From Reg Hardware:

CEO Steve Jobs on Tuesday took the wraps off two Mac Minis based, respectively, on Intel Core Solo and Duo chips, said to be four times faster than their predecessors, plus a sound system that docks iPods and plays iTunes.

This is the first recent Apple product announcement I can think of that has been seriously unimpressive; I had a fortune-telling fish at Christmas that predicted Intel-based Mac Minis, while the iPod Hi-Fi has been done before by other manufacturers with less bulk and at a lower price (even fucking Bose charge $50 less for theirs).

And that’s it, other than some leather iPod cases (which cost ninety-nine fucking dollars).

The only thing remotely interesting about this little lot is that the Intel Minis now have Front Row so you can hook one up to your TV and use it to view video from over your network. For, um, many times the price of a hacked Xbox running XBMC.

Ho-hum.

PS. I wrote this post before the one that appears below but due to my inability to correctly click “Publish” instead of “Save” this one appeared second, just in case you thought I was being callous for posting this after stating I was going to go and listen to some Linda Smith MP3s. What can I say? I worry about things a lot.

From the BBC:

Comic Linda Smith, a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz, has died of cancer at the age of 48.

The writer and broadcaster was a staple of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and BBC Radio, whose listeners voted her “Wittiest Person” in 2002.

The BBC website also has an obituary and a transcript of Jeremy Hardy’s tribute as broadcast on Radio 4’s PM.

I’m really fucking upset about this; I always found that Linda’s presence on a programme was a guarantee that I’d enjoy it. I’m going to listen to my MP3s of A Brief History of Timewasting tonight; call me pathetic but I’ll probably cry.

This essay in yesterday’s Guardian starts off with the sentence “Does masturbation lead to suicide bombing?” and is worth reading for the sheer chutzpah of that alone. However, while an interesting piece, it doesn’t really go anywhere and seems to stop a couple of paragraphs too early; there’s no final summing-up that I was taught to include in my essays all through my education. But maybe “grown-up” essays don’t need them; I must admit to rarely reading the opinion pieces in the Guardian on a Saturday, but this one caught my eye with its phallic imagery of weaponry and enticing opening paragraph.

Meanwhile, a post over at Schadenfreude got me wondering about whether we need a rough unit for estimating time in the same way that the size of Wales is often used as a rough unit for estimating area; could we, perhaps, adopt the wank as a measurement of time? If ever I have to give a rough estimate of the time it took to do something, I usually arrive at a vague figure like “thirty-five, forty minutes” or whatever (for some reason I’m incapable of rounding to the nearest fifteen minutes like most normal people), but using a precise measurement in such an imprecise way feels wrong to me. Instead, maybe a wank could be the name given to roughly five minutes; therefore, it didn’t take me “thirty-five, forty minutes” to drive across town the other day, but “seven or eight wanks” (or maybe “seven or eight knuckles” in polite company).

The more I think about it, the more it appeals to me; and the more it appeals to me, the more I want to start using it to see if others will follow my lead. That’s why, apropos of nothing, I feel I should tell you that it took two or three wanks to write this blog entry.

I only masturbated the once, though.

Reading Kieron Gillen’s post on Kenickie got me thinking about how much I used to love them and what they used to mean to me.

It started back in the summer of 1997: I’d finished my A-Levels, had a place at a university in Manchester and a whole summer ahead of me to watch videos, listen to CDs and play arcade games via the magical “emulators” I’d just discovered. Using my then-girlfriend’s job at a local library to my advantage I hired out loads of films and CDs for free, but none made an impact on me like At the Club did.
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Break Your Heart, Break Your Face

Ricky Gervais is going to be charging for the second series of his podcast, having previously sold advertising space (and presumably found it relatively unprofitable).

It’ll be US$6.95 for “at least four” episodes, which equates to roughly the pound per download he’s previously joked about charging.

That joke doesn’t seem quite as funny now.

(With credit to Emergency Lalla Ward Ten for the initial info about the podcasts and Neil for the Channel 4 Sales link, both posted at Cook’d and Bomb’d)

Dome-headed arts critic Mark Lawson penned a piece on the increasing number of DVDs given away free with British newspapers in Friday’s Guardian:

[T]he DVD of Donnie Darko […] is currently on sale from online stores for as little as 50p. Yet, in 48 hours’ time, the expectation is that one newspaper’s circulation will shoot up as an extra 200,000 to 250,000 people pay £1.80 to get the film for “free”.

[…]

The Big Sleep (£1.30 “free” with the Mail on Sunday) can be picked up on the internet for £1.47. Take the Money and Run (£1.10 from those nice people at the Times) is yours at your keyboard for 99p.

Now, call me a cynic but I think Mr Lawson has exercised a little journalistic licence here; the cheapest I could find Donnie Darko (director’s cut), The Big Sleep and Take the Money and Run were £5.99 (from BlahDVD), £3.97 (from Amazon excluding shipping) and £8.99 (from PowerPlayDirect, although the R1 edition can be had from DVD Pacific for ~£7 delivered).
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Journalist in Dirt-Cheap DVD Shocker

There’s a terrible cold going round our office at the moment; it’s been hovering over me like a dismal cloud all week but I dutifuly dragged myself into work each day (I’m the model employee in that respect; I very rarely take sick leave and quite often don’t use up my annual leave allocation each year). However, the cloud descended this morning and I finally succumbed, so after a quick call to the office I decided to spend a day as I imagine a Problogger would, just to see how the other half live (although I suppose it’s really the other 20% if you subscribe to the Long Tail theory).

But first things first; I boiled up a Lemsip and made myself a bowl of oats for breakfast, before settling down in front of my PC to scour Bloglines for interesting things to post about.

I pretty much failed, to be honest; one solitary post was all I could muster, and that includes an attempt at writing something in the afternoon as well. That’s no way to make a living, surely! Only one post a day? I’d be laughed out of the Probloggers Fellowship quicker than you can say… well, you see, there’s another thing; if I was ready for Major League Blogging I could’ve come up with something witty and apposite, but I couldn’t. It doesn’t look like I’ll be creeping onto the A-list just yet…

So, what did I learn about the Problogger life today? Well, if my experience is anything to go by:

• Probloggers don’t shower before 12pm.
• Probloggers subsist on a diet of cheese toasties and baked potatoes, with the occasional square broken off the big bar of orange crisp chocolate they keep in the fridge.
• Probloggers are very good at finding displacement activities on which to concentrate instead of actually writing; I may not have written anything particularly interesting or incisive today but my hard disks are a lot tidier, my MAME collection has been audited to within an inch of its life and my DVDs-to-watch pile has shrunk a little more.
• Probloggers can spend all day indoors doing little of any real consequence and yet somehow not find the time to do any housework; but, more importantly than that, after a day spent doing nothing a Problogger can still come up with a ~400-word post about it.

Hmm, maybe I ought to have a proper go at this Problogging lark after all; just make sure you switch your pop-up blockers off over the next few days, otherwise I’ll never make any money. Many thanks!

Banana Woofwoof has written a beautiful piece on lost childhood over at Cook’d and Bomb’d spin-off Blog’d. I won’t quote any of it here, just read it for yourself and if you make it to the end without weeping like a big girl then you’re a stronger person than I.

It made me think about my own childhood though; I never really had “adventures” like BWW did, and although I used to do the usual playing things boys growing up in the 80s did (playing football and cricket, riding bikes around, that sort of thing) I never did anything that still sticks in my mind as a strong childhood memory. Even back then I was quite geeky, and my brother and I would spend hours playing on our old Sinclair Spectrum and Atari 2600 (we later got an Amiga A500, then an A1200 and a CD32 but I was well into my teens by then and computing had lost its gentle childhood innocence). Sometimes I would draw adverts for games that I’d made up in my head; they would invariably follow the template of the old Ocean adverts, consisting of an illustration (usually a childishly blocky tank or something) with a big logo at the top (the gloriously cack-handed DEATH SYNDROME was one particularly memorable title) and a row of “screenshots” along the bottom. I slavishly copied the ads I saw in magazines right down to the detail of listing prices for the various formats; the Spectrum versions were always £7.95 or £8.95, the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC versions would be £1-2 more and if you wanted it on disk it’d be another £5 on top. If I was feeling charitable I’d even make a BBC Micro version for the posh kids (and an Acorn Electron one for the posh kid wannabes).

I was never a particularly solitary child though; plenty of other kids at school had Spectrums so we would swap games with each other (often indulging in the illicit contraband of a C60 mixtape of your favourite games), go round to each other’s houses to play them or show off your latest acquisition, that sort of thing. “Social gaming” isn’t a particularly recent phenomenon as far as I’m concerned.

Luckily, if you were to draw a Venn diagram of “cool kids” and “nerdy kids” I somehow managed to place myself in the union of the two groups, meaning I was able to indulge my nerdish but never really suffered for it. Oh, no doubt both sets of peers mocked me behind my back (and it was definitely done to my face on multiple occasions) but adjusting my geekishness to fit the company I’m in is something I like to think I’ve done a reasonable job of since then.

So did I waste my childhood? If a good childhood is one full of specific memories then yes, I suppose I did; but if being happy is reason enough to think of your childhood as a good one then… well, it would be a “no” — and a most emphatic one at that.

Finally, I find out that I’m not the only one who isn’t particularly interested in the stock market:

I couldn’t give a monkey’s tart about stock fluctuations.

I tend to zone out when I start reading blog entries about the stock market; at last I know I’m not alone in this respect.

Also, Mr Haarball’s pioneering vision of Web3.0 greatly excites me, and I look forward to many innuendo-laden blog posts about checking out the “rounded corners” etc. etc.

While writing on the subject of blog karma, Phil Sim made the following confession:

I’m a shitty blogger. I’m really bad at responding to comments, hardly ever comment on other people’s blogs, don’t link enough, etc, etc.

Phil’s candour made me reflect on my own blogging behaviour; I often practice hit-and-run commenting on other blogs, where I forget to return to check for replies until I’m reminded by referer links in my site stats. Not that I comment on many other blogs; like Phil, I’m a shitty blogger in that respect.

Phil also said this:

[tossr] is worth visiting if for nothing other than the name.

I’d like to think I’m worth visiting for more than just the name but to be honest, I think he’s got a point. Still, I grant Phil the gift of +2 blog karma points for the linkage, as well as a reciprocal link from the 1,196,895th blog in the world. Watch that traffic come flooding in!