hackbash

This is great; an error message from Google (in US English) telling me it couldn’t provide content in my language (UK English). I’ve whinged about regional settings before, but it turns out I’m bilingual. Who knew?

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Conventional wisdom has it that digital doesn’t degrade gracefully. That unlike, say, the random fuzz introduced into a conventional analogue TV picture by interference, you get the blocky, stalled or jittery breakdown more familiar to digital viewers. It’s generally true, but not always, as I think the image above – produced when a network fault [...]

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By now, surely the only person who hasn’t seen this Renault Clio being shunted sideways down the A1 (M) is the truck driver responsible, so just in case he’s reading: While the Mail has since tracked down the unhurt 31-year-old Clio driver, details were thin on the ground on Thursday last week as the surely-it-can’t-be-real [...]

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Interesting blog post yesterday from BBC News editor Steve Herrmann, essentially asking “how should we link?” As Herrmann points out, the BBC has always provided relevant links – something I think is essential to good web journalism – but to date it hasn’t seemed comfortable bringing them into the body copy. That’s where the majority [...]

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I don’t know. Seems I’m still feeling pissy about the polluting effect of SEO on content. While Google News seems to have temporarily extinguished Autobulbs Direct, a host of similar sites are cropping up in its results, blabbering on about how the weather could delay prestige car hire customers (people) or how British commercial vehicle [...]

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An earlier gush on Twitter (I refuse to pander by calling it a twush or anything equally facile) provoked a couple of replies, revealing that I’m not alone in my admiration for Google’s Chrome browser. I came to it late – about two weeks ago, truth be told. I’d been struggling with IE, and have [...]

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Just noticed this box on the BBC site as it prepares to cover the Oscars. It’s the first time I’ve seen them directly embed tweets into a story. Looking at the actual feed page it seems like there’s a problem – an 11 hour-time lag between a tweet and its appearance on the BBC page. [...]

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Less is more, and I’d pay Facebook a micro-subscription if they’d take away the adverts.

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**Updated below** I got a worrying email last night from a friend and ex-colleague, letting me know that he’d had a phishing message purportedly from my Last.FM account. Oops, we both thought – I’d been hacked. I went in and changed my password. I subsequently discovered an email to me ‘from’ another colleague that also [...]

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