An additional bonus is a distinct lack of stylistic vulgarity – even a full-on Fogey could wear these in public and not look like an arse, which is more than can be said for most headphones.
A few things that have been going on lately. There’s more, obviously, but who has the time?
A ‘best in show selection’ from CES 2013 in Las Vegas. Was it worth travelling 5235 miles for this lot?
Facebook. Cutlery. Specs. Ad-buster. Suicide. Another week in the technosphere.
Links to articles we’ve read recently, two from the Independent on Saturday 19th January and two from the New York Times on Sunday 13th January. All are worth a look.
Some incoherent waffle gleaned from a few hours at CES in Las Vegas before TF succumbed to man flu and spent the rest of the week in bed. We know how to suffer.
The death of the high street. It’s a national tragedy. Is it bollocks. Most shops are shite, staffed by oafs, selling crap. If they weren’t, punters would prise themselves away from their smartphones and tablets and walk through the doors (helpfully wedged wide open even in the coldest weather and fuck the environment).
Time Out used to be a luscious repository of all the wonderful shit that goes on every week in London. Now it’s barely fit to wipe your bum on and the content would shame a bunch of student amateurs. Digital. Progress? My arse.
Somehow being tracked online by cookies seems less ridiculous than being tracked by biscuits. Be thankful the term was coined by an American.
Until now Tech Fogey has been slightly underwhelmed by The Cloud. Small back-up storage devices that can hold many thousands of gigabytes of data are pretty cheap but they’re only really usable with a housebound computer. It’s true there are pocket-sized, plug-and-play hard-drives but it’s still another hunk of junk to lug around.
No one forces anyone to buy a book, whether it’s digitally rendered or paper and print. If Apple had set their prices too high, a lack of sales would have suggested their error. And there are always alternatives for the consumer such as libraries and those dusty repositories known as ‘book shops’
This isn’t so much built in obsolescence we’re talking about here, rather a deliberate and unnecessary removal of functionality from an otherwise perfectly serviceable device. That we paid good money for. And is now worthless, in every sense.
This bit of kit is integrated into a skull cap (a headband version is in the works) and displays the force sustained by head impacts on an LED display that sits at the back of the neck.
That’s what happens when you eavesdrop on conversations about subjects of which you know nothing. You find that the person upon whose eaves you were dropping doesn’t know anything either.
At 4pm the seething hordes of the geek media were let in to swarm around buffet tables groaning with free food and bars serving equally free booze. Somewhere amidst the platters of shrimp and beef skewers there were selected brands showing their products at very many small stands.
CES is now a curious circus, notable as much for some of the biggest names in tech that choose to be absent: Apple, Google, Amazon.
Users of social networks reveal far more about themselves than they should or that they are aware of and that in doing so they put themselves where the law, which has been tortoise-slow to try and get to grips with the new electronic age, cannot help them.
There is plenty written about the digital world that is mildly diverting, in a ‘what will they think of next?’ kind of way, while being unlikely to impinge on the lives of thee and me. Such is Bitcoin.
The HP website assures us that Windows 7 is pre-loaded with the driver that will make it and the 7690 sing sweet printerly music together. They are lying. And that lie is compounded by the fact that the driver we need cannot be downloaded from the HP website.
If you don’t like what’s being done with your online burblings, go offline, go analogue. Or just shut up.
Links to articles we’ve read recently, two from the Independent on Saturday 19th January and two from the New York Times on Sunday 13th January. All are worth a look.
Here’s a fine feature by Sam Anderson from the New York Times Magazine about mindless video games. The sort of things (Angry Birds) that have replaced the fag-break in the nation’s use of snippets of down time. This Fogey has spent an inordinate amount of time on Angry Birds and so far no 3-star level [...]
Jeffrey Steingarten is food critic for US Vogue. His writing is wonderful and, since he’s waxed lyrical often about kitchen gadgets and food and cooking technology, he’s a perfect fit for Tech Fogey.
David Pogue is a very funny man who knows what he’s talking about. A rare bird indeed.
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