Race Online 2012

Dec 13, 2011 No Comments by

Chances are if you’re one of the digitally dispossessed the government believes should be helped to get online, you won’t be reading this.  But you might know someone who’s an Internet Luddite, a Web refusenik or even a Tech Fogey.  Your mission, therefore, is to help Martha Lane Fox, Britain’s digital super-champ get everyone hooked up and browsing, surfing, emailing, Tweeting, liking, Digg-ing, Flickr-ing and all that guff.  The digital universe is desperate to lure fresh meat into its clutches and turn their analogue brains into binary mush.  Oops, went off-message there.  What we really mean is that the wonders of the web are out there and waiting to be discovered and for anyone in the UK to not be able to avail themselves of said wonders is just terrible.  Really bad.  Not good at all.

One possible downside to becoming a ‘digital champion’, whereby you pledge to give an hour of your time to help someone get online, is that by doing so ‘you agree to receiving information, ideas and offers from the digital champion network’ which makes it all sound less like a selfless, philanthropic venture and more like a brazen attempt to bombard good-natured digital Samaritans with direct-marketing crap.

Tech Fogey would be glad to help recruit more cyber-serfs but it’s not going to do so if the price is an inbox overflowing with tripe.

But have a look at the site anyway.  It’s here: http://raceonline2012.org/about-us

Or have a gander at Martha Lane Fox’s site: http://www.marthalanefox.com/

COMMENT

News

The $800 Million ebook

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’

Et tu, Apple?

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.

Reebok Checklight

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.

Panasonic

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.

CES Unveiled

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. Oh Yes.

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.

I Know Who You Are…

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.

Bitcoin

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.

PRINTER WOE (continued)

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.

Here’s Looking At You

If you don’t like what’s being done with your online burblings, go offline, go analogue. Or just shut up.

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Pogue Knows

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Monday Mash-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.

Just One More Game … Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’

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