Convicted Bee Gees singer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi has died of cancer, aged 60. Many people, including several victims of Saturday Night Fever, questioned the extent of his involvement with the Bee Gees. However, the US and UK governments last night reaffirmed their belief that he was indeed guilty of the atrocities with which he was charged. […]

So Egg got taken over by Barclaycard. I’m not entirely happy about that, but it’s why I ended up having to go through enrolment for online account management with Barclaycard. Let’s see what passwords, etc, they ask for: 1. The first thing Barclaycard wants is a “memorable word, for instance your favourite colour or the place you […]

Just kept an Ammyy scammer[*] on the phone for 30 mins. It was my civic duty. His faltering English meant most of my usual time-wasting techniques wouldn’t work. Here’s what I did in case you’ve got one on the phone right now and want some ideas (please add more in the comments): Keep thanking him […]

 [A slightly edited version of this article has now been published on the satirical news blog The Oracle Speaks] Despite disbelief from people with a so-called ‘education’, it turns out that the majority of the UK population really do think that ranking things in numerical order is too complicated. “Millions of people are apparently unable […]

I have a theory. Everyone who uploads photos to instagram with some sort of special effect* should be tied to a chair in front of a 10 foot searingly bright screen showing their original photo while a voice speaks over a large PA saying “the photo you took was crap, why do you think making […]

A study released today shows that news anchors are quite capable of holding appallingly misguided right-wing opinions, without any interference from Rupert Murdoch at all. The survey shows that the media giant, who owns a large but not overwhelming number of newspaper titles and TV stations, hasn’t made people buy the Daily Mail, join the […]

This is very childish. I apologise in advance. Someone on twitter the other day asked “do sex workers have standards?” (in relation to unattractive clients). So I thought a trawl of the ISO[*] site would be in order, to see if they did. And I came across these pages, which I assume are tailor made […]

Watershed’s internet kiosks have 5 special keys at the bottom: www. | .com | .co.uk | :-( | :-). In earlier versions of the keyboards, these keys were actually just F1-F5 (which the computer then had to map to the right text), but it seems the later keyboards are programmed to tell the computer that […]

So here’s an odd thing. On Monday, I cycled home as normal, and coming round the corner onto our road I saw our car parked outside our house (about 20m away). Immediately I thought “I’d better check if that’s locked.” Initially I had no idea where that thought came from. Now, looking back at it, […]

Well, this started out as an iPhone blog, so I’d best write up a few bits & bobs on the iPhone 4. I reserved an iPhone at the Cabot Circus Apple store, but since there were likely to be queues all day (even to pick up reserved ones) I got in the queue at around […]