Today, the bus system on my route into work crumbled beneath me, so I got the Tube. (Urgh)

When I arrived at Goodge Street station, I decided to throw caution to the wind and buy a sausage roll and a can of Coke from the shop next to the entrance. I didn't look carefully at the can till I got it to the office, but when I did, I discovered that it not only contained 10ml more liquid than a regular can, but it said in large letters around the top "EXPORT FOR MARITIME CONSUMPTION ONLY". I will award a prize (genuinely this time) for the most illuminating or funniest suggestion for why this may be.

A very short post today, peeps. In fact, let's do it in Cope-style bullet points:

• Neodymium magnets (from www.powermagnetstore.com) are the coolest things on God's green Earth (hell, that capitalisation looks odd. As does the juxtaposition of 'God' and 'hell'; oh well...) and many of my nearest and dearest can expect a couple for Christmas. In the above pic – taken during a lunchtime birthday drink for Westy – we see three pennies linked together by the power of just one of the little beauties. And PC Pro's Deputy Editor David Fearon looking on in awe.

• The new Harry Potter film kicks all kinds of arse. British director = pawky Brit sense of humour. Mad-eye Moody surprisingly convincing. Voldemort genuinely scary = 1 generation of fucked-up kids. Scope utterly epic.

• I overheard a French mum asking her poorly kid on the bus today what he would like to eat that evening. She asked in French. He replied with a strong Sarf Lahdahn accent, "Fish fingers ... chips ... et du pain." That last with the softest French accent you ever heard. Vive la difference!

• Three people I know and whose blogs I read, today completely independently and for different reasons posted about David Bowie. Two specifically about Labyrinth. Have they tapped into some collective consciousness?

• I need to shave off all the hair on my head, bar the eyebrows. My hair is usually kept to a #1 and the beard kept down to a stubble at worst. I have cut neither since our Awards, with the net result that I look very furry, and my male pattern baldness (which gave rise to this site's URL) is more pronounced than ever.

Because I write about technology for 7 hours out of any given 24, I usually steer clear of writing on the subject here. One story has prompted me to break this rule, however.
I don't know if you know of the $100 laptop project? It's the brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte, the founding chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and it involves putting together a wind-up laptop which will cost less than $100 to be distributed to millions of schoolchildren, ostensibly in the developing world, in a bid to level the playing field a bit in today's economy. Very laudable.
Today, most feeds in the Mac section of my RSS reader are reporting that Apple offered to supply its operating system, Mac OS X, for the laptops completely free. Again, laudable.
The folks behind the project politely declined the offer, on the basis that Mac OS X isn't open source – click here for a definition if you're not a geek – and most of the Mac sites around the globe have been smacking their collective palm against their collective forehead and condemning Negroponte and his colleges for denying 'starving children in Africa' the chance to use super-duper Mac OS X (my quote marks).
But here's the thing: although there's much in Mac OS X that is open source, the operating system is still, to all intents and purposes, a closed system. It can't as easily be adapted to a specific task, can't be as quickly fixed if a systemic flaw is discovered, and can't be worked on by legions of alpha geeks the world over.
The decision was entirely justified, but even so I imagine that it wasn't taken lightly. It would have been an interesting business move for Apple, and one which at a stroke would have radically improved its still-tiny market share, but it must have been very tempting for the $100 laptop coordinators.
Open source is not a panacea – it should coexist alongside commercial software – but the reaction of MacDailyNews to the story is misinformed and bigoted. (MDN, it should be pointed out, it the most rabidly pro-Apple site I know, even more so than Apple itself.)

Here, have a Lexus for free. No thanks, we'd rather have this here Ford Fiesta. You can't tinker much with a Lexus, but the Fiesta's hood always seems to be open. Check this out, we put some big knobby tires on it, filled in the rust spots and holes with Bondo, took it to Earl Scheib and, voilà! All your Lexus does is smoothly go 150 mph without complaint. Plus, nobody can break into it and it just runs and runs and runs.

To characterise open source software as a Ford Fiesta compared to a Lexus (ignoring the obvious observation that for a lot of people the Fiesta will be better suited, more econonical to run and less likely to get keyed while parked) is plain wrong. Open source software can be spectacularly polished and very easy to use – hell, OS X users use open source every time they fire up iChat, retrieve email or even just boot the operating system – never mind all the advantages inherent to a system that has thousands of individuals continually working on how to improve it. And bollocks to the suggestion that open source is patched up with 'Bondo'. No system is perfect, as the steady stream of security patches Apple itself issues for OS X proves.

Wouldn't Mac OS X – which runs a wide range of polished applications, networks easily, accepts peripherals painlessly, is extremely secure, plus many other reasons – work best for such a project, especially if Jobs offered it for free? What a boneheaded decision to decline Apple's offer!


Most of those nice things you've just said about Mac OS X can be applied to most modern operating systems today, from Windows to Palm OS to Symbian. Standards such as USB Mass Storage, TCP/IP, Bluetooth and 802.11 are making these archaic notions of Why-The-Mac-Is-Better-Than-Anything-Else-You-Smell-Like-Pee-Anyway much less relevant.

And what about Darwin? http://developer.apple.com/darwin/


Absolutely, first intelligent thing you've said, though it must be noted that you're now promoting open source; what about the Lexus/Fiesta analogy? Darwin is a great, open source component of the Mac OS X experience. But, people, it's a component. Sure, open source bods can dick about with it to their heart's content, but stick Darwin on a £100 laptop and you ain't got Mac OS X.
So let's get a bit of perspective here. I am a Mac user, and for 80% of the time, that makes me a very happy bunny. But there's room for other operating systems, and frankly I'd be at least as excited about the idea of a $100 laptop running a Linux variant than one running Mac OS X. Guys, it's still windows, icons, menus and pointers. Your mum could use it. Have you ever used it?
There's a feeling among the Mac Faithful that Apple can do no wrong and that it's still a maverick company piloted by a bunch of feel-good hippies. Bollocks. Apple is a business. If it had the chance to be in Microsoft's place today, you can be damn sure it would be. Give it a monopoly on the $100 laptop – a project which is closer to socialist ideals than capitalist – and after a few years I'd be very surprised if they didn't start tightening the thumb screws a little. And, let's say this all together folks, if it's a closed system, nobody but the controlling company can dictate progress or direction for the operating system. By using open source, the $100 laptop can go wherever the needs take it.

In other news, I wholeheartedly endorse the reaction to über-twat Jason Kottke's comment about stickers made by the lovely folks at 37signals.

I'm a bleeding heart liberal. I support* both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. The latter because they actually play the game, politically-speaking, and demonstrate serious research and consistent lobbying. I'm a little ashamed still to be supporting Greenpeace, as their stunts often err on the side of 'what a bunch of tossers', but I think they play an invaluable role in keeping the environment on the public's agenda. I just wish they'd be a little less 'Fathers 4 Justice' about the whole thing.

I also support* Trees for Cities – specifically a little copse on the South Bank. Though it's not a panacea, I love the concept of carbon offsetting, and like to think that I am in a very very small way helping to make myself carbon neutral. (Not a sentence you'll hear often, I suspect, viz: "What do you want to be when you grow up?", "Carbon neutral.")

In this vein, here are a couple of suggestions for an ethical Christmas. Friends of the Earth have teamed up with The Magazine Group to offer cheap subscriptions to a huge range of magazines. On top of the savings you make, FoE gets at least £8 for every subscription sold through this link. (If I might make a suggestion, I hear that this magazine is particularly fine...)

There's plenty of time still to get Christmas cards ordered from Card Aid, which supplies cards of various designs to support over a hundred charities.

Best of the bunch, though, is the fantastic catalogue I got through the post a few weeks ago detailing lots of ethical gifts, such as preserving an acre of rainforest for £25 or a £20 hive of bees to provide income for a disadvantaged family. There's a website too – check out www.goodgifts.org – and you can feel virtuous even just reading it.

To cheer up this post which has rather slipped into the po-faced, here's a picture of the rather lovely bottle of apple juice I bought the other day at a painfully right-on sandwich bar near my office. Quelle retro!



* Support in these instances doesn't just mean setting up a Direct Debit. I do try hard to join in debates, lobby my MP (the frighteningly glamorous Joan Ruddock) and generally muck in. But, like I say, bleeding heart liberal.

That was a hell of a week, but at least it's all over. I had a few big projects to complete – not ordinarily a problem, naturally, but there have been so may other little exta jobs cropping up which have mean that the major projects got bumped further and further back.
It's a tricky time of year, this. We have the MacUser awards and the big Mac show, this year back to Olympia. I got myself involved in both (partly through my self-sabotaging inability to say no, partly because I hate to see a job badly done, and partly for other reasons...), had to write some extra little bits for the magazine... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera [to be said à la Yul Brynner in The King and I].
No matter. A late finish on Sunday night meant that it is all done. Finished. Completed and submitted.
And you have no idea how good that feels.
True, there are many thing I need to do this week, but the pressure should be nothing like as bad as it has been since the last post.
You never know: maybe this blog will cease to document my mood swings and start to offer some decent editorial content as opposed to being the 21st century equivalent of the snivelling diary of a teenage girl.
As I write this, I'm sitting in an adorable café near to the office, drinking Earl Grey and eating a fruit scone with jam and cream. (The young lady will tell you that I'm easy to please; a cream tea will rescue me from all but my blackest moods.)
Thanks for the words of encouragement, particularly from my Ma. And a specific 'thanks for nothing' to Cope for suggesting that the sapping malaise I feel is endemic and uncurable...
(Incidentally, the above pic was taken last night as I was working on some stuff; it's of the shadow one of our tea strainers balancing on the spout of our teapot.)