This year, because we are all grown ups and have got most of the toys we want already, we decided to have a white elephant. This meant we had presents to put under the ‘tree’ and open after Santa had passed our house. To be honest, we did wonder how he was going to get through the door of our wood burning stove.

Our tree this year was a work of art. After considering £60 too high for something we would use for less than a week, we made our own by weaving ivy around a conical plant support from the garden. With rosemary branches poking out to look and smell like the real thing, it was remarkably effective, especially after a large pile of Christmas presents surrounded it. Read more

In the 1970s and 80’s Britain’s brewing industry underwent huge changes as small independent breweries were amalgamated into the large computer-controlled factories we have nowadays. This also meant the loss of some of the countries favourite beers, replaced by bland brews that were made for shelf-life rather than taste.

They were truly dreadful, gassy drinks which many would say tasted the same going down as they did coming out an hour later. CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, represented public opinion and became the most successful consumer group in Europe. The country saw the rise of small artisanal breweries making beers with flavour as the aim and slowly public houses reinstalled their hand pumps and publicans learned how to tend to living beer.

There needs to be a similar movement to campaign for real bread. Even the best supermarket loaves have a list of ingredients including things you can’t even pronounce let alone want to eat. Unlike proper bread from by artisan bakers who make bread for its flavour and texture using only flour, yeast, salt and water. It is strange that the French, as a nation who value their bread, are buying soft and pappy loaves from supermarkets. The same bread would remain on the shelves and unsold in UK shops. This is in the birth place of Louis Pasteur where the French choose sterilised milk over fresh pasteurised.

In the 1980s and 90s another industry also went through complete upheaval as offset litho and desktop publishing ousted the old hot metal presses. Designers replaced most of the people involved in printing who became redundant because their skills weren’t needed. Ten years later content creation has become where the smart money is as desktop publishing is being ousted by digital publishing.

The recession has seen many publishers and book packagers move away from traditional, wet printing and into short-run digital output but even they are being moved aside as the artisan book makers come to the fore. Armed only with a text editor, a modem and a handful of ideas, they can get their books published and on sale at Amazon. It doesn’t mean that their books are any good, though.

Which is how some see the new small Kindle. The screen size is limited, grey-scale and without a backlight. While the memory holds a library of titles, reading on the Kindle’s screen is an acquired taste. However, I have found the ideal use for a Kindle.

Even with large amounts of time on my hands during a sojourn in hospital recently, there was no way I could get into Steve Jobs biography, the book is just too large and heavy. We didn’t have a Kindle when I ordered it so I’m stuck with trying to read a book the size of a family bible. Which in a way, is exactly what it is: a bible for all the Apple disciples of which I am one.

Ever since we can remember, before going to bed or going out for a while, we always check around the house and office. In the day time it’s to shut the doors so that when burglars break in, opening a door will damage their eardrums as our alarms set up a cacophony of deafening bells. At night time, it’s to make sure the Macs are behaving themselves.

Looking into the office we see at least 25 neon lights glowing from all the little boxes of electronics. Some pulse slowly as if the devices they are attached to are snoring, others blink rapidly as an iPhone or Pad check for mail. We have always wondered what the cumulative effect of 25 or so consumers of milliamps will be to our carbon footprint but they all stay lit unless we go on holiday.

Recently we checked the office and both felt something wasn’t right. There was a subtle difference that eluded us but neither admitted it to the other until a chance remark in a conversation about a film we were watching. The movie concerned the mysterious going’s on at a school where a ‘malevolent presence’ roamed around, bumping off people one-by-one.

Of course, none of the victims ran away when they entered the room containing the ‘presence’. Instead they stood awaiting their fate as the camera focussed over their shoulder onto the slowly solidifying mist.

It was the same with our office. Something was wrong but we couldn’t tell what. We could stand looking round the room, checking under desks to where the snakes live or into the corners where they spiders hang out. But nothing showed up. Then realisation came us.

The new iMacs have no blinking light.

A courier arrived at our door yesterday, carrying a large brown box on his shoulder. He had tried to deliver it to next door where the address label said it should go to, but they didn’t want it. There was no addressee and the name of the building was as incorrect as the number. What we and our neighbours didn’t know was that the box contained a brand new 27″ iMac, graphics tablet, extended keyboard and trackpad. Plus QuarkXPress 9 and Microsoft Office.

Nice! Shame it wasn’t for me but my wife. Meanwhile I am struggling to convince my employers that as my job is 100% computer and telephone based and I have full access to their Citrix servers, I can do my job successfully from home just as I have done many times in the past when it suited them. Now that I need to, due to large wounds on my arm and leg which are redressed every day, they are getting sniffy about it. Blimey! I was better off when I was self-employed.

But that was a digression and this is more to do with setting up a new Mac. The iMac is the umpteenth Mac swap we have done over the years, from way back in the era of Mac Plus, and Mac IIci in the late 1980s. We know it takes time and as ever, relies as much on the speed of the connection between the two Macs and their hard drives. In the early days it was painfully slow, using the serial network, we could do it via external hard drives which were never quite large enough to do the switch-over in one go. As an average we used to reckon on two or three days, often running all night.

This time we can create a Firewire 800 network and while the old G5 Mac Pro is long in the tooth, it’s still no slouch. We have given up supporting anything older than a fast G4 nowadays. Apple’s Migration Assistant was the chosen tool and being Mac users we didn’t bother to read any instructions. Three hours later the new Mac is up and running. Not quite as we would like but as it was so quick, we will probably erase it’s drive, reinstall the System and re-do the Migration, this time starting the source mac in Firewire disk mode as we, hum hum, should have done.

It’s all good fun, isn’t it? And that 23″ Studio monitor is going to look very cool next to the one already on my desk.

Another two weeks in clink, or hospital whichever way you look at things. All to dig a vein out of my arm to fix the twice repaired artery in my leg. Bloody stuff and still very painful. However, it does give the armoury of entertainment a good run out and here are some recommendations.

First up is the iPod which proved essential when stuffed to the diodes with radio shows and plays downloaded in advance. They even left enough space for a movie or two and some TV shows. All courtesy of BBC iPlayer and home recordings.

Next is the iPad. Its small form factor, with an STM cover for propping it upright, made all night viewing a breeze. Movies and TV shows recorded and compressed kept me going for days, meanwhile my lifeline, or more accurately wifeline, was busy preparing new ones for me.

We did try a MacBook but its weight and large size made it vulnerable in a situation where every surface is cleaned several times a day. A MacBook Air would have been a better choice but I don’t know how safe it would be on open wards with no secure locker. Get whisked off for a scan and return to find it had also been whisked off. Whereas the iPad is small enough to keep with you.

Finally the iPhone rounds off gadgets for the gammy. At first my old iPhone 3GS but the lure of a 4S waiting at home proved too great and what a good thing too. A quick switch of contracts was all that was needed to stream TV and radio to my hospital bed-bound misery.

Obviously the above are all Apple products but there is a good reason for this: they all take the same charger. One tiny white plug and lead powered them all up, rather than the large box of transformer-rectifiers used by other manufacturers.

The best thing about the new iPhone is the aerials. Apple spent extensive research time on them and it has really paid off. This is the first cellphone I can get a signal on in my own home, which being near the seafront, is surrounded by buildings rising higher as the land slopes gently away from the coast. A cellphone signal has been all but impossible to pick up from any supplier on any of the dozens of handsets we have tried.

With the iPhone 4S I get a solid three or four signal bars anywhere in my home. Brilliant!

iPhone Friday saw me at O2 checking out the new phones and very nice they are too. But where to get the best deals? Read more

You might have thought that a large enterprise such as Sony, having suffered a very high profile and therefore very embarrassing (not to mention brand damaging) security breach earlier this year as reported by IT Pro would have done everything it could to ensure there could be no further security shocks for users. You would have been wrong though, if the news that Sony has locked down 93,000 online accounts is anything to go by.

It would appear that a number of unauthorised access attempts had been registered earlier this week, over a three day period, which succeeded as far as verifying the valid sign-in information for more than 90,000 accounts concerning Sony Entertainment Network, Sony Online Entertainment and PlayStation Network users. Although the fact that Sony reacted reasonably quickly in reaction to the hack attempt, coupled with no credit card information being put at risk this time around, might sound like good news for the entertainment giants, I’m not convinced that’s the case.

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Let me rephrase that question: is 97 percent of wireless data really secure? The answer, whichever way you look at it, is quite obviously no. Yet, according to the latest research from the Wi-Fi Alliance, some 97 percent of folk appear to firmly believe that data held on their wireless devices and networks is both safe and secure.

In the name of investigative journalism, and because I needed a loaf of bread, I ventured out in the howling wind and rain of the Pennines this morning with my Wi-Fi detector in hand. As I drove past (I may be dedicated but I’m not daft, and I wasn’t walking anywhere in this weather) the row of small businesses, a nice mix of retail and office-based ones, the software displayed the encryption status of the networks it discovered. Of the 18 networks I found in this very unscientific test, five were completely open and unsecured while one relied upon the totally broken WEP encryption methodology. That, rather handily, equates to a third of the Wi-Fi networks I found operating in one small business area being totally, and undeniably, screwed as far as data security is concerned.

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After hearing the news of the death of Steve Jobs, my first reaction was of sadness for him and his family. But later, it became more than sadness as the news of his death was repeatedly broadcast by the media. That dull feeling in one’s stomach, tight throat and itchy eyes.

In the 1980s Steve told John Sculley, president of Pepsi, that he could sell sugared water but if he joined Apple he could change the world. Prophetic words and ones I listened to as well. In those days and stuck in a career I hated, Apple’s computers offered an escape route.

The competition then had green and black screens driven by command lines and beeped while Apple’s computers were in colour, operated by a mouse and talked to you in stereo. Macs opened the door into desktop publishing, something I had a toehold in via the old Amstrad PCW and Atari ST. It meant spending as much as a brand new car for a Mac, laser printer and software but my design and publishing business flourished, keeping me in work for over 20 years until the bankers screwed the world.

Now, I am typing this on my Mac Pro (albeit logged in from a PC 10 miles away), make calls on my iPhone, listen to my iPod and take an iPad and MacBook on holiday. Tonight we shall probably watch something on our Apple TV.

Steve Jobs and all the people at Apple transformed my life in so many ways that I just can’t express my gratitude and how much I owe the company and it’s visionary leader Steve Jobs.

What do you get if you cross 4,650 IT professionals with social media in the workplace? A lack of Infosec policy that leaves the enterprise at risk. Boom boom! OK, so it’s not the funniest punchline I’ve ever heard, but the level of social media risk that the average enterprise is leaving itself exposed to is, frankly, something of a joke.

The 4,650 IT professionals mentioned above were questioned as part of the Websense/Ponemon Global Survey on Social Media Risks which covered people with an average of 10 years hands-on IT experience, with the majority being of supervisor level or above and some 42 percent representing organisations that employ more than 5,000 people. Yet of this number, 68 percent are still saying that social media is posing a threat in the workplace courtesy of how the staff use it, with 76 percent of them admitting their enterprises don’t have the necessary controls in place to mitigate that risk. Here’s another ‘yet’ to add to the growing list: 56 percent of those asked reckoned that malware infections are increasing as a direct result of that uncontrolled social media use.

Well stuff me sideways on a child’s tricycle, when are people going to actually get the message? Scrap that, stupid question, obviously. 45 percent of those asked said their companies don’t even have a policy regarding acceptable use in the social media sphere. Worse still, of those that do have such a policy, it remains un-enforced in 79 percent of organisations. Double duh with knobs on.

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