Highlights
Count Binface and electoral theatre
Don’t be a costumed loon — It’s trivially easy to stand for Parliament in the UK. Any loon can do so. You need ten electors to nominate you and £500 for a deposit – and it’s actually been getting easier. The deposit was introduced in 1918 (£150 – quite a lot of money then). Before […]
I hate this
But does it matter? — I don’t usually say that sort of thing here. I try to be more measured, less personal. I’m talking about the police face recognition vans obviously. This might not surprise you: I mean that I don’t like them. I’m an old git after all, a man who’s written here before […]
Where is my patriotism?
Come, love of country, fill my heart… — I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured the place I live and not disgraced it or undermined it (I support England and GB in sporting events – I fly a little flag […]
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Go on. Buy my old stuff
You’ll be wanting one of these – a bargain-priced super-compact, Nikon APS SLR. Ideal Xmas gift. I still think APS (Advanced Photo System) is pretty neat and this camera is…
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Archiving Al-Qaeda
Speaking of hijacking license payer-funded audio, I learnt a huge amount from this 13 minute, middle-of-the-night gem at the weekend. It’s one of the World Service’s ‘Instant Guides‘. This one’s…
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Hijacking license payer-funded audio
Audio Hijack Pro is a nicely put-together OS X app for capturing sound from any application, including stuff you might not strictly be allowed to record, like the BBC’s RealMedia…
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Adbusting or whingeing? You decide
Consumer activism is a good thing (don’t get me wrong), especially when it takes a street-wise, media hacking, spray-paint-and-stencil kind of approach, but – really – this is just whingeing…
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A changing city
If it weren’t a really crass thing to do I think I’d probably say that Walter Benjamin would have loved this mournful photo-record of change in the built fabric of…
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It’ll all end in tiers
Higher education in Britain is in a rut. The post war revolution in access has left behind an effective but dreary monoculture. The end result of 50 years of hopeful…
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Fast track elf
At the weekend – while you were translating Artaud or arranging a Bartok quartet for the tuba or whatever you do with your free time – we went to see…
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More about Creo’s Tokens
I’ve been thinking about Creo’s interesting attempt to improve on P2P file distribution – a product called Tokens (I blogged it here the other day). If you want to try…
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Looks like a bow-tie to me, mate
Yeah. Definitely a bow-tie. Click the small image for a forensic enlargement.
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Bush = Bartlet?
Neo-con doctrine and tough liberalism collided in George Bush’s positively Bartlet-esque Banqueting House speech last week. Bush said: “we cannot turn a blind eye to oppression just because the oppression…
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Solution seeks problem, finds problem…
Things change at different rates. Bandwidth, for instance, is all over the place. At the net’s core – in the trenches between ISPs and data centres – aggregate bandwidth in…