While some tech is very fine, some is utter shite. More often these days we find ourselves thinking, ‘What’s the f***ing point of that?’ rather than, ‘Isn’t that wonderful.’
This Fogey is at that life stage where incidental pleasures assume ever greater significance, especially if they can be enjoyed privately and often. Which is where a Washlet comes into its own.
Now imagine a 50-inch iPad with gesture and voice recognition that both work beautifully. Being Apple, it will look stunning. Its operating system will initiate a rustling deep in your nethers and there will be so much to watch that you actually want to watch, you will permanently confine to couch and die thereon, joyfully, of malnutrition. No one will care what the iTV costs; everyone will want one.
Tech Fogey isn’t a news site. We could pretend to be. God knows there’s enough mouthpieces out there convinced they have something really important to say. Right now, all news on whichever medium – TV, radio, online, print – is an aggregation of a constant avalanche from more sources – both on and off-line – than a sane person could count.
TF has been a bit quiet in the ‘pouring lukewarm scorn on tech innovation’ stakes. Stuff’s been happening but stuff’s always happening. We just developed soul-sapping ennui when confronted with the current crop of stuff.
Pay up and pay for the game. If you want to watch the best TV and listen to music you actually enjoy it’s going to cost. But how much is too much?
A ‘best in show selection’ from CES 2013 in Las Vegas. Was it worth travelling 5235 miles for this lot?
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).
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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