I recently had the fantastic opportunity of writing a book about photography for an US publisher. Of course, with the publisher being abroad, there were some tax issues with the venerable Internal Revenue Service. Basically, I was given the choice between a) giving the US Internal Revenue Service 30% of my earnings, and subsequently pay another significant percentage to the Inland Revenue (which are, of course, the UK tax authorities), or somehow get out of the US tax, and pay tax only in the UK. Check out the rest of the post »
So, the online bookmarking / social network site Reddit was down for a couple of days, and admits to having a lot of their data stolen. They further admit that the data will have included logins, passwords, and e-mail addresses.
The part that was stolen, according to the news story, was “media of ours that contained a backup of a portion of the reddit database was stolen recently”… Not being funny, but what the hell is a media company doing having unencrypted ‘backup media’ (CD or DVD, presumably) laying around? That’s hardly what’s known as being diligent in protecting your users. Check out the rest of the post »
So, as part of research for my job - and because I love this kind of stuff - I’ve been playing around with different types of social networking sites.
One of my friends, Ashley, pointed out FaceBook to me today. All I can say is - jesus christ, why isn’t MySpace more like FaceBook? In fact - why do people bother with myspace at all, when Facebook is better in just about every possible aspect? Check out the rest of the post »
There’s something to be said against seasonal affective disorder. Myself, I’ve never been struck particularly hard, but I do notice that getting up in the mornings becomes a bit more… pointless?
Anti Lag is a system used in highly tuned turbocharged vehicles, to reduce the effect of turbo lag.
How a turbocharger works
A turbocharger works by exploiting the pressure of the exhaust gasses moving out of an internal combustion engine. It consists of a turbine - driven by the exhaust gasses - which is connected to a compressor.
The air pump forces air into the inlet manifold. The higher density of the compressed air means that more fuel can be injected into the engine, which leads to much higher power output compared to a non-forced-induction car (also known as a ‘naturally aspirated’ engine) Check out the rest of the post »
The sport of Drifting has been around for quite a while, but with movies such as Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift, and a recent increase in popularity in the D1 and Formula Drift championship, the newest motorsport on the block (or, more likely, around the block) is gathering speed.
Back in the day, you could drift with just about any car that’s got rear wheel drive - Sierras and Cavaliers were tremendously popular in the early years of UK drifting - but as competition levels went up, more is needed from the cars. Check out the rest of the post »
In for a penny, in for a pound is an old (British) English expression which relates to taking chances.
It has a few different etymologies, but all of them are crime or gambling related. The idea of the expression is that if you are going to be taking a risk of any kind, you may as well take a big risk, and try to reap the bigger reward. Check out the rest of the post »
Magazine Publishing is the act of putting a magazine into circulation in some way or another.
There are many different types of magazines, such as magazines published by manufacturers of goods (such as “Liv”, published by Volvo about Volvo products, promoting automotive safety and general Swedishness) or services (such as Reach, published by an UK train company). There are trade publications, which aim to inform businesses and traders (such as MotorTrader, which is distributed to car sales outlets and manufacturers in the UK). There are B2B publications, such as information newsletters or magazines published by Microsoft, distributed to their customers to keep them up to date. There are business-produced publication such as PC WORLD Magazine, for customers of the PC World chain of outlet stores. There are official independent magazines, such as official Playstation 2 magazine, which is produced under licence from Sony, but otherwise independent. And there are completely independent magazines, such as most of the ones you’ll see in a magazine shop.
Needless to say, a single write-up cannot cover all the different forms of magazines, nor all the specifics about one type of magazines, and all ways of funding them. This write-up will take a closer look at how a magazine comes into existence, how it is run, and how it all works behind the scenes. A lot of it is applicable also for newspapers and for different forms of magazines, but by and large, this write-up covers the inception, production and distribution of a large (100,000 copies plus), monthly magazine. Check out the rest of the post »
Jesus, we’ve come a long way since the 1960s. Surely, they can make a taxi that doesn’t look completely ridiculous? With the launch of TX4, I guess the answer is ‘no’.
For some reason, we get tons of press releases about how great black cabs are, and how hard all other hackney carriages suck. Of course, it’s a bit tiresome, but we could live with that, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the LTI taxis themselves are complete dinousaurs, with ancient engines and ridiculous performance. Check out the rest of the post »
Jesus, we’ve come a long way since the 1960s. Surely, they can make a taxi that doesn’t look completely ridiculous? With the launch of TX4, I guess the answer is ‘no’.