you are. When you reach a Geode compatable site, a bar at the top of the browser asks you how much information you want to pass to the requesting site…
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Sorting Out Your Music
It’s come to my attention that over the last couple of years, although I still buy and listen to a lot of music, too much of it is through my iPod. Although I’ve got some half-decent Sennheiser earphones (i.e. not the ones that came with the device which are embarrassingly bad), that’s not really the…
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Cliq
UBC today announced that it was closing down the phone service Cliq while it continues to look towards “connected” radios which will become available later in the year for its future business model. Cliq worked by installing a JAVA app on your mobile that used the data network. The service monitored the output of 28…
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Something to Watch on iTunes
If you were a UK resident and rushed out and bought an Apple TV device after they were announced in autumn 2006, you’d have been sorely disappointed when you got home and plugged it in. Certainly you could listen to you iTunes library through your TV, as well as any video podcasts you subscribed to.…
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Net Neutrality
There’s been an awful lot of fuss in the last few weeks about “net neutrality” in the UK. The supposed reason for this is the immediate success of the BBC iPlayer which is eating up bandwidth like it’s going out of fashion. As the iPlayer arrives on the Nintendo Wii, the BBC announces that 42…
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HD on Freeview
So today, Ofcom has announced that it’s planning a reorganisation of Freeview to allow one of the current six multiplexes to be made available for high definition services. New Freeview boxes will come onstream, and improved compression rates will to allow these new services to squeeze into the space. At the same time services currently…
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iGizmo
Dennis Publishing has just started “the WORLD’S FIRST fully interactive digital magazine dedicated to bringing you the very latest and best in consumer technology.” The second issue is out this week. It’s called iGIZMO, and it’s dreadful. Dennis has previously had success with a magazine called Monkey which is a similarly interactive title aimed at…
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Making Your Stuff iPhone Compatable
In the past I’ve had a bit of a go at websites rushing to produce iPhone friendly versions of themselves. This might be in some part because I’m not an Apple evangelist like so many tech people (I have an iPod, but that’s it, and I think iTunes is a truly awful piece of bloatware).…
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When is Free Really Free?
In some respects, this is a continuation of my last entry about Qtrax. While the final position of Qtrax has yet to be established, it’s interesting to look at another high profile example that got plenty of coverage last year – Nokia’s Comes With Music package. As you may or may not recall, Nokia announced…
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Newsworthiness of Product Launches
Rory Cellan-Jones has a pretty spot-on analysis of a certain company’s new product announcement yesterday. The argument put to him is that a new model of Ford Focus probably affects more people. I’m not sure that in hard numbers it does, but the point is well made. Now if Bic launched a new version of…
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Proposed Changes to UK Copyright
This is pretty important. Back in 2006, Andrew Gowers published his review of intellectual property in the UK. It was a pretty intelligent look at the state of play in this country, although not everyone was happy with what he was recommending. Anyway, a year has passed and now intellectual property minister Lord Triesman has…
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Quality
A recent entry on Boing Boing pointed to an article in Rolling Stone magazine which highlighted the fact that producers mix tracks so that they sound good when they’re ripped to an mp3 player, at the same time, removing the subtleties that a wider dynamic range allows. Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow comments “…it seems to…