While my rudimentary French and Spanish may be enough to get me a room for the night in a Paris or Madrid hotel, my foreign-language skills leave a lot to be desired. But still, it amuses me when I see translations such as this, where the penman has clearly used a Spanish>English dictionary to translate their message very literally.
On a recent trip from London’s Luton Airport, I encountered this helpful chap, who was on-hand to provide some guidance on how best to navigate one’s way through customs.
I’m sure this is quite a common technological advance at airports across the world, but it’s the first time I’ve seen such tech used first-hand. It’s like something from Total Recall.
It’s the bane of every blogger. Comment spam, blog spam…whatever you want to call it, has reached epidemic proportions. Bloggers from all backgrounds set aside time to sift through the steady stream of pseudo-comments that sit waiting for ‘approval’.
Most experienced bloggers can spot a counterfeit comment from a hundred yards. The grammar is normally passable, and it often adopts a rather complimentary approach, but it just never seems quite right.
A quick perusal of the thousand-odd comments awaiting approval on my own blog (most of the comments will never see the light of day, I must add…), reveals where the spammers are going wrong.
To read more on this, check out my piece over at The Next Web: ¿Habla Spamglish? Speaking the language of spambots.
Has it really been six years since YouTube first took to the online airwaves? No, not quite. But a month from now will see that magic milestone reached, so I went in search for the first ever YouTube video…and I found it.
Uploaded at 8.27pm on Saturday 23rd of April, 2005, YouTube’s inaugural video starred company co-founder Jawed Karim. It’s not terribly exciting, and it lasts a mere eighteen seconds, but it’s a historical moment nonetheless.
The ‘Me at the zoo‘ video is Karim standing in front of a herd of elephants at San Diego Zoo. His main insight is that these elephants have “really, really, really…long trunks”.
Anyway…watch it for yourself here:
I’ve never been duped by spam, and I aim to keep it that way.
But Thursday was the closest I’ve come yet to being even remotely fooled by a digital fraudster. How? Here’s how.
I never, ever do the National Lottery. But on Wednesday I did – and I bought my ticket online. The jackpot was around the £3m mark.
So when I got this email in my inbox on Thursday, I was very excited:
