Tag: Gary Cutlack
eBay Nutcase of the Week: BT engineer given nine-month sentence for selling stolen equipment
Poor old Qamar Masood-Mirza was said to have been running an “unsophisticated” operation, in which he nicked equipment he was supposed to be installing in people’s homes in order to sell it on eBay.
The BT engineer made himself a £3k profit flogging stuff he’d nicked from his employers – money he’s been ordered to repay in return for his nine-month prison sentence for theft being suspended. BT colleagues suspected him of selling the “internet connection equipment” and looked for it on eBay – they found it and tracked Qamar down from his eBay ID, which he’d rather amateurishly registered using his real details…
Sanyo has said it's doing something to make Blu-ray lasers better
To this end, Sanyo is promising to boost the capacity of Blu-ray discs to 100GB and maximise write-speed of burners to around 12x.
It’s all thanks to clever and more powerful new blue laser diode technology, which allows up to four data layers – each packing in 25GB of deleted scenes and staggeringly dull interviews with the leading man – to be stuck into a single Blu-ray disc at TWELVE TIMES writing speed…
The viral marketing ENDS HERE – Bungie's new game is "Halo 3: Recon"
Halo 3: Recon! It sounds like a joke. But it isn’t. Halo 3: Recon is the result of all that extremely tedious viral marketing nonsense Bungie’s been doing for months now, a game that brings a new character and play style to the dull old Halo universe.
Just announced at the Tokyo Game Show, Halo 3: Recon is a completely new chapter for Halo 3 that features a NEW CHARACTER and tells the story of events leading up to the start of Halo 3. It is a “standalone expansion” which means a separate game – not a downloadable mission pack for Halo 3. More expensive than that.
Halo 3: Recon will arrive in Autumn of 2009. The full official explanation…
VIDEO: Energy & Efficiency, episode 3
This week, I take a look at fires in the house. Not as dangerous as you may initially think, plus burning wood is a superb environmentally sound and low-cost solution to home heating.
It’s also great fun if you draw effigies of your enemies on the logs, then watch them BURN.
CONCLUSION: Everyone should buy fires for the home. Watching wood effigies…
Midori-san – the world's highest-profile blogging houseplant
A company called KAYAC has developed a kind of “botanical interface” that allows plants to speak and emote with us little humans. And, as is any sentient life form’s right, the plant has now started up a blog to air its inner angst.
Midori, as the plant is known in the Japanese blog-o-sphere, has an auto-generated blog which can be found here. It’s in Japanese, so won’t make much sense, but should you have an understanding of the squiggly language you’ll be able to read Midori’s feelings…
Humans hit evolutionary limit – here's how SCIENCE should intervene and make man BETTER
According to some scientist, humans have stopped evolving. This means we’re not going to get any better – at least not naturally.
So I propose science steps in to make us better, seeing as Mother Nature can’t be bothered any more. Here’s how. These are the evolutionary steps scientists need to introduce to our gene pool ASAP.
1. SIDE EYES
Seeing as our ears are always in use listening to MP3s of 1980s cover versions, it’s hard to hear cars, bicycles and lorries coming toward you. I therefore suggest moving our eyes to the sides of our heads, like horses, so we’re less likely to step out in front of buses because we can’t hear them coming. You never hear about horses never get run over because they’re too busy listening to the new Oasis album to listen out for cars, do you?
2. WIDER EAR CANALS
Dunno about you, but my ear holes are never big enough to accommodate all these so-called “in ear” earphones. You know, the ones you’re supposed to ram right in. I ram them in so hard it hurts and my brain pops, yet they still fall out after three minutes when the cable snags on my shirt. I therefore suggest we evolve wider ear holes for better audio clarity and comfort “on the go”…
Show your disregard of the global financial crisis with the sapphire-encrusted INCRUDO Phantom
The INCRUDO Phantom is, despite all the jewellery, a phone that has been designed to include a “Man’s character.”
Maker INCRUDO is clearly a bit insane. It says the “man’s character manifests itself in the combination of minimalism and simplicity and maximalism in materials, construction and characteristics of the device.”
While we respect INCRUDO’s excellent invention of the word “maximalism,” we can’t help but…
Vodafone extends entertainment portfolio with exciting new "books" option
Vodafone has teamed up with GoSpoken.com to sell books on your mobile, through Vodafone Books on Mobile. It will offer books for between £5 and £15, which seems quite a lot, to be honest, seeing as you’re basically paying to download an audio file.
Vodafone reckons that, if you’re using an HSDPA network, a three-hour audio book will download in three minutes. Then you’ll have £5 or £15 or maybe £7.99 added to your bill, as that’s what it’s all about…
Sony working on "Annihilation Assisted Upconversion" – bendable OLED screens
OLED development race winner Sony has announced its plans to start making OLEDs less than 1mm thick – that are flexible enough to be bent and wrapped around angles.
This’ll come in handy for when you need to… bend a screen. Or, these thin, semi-transparent OLEDs could be piled on top of each other to make 3D displays, used as HUDs in the windscreens of expensive cars, or even used as a way for Sony to carry on charging us lots of money for new TVs that aren’t particularly different from our existing TVs…
Clever German uses an MSI Wind, and a grinder, to create a fake MacBook Mini
The fans of small computers over at Liliputing – who must be well happy about the rise and rise and rise of the “netbook” and the impact it’s having on their Adsense earnings – have sourced a rather insane guide that shows a technically adept person how to build a MacBook Mini.
So, if you can’t quite bring yourself to spend the vast sums required to get a MacBook Air, you can have the next best thing – thanks to a German user on the MSI Wind forums. Yes, that’s just a lovely MSI Wind, with an Apple logo cut into the lid…
