Robots, philosophy and other stuff…
There’s been a General Election on here in the UK – have you heard?
Most of my Facebook wall today is full of people rightly or wrongly basking in the failure of UKIP in the election. Now, I’m not a UKIP supporter, but there are some interesting points we can take from this that link to the work of critical theorists such as Deleuze, Guattari and Badiou among others. Continue reading
“I use Grammarly’s free online grammar check because even the best writers make missed stakes.”
I recently stumbled across Grammarly, a tool that claims to be “The World’s Best Grammar Checker”. According to the website, Grammarly is “an automated proofreader and your personal grammar coach” that corrects “up to 10 times” more mistakes than many of the most popular word processor packages. Bold claims indeed, though such powers of proofreading do not come cheap. At the time of writing Grammarly is charging $29.95 per month, or $139.95 for a whole year. That’s £18.56 per month or £86.74 per year for users based in the UK.
But is the system any good? Come to that, can any automated proofreader really substitute for a bit of good old-fashioned honest toil? Continue reading
As a writer I’m fairly easy going when it comes to my working environment. I don’t need much: a computer with an up-to-date version of MSOffice, access to the internet, and a few very minor stationery requirements, and I am well equipped to sit and write all day.
Not too much to ask, you may think – there’s not much there that can particularly go wrong, or make my life more difficult than it needs to be. Well, that’s where you’d be wrong. You see my employer has kitted out our office with Apple Macs, the most un-helpful, un-user-friendly devices imaginable. Whereas on a simple low-spec PC I would be able to do most things a writer needs to do, such as rename files and multi-task between a few Word documents, on a Mac even these simple tasks become a chore. Continue reading