Yes I use a Mac, I've always used a Mac. I believe is a more powerful system that delivers better software and a better experience. But what it delivers more than anything is respect for its users, not the contempt, over-pricing and failure to deliver on its promises that is Vista.

Roughly Drafted / What you expected; what you got

A new album and a new single from the pop punk genius that is Helen Love.

New Zealand's Croucher Brewing Company offers 12 bottles per month for the rest of the life of whoever returns a stolen portable.

A reminder of the first three rules of computing: backup, backup and backup.

BBC / NZ brewery offers beer for laptop

...but even he is more agreeable that the selfish idiots who think they know what we should be allowed to see and hear. Interesting that they don't complain about books - is it because they can't read?

“A note of dissent, however, came from Crystal Madison, representing a body called the Parents TV Council. She complained that prime-time drama series on News Corp's Fox television network showed inappropriate content at peak times, listing several shows as regular offenders - Family Guy, American Dad, Bones and Dirt.

“Ms Madison said there was regular humour about prostitution, masturbation, and infidelity, adding that Bones recently showed a maggot-infested dead body with its feet severed at prime time: ‘Is this entertainment, Mr Murdoch?’

“The News Corp chairman replied that ‘a lot of people think so’, adding: ‘People have a couple of hundred channels to choose from - they don't have to watch this.’”

The Guardian / Murdoch faces investor rebellion

This is the full version of the edited story that I wrote for PC Pro.

Anyone can download Radiohead's latest record without paying a penny after the band invited listeners to pay whatever they wanted for In Rainbows. You might have thought then, that no-on would bother using p2p to grab a copy. You'd be wrong.

Big Champagne, a leading p2p analyst, recorded 240,000 BitTorrent downloads of In Rainbows on the day it was released and with 100,000 new torrent downloads each day, unauthorised copies of the record will soon exceed the 1.2 million acquired from the band's official website.

Big Champagne's chief executive Eric Garland said that is not unusual for p2p downloads to exceed sales, but he was somewhat surprised that this was the case with the Radiohead album. And he can only put it down to habit.

“People don't know Radiohead's site,” he said. “They do know their favourite BitTorrent site and they use it every day. It's quite simply easier for folks to get the illegal version than the legal version.”

He added that price does not appear to be a factor that affects how much an album is swapped over p2p - contrary to the popular argument that record companies could eliminate file sharing simply by cutting the price of CDs and downloads.

Others have noted that by letting users pay nothing, Radiohead have inadvertently devalued their music and legitimised file sharing.

Professor Ed Felten of Princeton University, a digital content and DRM expert, notes on his Freedom to Tinker blog, that the “clunkiness” of Radiohead's website is partly to blame.

“Radiohead’s site makes you click and click to get the music,” he writes. “First you have to click through a nearly content-free splash screen. Then you click through another splash screen telling you things you probably already knew. Then you click an “ORDER” button, and click away a dialog box telling you something you already knew. Then after some head scratching, you realise you need to click the “VIEW BASKET” button...,” and so on. You get the picture. What it all amounts to is getting the downloaders details so that they can later be sold concert tickets and merchandise, which is where most bands make their real money since record labels have no claim to a share.

Faced with that, p2p does look a lot more attractive.

“If people normally choose p2p over authorised channels because p2p is cheaper, we would expect customers to shift toward the authorised channel when it offers a zero price,” Felten writes. “But if people choose p2p for convenience, then we’d expect a shift toward more p2p use for this album, because people have fewer moral qualms about p2p downloading this album than they would for a normal album.”

The building site next door that very kindly wakes us a 7am each weekday morning with the sound of drilling and hammering which then continues throughout the day. I do kind of hope this toilet crashes to the ground and showers shit on them all.

Appearing in Brussels on December 6.