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Saving iTunes, Our Bloated, Essential Companion
iTunes is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to iTunes.
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Virgin’s 10 Reasons That Wind Me Up
I got a letter addressed to “The Occupier” from Virgin Media this morning. It’s the latest in many advertising missives that I’m convinced I’m only sent because someone has surveyed the street and spied my Sky minidish attached to my back wall. So this one I got this morning has listed ten reasons to switch…
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Getting the UK Keyboard Layout Right in Mac OS X Snow Leopard
For the last couple of years, I’ve fallen more and more back in love with Macs. One of their foibles is that Apple have decided the standard British English, or UK, keyboard layout should not match that of every other computer manufacturer on the planet. Various characters are just in the wrong place, such as…
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Woss All the Fuss About?
Is it just me, or has this furore over Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross prank calling Andrew Sachs’ answerphone on a radio show been blown out of all proportion? Both men involved have apologised to Sachs, and that should be the end of it. Instead, they are now suspended from their BBC broadcasts, and Sachs’…
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Strange iTunes Censorship
I was flicking through the iTunes Store this morning and noticed something odd … some words in reviews and track titles had asterisks in them as though they were swear words (e.g. ‘b*ll*cks’). But they didn’t appear to be swear words. iTunes uses allmusic for the bulk of their album and single reviews, so luckily…
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Cabs are Awesome, Unless They’re Not
Jono’s post about taxi cabs and close calls with death reminded me of how little hassle I’ve usually had with cab drivers. I usually chat away to cabbies, and tip pretty generously on most occasions, but one guy in San Francisco took the biscuit, and didn’t get tipped. Or chatted to, as I was giving…
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IMAX Disappointment
So two things i’ve been looking forward to for a long time are going to see The Dark Knight and finally getting to see a movie at the IMAX cinema out at the Glasgow Science Centre. It’s a crying shame that the actual experience of going to watch the movie didn’t match up to the…
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Defective in the Head
As someone said on IRC this morning: “the FSF appear to have come up with the perfect plan for how to look like a bunch of annoying, smart-arse tossers“. Has the Free Software Foundation gone nuts? Update 13:30: I don’t seem to be alone on this: popey, mgdm, ZDNet, Slashdot. I’ve been saying for a…
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My Dinky Dell Latitude: A Memorial
I dropped my dinky Dell Latitude X300 a couple of weeks ago. The whole thing just locked up hard, and wouldn’t recover from a reboot. I ended up claiming for it on my home insurance. The insurance folks got back to me and said it was unrepairable, and they’ve offered me £400 in vouchers for…