Pigsaw Blog
All the pig that's fit to saw

Archive for the 'Public life' Category


Top Gear: Bad news

It sez here: Top Gear stars James May and Richard Hammond have not yet signed new contracts despite their agreements expiring at the end of the month – leading to fears they may leave the show. That’s right, folks: there’s a real risk of Jeremy Clarkson staying on television. Start panicking now. Tags: topgear, jeremyclarkson, [...]

UEFA doesn’t seem to understand piracy

Over on the Observer’s Business site there’s a report about UEFA taking umbridge at fans videoing and photographing matches and then putting them on content-sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr. The more I think about it, the more I’m in sympathy with UEFA, having started from a position of opposition. The matches are held [...]

Apple really knows simple

To me the most remarkable feature of last night’s iPhone 3G announcement was the maths. Before the presentation Apple had one iPhone (albeit with memory options). The announcement presented a new, 3G, iPhone. The total number of iPhones Apple now sells is… one. Compare that to, say, Nokia, who still sell the N95 alongside the [...]

Devil may care guide to proofreading

Here’s the extract from the new Bond book that Toby Litt begins his review with. Why do you think it might be worth quoting…? “Bond and Scarlett went into a spacious air-conditioned room that was painted crimson: floor, ceiling, walls – there was nothing in the room that wasn’t poppy-red. Behind a desk stood an [...]

Non-commercial photo use by commercial organisations

A similar — but distinctly more convivial — experience to Neil McIntosh’s run-in with AOL. I got a mail about a photo I put on Flickr: it’s nominated to be included in a forthcoming visitors’ guide, and I had the opportunity to agree to this or withdraw it. Following up, the site said: While we [...]

55 in 1

I just went out out to buy a card reader for a Micro SD card, and maybe my camera’s Compact Flash card as a nice-to-have. I have returned having spent twenty quid on a — ahem — 55 in 1 card reader. I am currently both in wonder that someone has produced a device that [...]

Heart-stopping leap

Here’s a photo sequence that appeared in the paper this morning, and I couldn’t stop looking at it for ages. A man taking a photo above the Grand Canyon, and… oh, goodness. Update: There’s some discussion about whether it’s a hoax. It would seem that any possible hoax is about not revealing the full picture, [...]

Apples, oranges, Vista and XP

Reg Developer picks up on Microsoft’s defence[*] of features causing confusion for Windows Vista users. Of interest to me is this, from Microsoft’s document: We’ve heard some of you say that Windows Vista runs slower than Windows XP on a given PC. So what’s really happening here? First, we need to avoid comparing apples to [...]

Get a mortgage and kill a baby polar bear — free!

Spotted on a poster on the way to work today: LloydsTSB have an exciting and unique offer in which you can take out a mortgage with them and they will kill a baby polar bear on your behalf. Okay, that’s not true. But they do have “The only mortgage that gives you free Airmiles”, which [...]

Shipping warning

It was a late night last night, and I was listening to the Shipping Forecast (all jolly good until you get the National Anthem; a waste of airtime, but imagine the uproar if they scrapped it). Anyway, Charlotte Green, or whichever salty sea dog had the pleasure, seemed to be telling us that an awful [...]