Been avoiding this but I'll bite: London is not "an unaffordable shit-hole". It's a long way from perfect, but we have great public transport, accessible and free museums and institutions, wonderful art, terrific food etc. If Matt and Charlotte don't like it, then don't come here Also, I must take issue with Gill's "lack of functional media" bullshit: we have the BBC, which is world-class; we have four other terrestrial channels producing a wide range of stuff for a diverse audience; we have a lively newspaper landscape & endless specialist publications

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

Let's have a Pallas Cat thread.

This Pallas Cat has had rather too much nip This Pallas Cat is really done with your shit

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

my god this is so stupid

https://twitter.com/DailyMirror/status/1612759433620197376

"Investigators say there is a clear link between illegal streaming services and fraud, scams and organised crime." Citation very fucking needed here, thank you.

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/AnnitaBBC/status/1597546771739250689

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"?

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 ...

https://twitter.com/KarlBode/status/1597341871889842177

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.

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.

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.

The entirety of British Twitter is tweeting NA NA NA NA NANA NAAAAAAAAAAAAAA my god, what will he do for an encore?

MACCCCCAAAA!!!! #Glastonbury Nobody wants to hear the new songs, Paul. Play the bangers everyone knows! #Glastonbury

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

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

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.

https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1435996540380717057

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

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. I mean, this should not be hard. They're right next to each other

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

of all the stupid, obnoxious, crass, offensive shite this idiot crowd has pulled over the past year, this is absolutely the worst thing.

https://twitter.com/Baddiel/status/1385952054733119496

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.

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

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 😩😩😩

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