Kate Profile picture
Cat pictures, tech & 🙄🙄. Occasionally on telly/radio. Owner of @Raspberry_Pi-powered tweeting catflap @daphneflap. I don't like chocolate.
Jan 7 5 tweets 1 min read
Bit tired of "ooh bad journalists didn't cover the Post Office scandal". It's been covered for years: there have been two Panoramas, coverage of the court cases going back years, Radio 4 has done a series, Private Eye has been all over it, Computer Weekly has been on it for years There's an excellent, deeply researched and detailed book by @nickwallis and the newspapers have been covering it off and on for years, and the police investigation has been running since 2020. I'm glad the TV drama has brought it to wider knowledgeable
Aug 23, 2023 21 tweets 6 min read
Let's have a Pallas Cat thread.

This Pallas Cat has had rather too much nip Image This Pallas Cat is really done with your shit Image
May 1, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Been chucked out of the desktop and Tweetdeck and I'm not alone, it seems. What has Elon broken now?? 🙄 ah, I'm back in. Well done, Elon
Jan 13, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
my god this is so stupid "Investigators say there is a clear link between illegal streaming services and fraud, scams and organised crime." Citation very fucking needed here, thank you.
Jan 12, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read
Spent all evening trying to work out why my laptop was suddenly locking really quickly and ignoring my power settings. Turns out it has a presence-sensing function that I couldn't access until I downloaded the consumer version of Lenovo Vantage
- mine has the commercial version. For some reason the presence sensing had turned itself on after a reboot. It has *never* done this in the couple of years I've had this laptop. Never knew the lappy had this function. Found it by digging through forums.
Nov 29, 2022 8 tweets 2 min read
I really really wish broadcasting coverage of this fucking awful bill didn't rely so heavily on kneejerk reactions from pressure groups. There's no context to this at all; no discussion about why "legal but harmful" is such a hopeless and problematic concept. We don't even really know what "harmful" means. Something that hurts someone's feelings? Whose feelings? A six-year-old? A 16-year-old? A 60-year old? Something that sends them down a disinformation rabbit hole? But who defines "misinformation"?
Nov 28, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read
yeah, I'm seeing far too many credulous "Musk is going to launch a phone" stories. No, he's not going to launch a phone. Not least because he's going to face the same fight with Google as he's picking with Apple over their cut of in-app revenues ... and if there's one thing we learned from Huawei, it's that nobody wants an Android phone without Google services - the Play store, Gmail, Maps, YouTube etc. Yes, a tiny handful of nerds might be up for a Google-free phone, but trust me, it's a pain in the arse to use.
Nov 27, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
Hugely enjoying the latest bonkers conspiracy theory that Matt Hancock is doing well in #ImACeleb because "the production team is in on it", etc. He's getting votes because he's being a good sport and a team player. Not because there's some grand conspiracy. I mean, obviously there's an element of "make the fucker eat kangaroo anus and suffer", but I think it's gone beyond that now. If you're not steeped in Twitter and politics, it's easy to see him as a good sport who's mucking in and pulling his weight.
Nov 26, 2022 8 tweets 3 min read
This is great from @milesbrignall. I thought a lot about how older people are excluded from the rush to doing everything online/on a smartphone, and it's a hard problem, because brands don't want to offer offline/analogue services that most folk won't use theguardian.com/money/2022/nov… There's a wider issue: there are many whose only internet access is an old, out of support phone, one that's not secure, where apps stop working, and they're often vulnerable. Orgs really need to think about not just older people, but all whose digital access is limited.
Jun 25, 2022 9 tweets 1 min read
The entirety of British Twitter is tweeting NA NA NA NA NANA NAAAAAAAAAAAAAA my god, what will he do for an encore?
Jun 25, 2022 33 tweets 4 min read
MACCCCCAAAA!!!! #Glastonbury Nobody wants to hear the new songs, Paul. Play the bangers everyone knows! #Glastonbury
May 3, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
This series with Wim Hof on @BBCOne is basically about making celebrities freezing cold in various creative and sadistic ways @BBCOne I do rather want one of those big outdoor dressing gowns, though
May 3, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
Cow parsley has gone delightfully nuts in Brompton Cemetery - it's up to my shoulders This is my favourite path in the cemetery, along the eastern wall, and it is spectacular at this time of year
Sep 10, 2021 7 tweets 2 min read
This isn't a deep dive. It's "ooh, I wore these and here are photos of me wearing these and here are the quotes from the press kit and from Facebook's tame 'privacy groups'." So tired of the absence of critical approach from so many male reporters on these. Every review of these from women is "has Facebook no clue about why these are so hugely problematic?", while most of the dudes' reviews are rehashing the press release while not even thinking that a camera disguised as Ray Bans just might be thoroughly creepy
Sep 8, 2021 6 tweets 2 min read
I love Bluetooth in theory, but it's so stupidly annoying in practice. Which of these is my Chromebook, FFS*? I want to send some files from it to my Windows laptop and I can see I'm going to have to email them to myself 🙄

*Answer: none of them. Image I mean, this should not be hard. They're right next to each other ImageImage
Sep 7, 2021 6 tweets 1 min read
I see we're already into snotty, grubby intergenerational pointscoring and we haven't even got the full details yet *sigh* it's also worth noting that there are ways of raising cash from a house without selling it, though the equity release landscape is a total minefield & can leave very disappointed Gen X/Millennial heirs when they find that the sale of their late mum's house leaves them nothing
Apr 24, 2021 4 tweets 1 min read
of all the stupid, obnoxious, crass, offensive shite this idiot crowd has pulled over the past year, this is absolutely the worst thing. You only have to look at the devastating pictures from India to see what happens when you don't take steps such as lockdowns to contain the virus. People turned away from hospitals, people dying in streets. I honestly don't have enough words to express my contempt for them.
Sep 25, 2020 7 tweets 3 min read
Well, I just nearly got fooled by a scam: watch out for this one, gang. I got this text, and because I'm expecting a delivery (aren't we all in these days of online shopping?) I tapped through when I should have looked more closely at the URL That sent me to a very good facsimile of a DPD page, complete with tracking number, and a convincing journey through rebooking a delivery
Sep 24, 2020 4 tweets 1 min read
why yes I have just ordered a very lovely fancy widescreen monitor to replace the two ancient side-by-side monitors I've been using for years. If we're going to be wfh for another six months, I want a new monitor samsung.com/uk/monitors/cu… oh good, my monitor is due to be delivered by Yodel 😩😩😩
Sep 23, 2020 4 tweets 2 min read
Good piece in Wired about potential pitfalls with the track and trace app wired.co.uk/article/nhs-co… This is a big concern: QR codes are a security risk, as I discussed on @TimesRadio this morning with @StigAbell Image
Sep 15, 2020 4 tweets 1 min read
hey @UPS_UK this is 2020. It would be very nice if you could implement some tech that would give folk a better indication of when their parcel might arrive rather than "by the end of Tuesday". I don't even know what "the end of Tuesday" means. 5pm? 8pm? Midnight? Related: I need to pop out for 10 minutes, which obvs guarantees that the package, which needs a signature, will arrive during those 10 minutes.