Facebook apparently doesn't subscribe to the idea that when you lose contact with someone it is often for a good reason. Sneak, who once started a group on Facebook just for the pleasure of kicking everyone else off it, does.

Because of this, he's rather disappointed to have started to get messages via Facebook encouraging him to reconnect with people that in the real world he would choose to avoid through such drastic measures as hurling himself under a train.

Like some sort of pushy mother, concerned that her 33-year-old son doesn't have enough friends, Facebook, the social networking site, has become social busybody, and started hurling ghosts from the past into the faces of people who have probably suffered enough already.

The new feature, launched this weekend along with a confusing new Live Feed/Live News Feed split on the homepage, has not only irked Sneak, but also a lot of other users. Not least of all because it has in some cases urged them to reconnect with dead people, animals, and people that they used to be in relationships with.

The twitterati has of course gone mental for it. And everyone who ever thought of a snappy screen name for themselves and has 140 characters to burn has been quick to comment on the feature.

Sneak's favourite post so far comes from daveisanidiot, who sounds a lot like a sulky, younger brother pushed into hanging out with a sibling.

'Dave' said, "Facebook told me i should reconnect with my sister. You're not the boss of me Facebook!"

October 26, 2009 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Clive Sinclair is a well-known figure in the UK and has widely been credited with bringing the computer out of the lab and into the home. Sneak has been lucky enough to have a sneak preview of a new comedy docudrama from the pen of Tony Saint, which digs deeper than ever before into the character of the man who brought us the ZX Spectrum.

Micro Men, to be aired on BBC Four on Thursday evening, follows the parallel careers of Sinclair and his one-time employee Chris Curry. This not entirely flattering portrait of one of the most important and influential inventors of the 20th Century paints Sinclair as a megalomaniacal, bipolar tyrant who would hurl abuse at his employees just as easily as stray bits of office equipment.

Sinclair is the first person to introduce a useable pocket calculator to the world, and invents the LED digital watch, but all of his inventions are ruthlessly cribbed by Japanese electronics giants and Sinclair is repeatedly priced out of the markets he single handedly created: "Hijacked by the Japanese and their ugly plastic grot," as Sinclair so succinctly puts it.

Poor quality components and some poor quality business decisions also mean that Sinclair's Pocket TV (yes they really did have pockets that big in the eighties) bombs so badly that the Cambridge-based company has to be bailed out by National Enterprise Board, a government department intended to help finance burgeoning British tech companies.

Sinclair is so incensed by what he sees as government interference that he sends Curry off to work for a shell company he has set up, but Curry is determined to be more than just a caretaker, taking it upon himself to design and create a microcomputing kit, which will allow punters to build their own basic computer.

Obsessed as he is with his singular vision for a personal transport vehicle, Sinclair rudely dismisses Curry's idea to spark the home computer revolution and when Curry mocks the C5, Sinclair throws him out of his house mid-dinner in yet another petulant strop.

Rather than turning up to work the next morning as Sinclair confidently predicts to his long-suffering wife, Curry sets up on his own with amusingly louche Austrian wine maker Hermann Hausser, and Acorn Computing is born.

What comes next is a parallel tale of two companies. Sinclair struggles to stay afloat while blowing millions of pounds on the C5 and Acorn poaches the cream of the Cambridge Processor Group band of socially dysfunctional nerds who build cattle-feeding computers for fun.

Sinclair soon realises that Curry was onto something with this whole personal computer theory and decides to take on the likes of Apple, Commodore and IBM by inventing a home computer which will sell for the magical sum of £99. At the time, an Apple II would set you back something in the order of £2,000 and even the Commodore Pet, which was seen as affordable at the time, was £695, a sum which was way out of reach for anything other than a college or large company.

The Sinclair ZX80 was a revolutionary failure. It sold by the shedload to an audience eager to jump on the computing bandwagon, and is probably responsible for setting off the UK computing revolution. But it overheated, made the screen flicker with every key press and probably convinced as many people never to touch a computer again as it did to go on to become multimillionaire superstar programmers.

Curry, on the other hand, is forced to go cap in hand to the banking system in order to fund his digital dreams and spends most of his time trying to second guess his former boss in order to get the upper hand in the fledgling computer industry.

Micro Men is a tale of hard work, greed, friendship and redemption, all wrapped up in the giddy boom and ultimately catastrophic bust of the first home computing gold rush.

Anyone who grew up with computers in the eighties will be spellbound by the attention to authentic detail the programme makers have lavished on this show. Every car, every hideous jumper, every hand-soldered circuit board and every note of the soundtrack is spot on. The battle between Sinclair and Curry is well-paced and fascinating even to those of you who wouldn't know your Jet Set Willy from your Manic Miner, even if poor old Clive does come out of the whole deal looking like a bit of an arse, while Curry comes up smelling of roses at every juncture.

In fact, the main protagonists are drawn with such broad strokes as to render them almost cartoonish, no doubt for comic effect. Alexander Armstrong's portrayal of Sinclair as a bumbling, single-minded sociopath is often clumsy. But it's Martin Freeman's too-cuddly-to-be-credible reading of Curry which ultimately fails to ring true.

Unbalanced but unbelievably affectionate all the same, Micro Men is one you really should not miss.

October 6, 2009 Television, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lily Allen is quitting the music business (rejoice!), maybe (oh).

Ms Allen is apparently ticked off at the business of people going around finding music that they like and sharing it with their friends.

Lily started a blog - called 'It's not alright' - as a vehicle for ranting on and on about how evil file sharing was but mysteriously pulled it down a couple of days later. Why? The smart money says that it's because she ripped a chunk of text off another web site without crediting it - which is somewhat ironic, given the message she was trying to put across

Further cementing this flimsy stance, she's also removed a couple of previously available mix tapes from her web site. Again, why? A quick listen on the Sneak iPod finds that they contain a lot of samples. Did she get the correct clearance on those? Was the whole business of piracy and music theft less important when it wasn't her lavish lifestyle that was at risk? We'll let you cynics decide.

In the meantime if you want to stay on Lily's side you should try and avoid her. We suggest that if you like her music you keep it to yourself, don't recommend it to anyone - and definitely never listen to it unless you have paid for the privilege. If at all.

September 28, 2009 Music, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (2)

An unorthodox race in South Africa has revealed that it's quicker to transmit 4GB of data via pigeon than it is to send it over the country's main ADSL services.

An IT company in Durban decided to hold a competition to test a theory once discussed over the watercooler. Would it be faster to use a carrier pigeon to send data than to use the country's biggest web firm, Telkom? Bad news for Telkom - yes, it is.

In the race held Wednesday between Howick and Hillcrest, a pigeon named Winston managed to transport a 4GB memory stick 60 miles in just two hours, the same amount of time it took the firm's web connection to transmit just four percent of the data. Of course, Telkom said that slow speeds at its customer end have nothing to do with it.

Overall though, estimates suggest that it would have taken days to send the data, which would have given Winston the winged rat loads of time to 'decorate' many statues of military heroes before finally turning up to claim his victory bread crust.

Like Telkom we can't be sure what is wrong with the firm's web connection, but old school methods of delivery have long been favoured by those in the know. Some people still use the old practice of moving files between machines on floppy disks - remember them? And way back in the 1970s, Dr. Warren Jackson said: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes." Nothing has changed, actually.

Winston the pigeon already has over 3,000 friends on Facebook. We don't imagine that anyone at Telkom is one of them.

September 10, 2009 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (2)

We all know how exciting Business Process Management (BPM) can be, and I'm sure you'll be exited to learn to learn that IBM has developed a game called Innov8 which lets users test their business decision making skills.

The 3D simulation game can be played through a browser or as a fully downloadable client and takes data based on real life scenarios and lets users make decisions and see how well they turn out.

One example scenario sees the player as a supplier faced with an approaching hurricane. The user must then organise emergency shipments of supplies to various stores - deciding which vendors/suppliers to purchase from to effectively balance demand, company profitability, environmental impact and customer satisfaction.

As an added bonus, the mini-games are accompanied by a set of 3D interactive tutorials that explain the business value of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for the three scenarios showcased in the games, using data from real case studies and real clients.

The game is already part of the University of Manchester Business School curriculum and several other universities and business schools are looking at incorporating it into their teaching.

For the truly competitive, there are also public online scoreboards to compare your achievements with every other Innov8 player.

When the trailer begins (yes it has a trailer) with a gravelly voice saying: "Enter a world where cities reduce traffic congestion before your eyes, companies revolutionise customer service and business streamline supply chains..." you know you can't resist.

September 9, 2009 Games, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

YouTube has struck a deal with the Performing Rights Society (PRS) to re-enable viewing of premium videos in the UK.

Under pressure from the music industry, YouTube attempted to remove copyrighted material from its UK servers six months ago, with limited success.

The PRS, which represents music creators and performers and makes sure they get paid whenever their music is played in clubs, pubs and shopping centres, has secured an undisclosed sum thought to be in the tens of millons of pounds to keep Paul McCartney in gold-plated lawn furniture until 2012.

The deal, which covers 'official music videos' rather than the shaky footage your sister took of Kings of Leon playing at Brixton Academy, has taken such a long time to nail down because of the complexity of YouTube, the international music industry and the fact that the PRS has 60,000 active members all holding out their hands for a slice of the online pie.

But the money won't all go for sable-lined Bentleys and indoor swimming pools to drive them into, apparently. The PRS reckons that 90 per cent of its membership - which includes composers, songwriters, musicians and other performers - earn less than £5,000 a year.

YouTube has always shown a willingness to compensate performers but, before this current round of negotiations took place, PRS lawyers were said to be seeking payments so out of line with the benefits to be obtained that the world's most popular web site had no choice but to pull the plug.

In fact, at one point the whole row got so nasty that technology minister Lord Carter was dragged into the ring in order to stop the handbags flying.

Google-owned YouTube has said that the tens of thousands of missing videos should reappear over the next few days.

September 3, 2009 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

The heat wave may have broken in the UK, but that hasn't stopped the world from noticing that Apple has released some support information concerned with overheating iPhones and using the devices in hot weather. We know, the words 'support information' chill us too (if you'll excuse the pun) so we'll summarise it for you - don't let your iPhone get too hot or it will stop working.

Although designed to work in temperatures that range from chilly to "will someone please let me out of this oven" (between 0ºC and 35ºC) trying to use one outside of these parameters could cause it to stop working, Apple has warned. The firm makes a number of recommendations, including telling people not to leave their iPhone in a hot car. Instead it recommends that you turn off the phone and move to somewhere cooler - like indoors maybe, or Iceland?

Although Sneak usually adjusts to the hot weather by making small changes to his daily routine - for example, storing his underpants in the office fridge - he can't help but wonder what this sort of announcement will mean to those holidaymakers planning on using their iPhones in St Tropez, St Lucia or some other summer hotspot. It's hard to imagine them stuffing the oh-so-trendy item anywhere but on permanent display. Besides, beach outfits tend to be low on pockets.

NB: The Apple support page was updated on 25 June. We would like to apologise for our lateness in bringing it to your attention, but Sneak works remotely and like the iPhone was struggling to work in the heat.

July 3, 2009 Travel, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (6)

Sneak was intrigued to read reports that the BBC is to screen a 'comedy drama' about the early days of the home computer industry in the UK, when men were men, computers were knocked up from kits that had to be soldered together at home, and software was almost invariably loaded from audio cassette tape.

The show is apparently to be called [bad pun alert] "Syntax Era", and will star comedians Alexander Armstrong as Clive Sinclair and Martin Freeman as Chris Curry, one of the founders of Acorn Computers.

Many of the reports Sneak has seen indicate the show's plot will centre on the rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn Computers for "home computer supremacy".

This isn't how Sneak recalls this period of IT history, it has to be said. Sinclair's ZX Spectrum and Acorn's BBC Micro computers were aimed at very different ends of the computer market.

The 'Beeb' was regarded as the Rolls-Royce of home computers, as it had a full typewriter keyboard, video outputs for a TV and monitor, and an array of ports, including analogue-to-digital converter, disk drive interface, and even a set of chip sockets for plugging in add-on ROM chips that expanded its built-in software. It was a hobbyists' dream.

By contrast, the 'Speccy' was cheap and cheerful, with a rubbery keyboard and a single expansion port that simply brought out the processor bus signals to a connector at the back of the case. It was great for learning to program, playing games, and an introduction to the world of computers.

It would be difficult to decide which of the two was best, however. While the Beeb was clearly technically superior, the Spectrum was far more affordable and had many more software titles created for it. Which would you choose?

As to the "Syntax Era", don't you think that it's great that the BBC went out of its way to find so obvious a look-alike for Clive Sinclair?

July 1, 2009 Television, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (9)

Have you ever sat at your desk fighting back a strong desire to eat some beans?

No, no one in Sneak's office has either. But apparently the people at Heinz are so bean-obsessed that they think that what the world needs more than anything is a USB-powered microwave designed for heating up beans. At your desk.

Yeah - you read that right. A bean microwave for the desk. We had to check the date to make sure that it wasn't actually April Fool's Day, but a story in the Daily Mail has pictures of the device and pictures of a man sitting at a desk using one. The mind boggles - in 57 different ways.

The Daily Mail has spoken to all involved - while presumably keeping a straight face - and has come up with the following facts: that almost 70 per cent of people are too busy to leave their desks at lunchtime, and that the mini-microwave would carry a price tag of around £100. Neither of which really sounds like a good reason for developing or purchasing a deskbound microwave.

Still according to those involved, the possibilities are almost endless: "It is possible to heat a pie, a burger, a cup of soup or tea in quick time," explained microwave expert and the Beanzawave's designer Gordon Andrews. Prompting us to wonder whether the device is aimed at office workers or food concessions at football grounds.

June 10, 2009 Food and Drink, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yasmina Siadatan is the lucky winner of this year's Apprentice, and as a prize she's landed the business job that we all dream of. No, not being Alan Sugar's apprentice - he has already had four of those from the previous series so we doubt he'll have much time to actually manage and nurture her.

Yasmina's exciting new role will see her giving away free electronic screens. With adverts on. To doctors surgeries. Wow. That's definitely bleeding something, if not quite 'bleeding edge'.

This new role sounds very similar as the job given to Lee McQueen, the winner of last year's show who also went to work for Al's Amscreen digital signage division. Lee - known for his bizarrre dinosaur impression and CV fakery - was recently applauded by 'Surralan' for getting a large contract inked for the firm. What was the contract for? Giving away free screens? Check. With adverts on? Check. To doc... No, this time it was to petrol stations.

Boy. I bet Yasmina wishes she entered last year. Or had stayed put at her restaurant.

June 8, 2009 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)