Indigo Jo Blogs

Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective

Category: Tech

Linux / Mac

And I’m a Penguin (but my Mac’s well weapon)

This Monday Charlie Brooker (Guardian columnist of Nathan Barley and TVGoHome fame) told the world why he hates Macs in the most-read page on Comment Is Free this week. He not only hates Macs, but also people who use them and “even … people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did”. Thabet @ Eteraz agrees with him. Brooker reckons that “Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui” and that the “I’m a PC/Mac” adverts, which in the UK feature a comedy duo called Mitchell and Webb, whom I’ve never watched, are “devastatingly accurate” for the wrong reasons.

Tech

Upgrade rage

Upgrade Rage (from today's Guardian) Tim Dowling on the annoyances of Windows which manifest themselves as "upgrade rage, or Upgrage, the uncontrollable anger which occurs whenever a software upgrade deemed to be either essential...

Admin / Tech

Spammers: why the scumbags do it

Getting the blog spammers to hang up their affiliations (Guardian Unlimited Technology) An article from today’s Guardian Technology supplement, about the intricacies (as they seem to me) of affiliate schemes and how they help...

Tech

An offer I really could refuse

The other day, with some money my nan gave me, I went into Borders in Kingston to get some books. I hoped to take advantage of the "three for the price of two" offer...

Mac

Who’s photocopying who?

OSNews: Redmond, Start Your Photocopiers? OSNews regular Thom Holwerda on how Apple, who used the title above as a slogan when launching the current version of Mac OS X (Tiger) in 2005, has done...

Linux

LUGRadio Live 2006 report

Yesterday I went to the second LugRadio Live event in Wolverhampton, organised by the Wolverhampton Linux User Group who do a fornightly "podcast" in which they discuss the state of the scene and interview...

Tech

Bill Gates and his billions

The Independent's Extra section today published this article about Bill Gates' recent announcement that he is reducing his commitment to Microsoft to concentrate on his charity work. One sentence that stuck out was this:...

Linux / Mac

My Mac and Ubuntu

On Sunday evening I finally got round to ordering the new hard drive for my Mac (a 120Gb Seagate). It arrived on Tuesday morning by standard first-class post, which was unexpectedly early, though they...

Tech

Buying computer gear

Earlier this evening I ordered a new hard drive for my Mac, one which has approximately triple the storage space of the one in there at the moment (120 gigabytes instead of 40). The...

Linux / Mac

Why I will probably continue to buy Macs

OSNews recently published a really poorly argued piece by a former Mac enthusiast who subsequently became a Windows and then a Linux fan (Why I will probably never buy another Mac). It lasts for five pages, and in the first page he goes from becoming a Mac enthusiast while other office workers were being lumbered with PCs, through the whole history up to OS 8 and 9 and Windows 98: after that, he says, the quality of Mac hardware went down, the price stayed more or less the same, the operating system became vastly less reliable and fell behind Windows, and the community did not want to be told that their hardware was a poor choice compared to a PC running Windows.

Tech

Geeks and sexism

Guardian CIF has a blog piece by AlterNet contributor Deanna Zandt about how geek culture is still very male-centred – notably how a woman who made it onto the tech discussion website Slashdot found...

Linux

Why Windows Vista will suck

Via the Planet SUSE RSS feed, I got this article on Why Windows Vista will suck by Ziff Davis Internet senior editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. The piece is in reaction to an earlier article...

Tech

Windoze Vista to encrypt hard drives

The BBC reports about the UK government's concern that Windows Vista, the upcoming new version of Windows, will make it more difficult for the police to search people's computers for illegal materials. Guess why...

Tech

Unix, Windows and security

A guy called Thom Holwerda, who posts many of the entries at the tech blog OSNews, today posted a piece about the security merits of Unix-type operating systems (like Mac OS X and Linux)...

Mac

Microsoft kills off Mac Explorer

BBC NEWS | Technology | End nears for Mac version of IE And a good thing too in my opinion – it's easily the worst browser for the Mac and cannot even display Hotmail...

Tech

Firefox 1.5 warning

Mozilla FireFox 1.5 has just been released, with a whole list of new features. Using it on my Mac it doesn't look any different, and they don't seem earth-shattering although they do include a...

Mac

How great Apple Stores are

For the year and a half I've been a Mac owner, my Mac's monitor has had niggling monitor problems – bits of colour in places they shouldn't be. This usually means a "halo" effect,...

Tech / Terrorism

Interview with UK cyber-crime minister

The most recent Guardian Online has an interview with Paul Goggins, the British Home Office minister concerned with internet crime, about recent Government proposals to police internet use by requiring service providers to keep...

Linux

SUSE Linux 10 is here

After I went to the London Linux World Expo a couple of weeks ago I ordered a copy of Novell's new SUSE Linux package, having missed the "product launch without a product" which was...

Tech

London Linux Expo

Yesterday I went to my second London Linux Expo at the Olympia in London. The show is an annual event held to promote Linux to the industry; there are stalls for a number of...