Raiding the archive

It has recently come to my attention...

I was going to erase that opening but then I thought it was mildly amusing that my default setting this afternoon seems to be that of deputy headteacher about to hand out punishments for some crime or other.

Let's start again.

Being narcissistic, I was reading my recent articles, er, recently. And I noticed that, if you look at them on an Apple tablet, none of the embedded youTube videos work.

They don't tell you that they haven't worked. They just appear as a completely empty blank space as though the author was sent to sleep by his own writing and his head slumped on the 'return' key.

I can assure you that has not happened yet.

No, not yet. Here's what I think happened. Google has embedded the video as little boxes of Flash (you know, the saviour of the universe). And Apple has decided that it doesn't like Flash because, er, I've forgotten and who cares anyway. It was something about it crashing a lot and making their machines look bad.

Surely if I want to run rubbish software (which, incidentally, doesn't crash a lot on my PC or make it look bad), that's up to me? Maybe put a little bubble next to it saying "This is rubbish. We advise you not to use it. If you do and it's horrible, don't blame us."

But no. You can't have it. They know best.

Charlie Brooker

Charlie Brooker's excellent and generally wonderful series "Weekly Wipe" uses the cheeky device of pretending it's a six-episode series but then pulling a switcheroo and making episode six a compilation of the best bits of the previous five. You know, for those who've forgotten what they saw about a month ago and really want to watch it again now.

In tribute to him, here's an article I wrote about four years ago (get that, Charlie? YEARS! not weeks - YEARS!) about how Apple writes control-freak software.

I called it "Why Apple's iTunes is a demented butler who won't let you poach salmon in your dishwasher".

At about the time I wrote it and hawked it around a journal or two (actually it was one) who didn't want to publish it, Charlie himself wrote a (slightly) (all right, not very) similar article about Apple. I can't remember his. I'm not saying he copied me. Of course he didn't. He wouldn't have even seen mine.

And I joined Twitter to tell him about the hilarious similarity. Because, back then, I thought that was how Twitter worked.

That, in itself, slightly terrifies me. But I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.

No, that wasn't a typo. It was simple plagiarism. A prize to the first person who can tell me where I stole it from and who can promise that they didn't just look it up on Google.