Have you ever listened to Radio 2’s morning news bulletins? They always end with the results of some new poll or research project. I’m sure they’ll mention this one tomorrow.

The latest is that UK children are less ‘intelligent’ than their counterparts 30 years ago. This ‘intelligence’ is not measured in terms of exams passed or school marks – exams are blatantly getting easier, and have a look at your mum’s O-level papers if you don’t believe me – but rather by administering to a sample of children the same test that was first given in 1976. Today’s youth did not do well.

I don’t think this is particularly surprising. Children learn through creative play and experimentation, neither of which they have any pressing need to engage in. When you can watch Cartoon Network 24 hours a day, why bother?

I don’t think this is an entirely new phenomenon, either. Just have a look at the number of self-taught scientists there were in the 19th century. Were they all incredibly clever back then? No, just bored, I reckon.

TV, games consoles, the Internet and finally, piss-easy exams are making things too easy. There’s no need to find new ways of keeping yourself entertained when you can just sit like a lemon in front of the telly and have it beam effortlessly into your gaping face. I demand a return to children sitting at home rubbing pieces of Lego together because they have nothing better to do. And from those pieces of Lego will spring child prodigies the like of which the world has never seen! Since 1976.

God, spammers. Aren’t they annoying? Whether it’s filling your inbox with messages about your willy or clogging up this fine site with ads for Phentermine – whatever that is – they definitely want shooting.

I haven’t personally had much spam in a long time – this isn’t a hint – mostly because I avoid posting my email address anywhere and I make sure I sign up for sites using a Hotmail address I don’t ever have to look at. I think that’s the most effective way of keeping email spammers at bay, but there are a few more.

SpamAssassin is super if you can be bothered to get it running; it’s written in Perl and only really works on Unix systems. It’s great though – it assigns scores to various spam-like attributes, and if a message scores above a certain threshold, it’s thrown out. Very clever. The Thunderbird email client lets you mark messages as “spam” or “not spam”, and learns from experience. That’s pretty clever too.

People were understandably shocked and upset when this shower of bastards cancelled Sam and Max 2, but then came the hints that it might be saved! And so the hilarity began.

Bad Brain Entertainment, a previously unheard-of German outfit, began posting subtle hints that Sam and Max 2 might not be quite so dead after all. Subtle hints like “we can’t tell you what we’re talking to LucasArts about, but it involves a dog and a rabbit!!!”. I may be paraphrasing a tiny bit.

Considering Bad Brain were supposedly under a Non-Disclosure Agreement, nobody was too surprised when “negotiations” broke down. Fast forward to 2005 and the Bad Brain CEO Blog, a veritable gold-mine of comedy. Here we discover that those high-powered negotations involved… one email exchange and no further contact.

Oh dear. On this same CEO blog, we also discover that Bad Brain found their corporate logo on the Internet. Wolfgang, top CEO, named his upcoming game i-Jet after seeing an inkjet printer in his office.

Something similar happens in Fun with Dick and Jane. But that is, you know, a comedy film.

The latest development is that some guy from the Adventure Gamers forums has been on an internship with the company. Nothing strange about that, you might think, but after reading his article I can’t shake the feeling that he’s the entire creative force behind the company. It’s just that nobody has mentioned that to him yet.

I’ve linked to it before, but it’s very apt. Had old Wolfgang decided to set Bad Brain up fifteen years ago, his enthusiasm would probably have got him somewhere. But this is 2006 and it costs millions to bring a successful game to market – unless you convince your potential fanbase to make your game for you, or something. Oh Wolfgang, you wouldn’t!

Hmm, haven’t had a post about telly for a while, eh? Probably because I don’t watch the old tellybox that much any more, but what the hell! That just makes my observations all the more relevant, right? Er… right?

The only unmissable thing on at the moment is Life on Mars, BBC1. Our hero is transported back in time to the 1970s, where he’s a detective – the same as in the modern day – in very different circumstances. His crazy modern methods cause a stir in the land of wide collars and moody smoke-filled rooms, but he gets results. Don’t they all?

I hate to say it, but the only other thing I even slightly watch is Celebrity Big Brother. Well, where else can you find a self-styled “protector of the weak” (not a direct quote) Member of Parliament standing around as “not a transvestite, just dressed as a woman” Pete Burns hurls abuse at some woman who was in Baywatch? Nowhere, that’s where!

Fortunately, there is a reason for that. Celebrity Big Brother is simultaneously appalling and engrossing, and I can’t help but watch it. Oh dear.

Energy efficiency = more cash 2 you. Or so the old advert said.

BBC News recently had an article about the ’standby’ button prevalent on many consumer electronics – TVs, hi-fis – and the effect it’s having on energy consumption across the UK. Slashdot, that bastion of great journalism, picked up the story and it got over 700 comments, way above average. Now I couldn’t be bothered reading any of these, but I think that suggests it was a bit of a hot topic. And so it is a hot topic here. The needless waste of energy has always been a bugbear of mine.

Whether it’s an office full of brightly-lit CRT monitors merrily displaying login screens to each other all night and all weekend, or a nation of TVs left on ’standby’ mode – apparently using two-thirds of full power in some cases – it’s just annoying. The government is rightly trying to encourage people to cut down on their energy consumption, not least because they don’t really want to build any more of those nasty, loss-making nuclear power stations. Manufacturers are getting better at cutting ’standby’ energy consumption – but there’s a fly in the energy-saving ointment.

As you will be aware if you read my Luddite rantings, analogue television is going to be turned off in 2010 or so, replaced with its digital cousin, Freeview and digital satellite. In the same government committee meeting as some clever blokey said that “digital TV represents nothing of benefit whatsoever”, it also transpired that “the impact on the UK’s electricity consumption from forcing people to buy set-top boxes for every TV and analogue video recorder in their house is significant”. To the tune of £7 of electricity per set-top box per year, in fact.

Let me introduce BSkyB, who require every customer to keep their digital set-top box switched on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, as a condition of their continued subscription. The idea is that Sky may want to squirt a software update down the line once in a blue moon, and the box had better be around to receive it. Let me also introduce Panasonic, whose set-top boxes consume 18 watts on full power – and 17 watts on standby*. I’m sure Panasonic aren’t the only ones with similarly pointless ’standby’ modes for their digital TV equipment.

Not that you can sensibly not use Standby mode on a lot of these devices, anyway. Guess what happens if you disobey the almighty Sky and switch your digibox off at the wall? You have to wait over 30 seconds for it to reboot itself when it comes back on. If you switch a Freeview box off? It forgets what channels it can receive. A Kenwood hi-fi? It comes back on in its flashy in-store ‘demo’ mode. Great.

Hope Tony’s getting those nuclear power stations ready!

* These figures are from memory of reading the tech sheet in the back of the manual, but each is no more than 5 watts out. And the two figures are very, very close.

The iTunes Music Store is a really useful thing to have around. It’s reasonably priced for single tracks, and as long as that’s all you’re after, it’s a great way of ensuring you get hold of a reasonably high-quality copy of your desired track quickly and with the minimum of fuss. No more messing around with dodgy P2P applications only to receive a blippy, dropout-ridden mess time after time!

Of course, it’s not perfect. The fact that you can buy a real, physical CD album for only fractionally more than you can download one from iTunes is a disadvantage, but not a major one. After all, if I was locked in the house and for some reason needed to play Dark Side of the Moon three times backwards to escape, the ability to download it on iTunes would seem quite handy. But that’s the only situation in which I can see myself doing it.

There’s one huge disadvantage though. There is no way to re-download the tracks you have purchased. You have to take care of them after the initial download, backing them up and re-importing them in iTunes as you move from computer to computer. Now here’s the major problem: the tracks are DRM’ed (Digital Rights Management’ed) to stop you naughtily passing them on to your friends. So surely… if some catastrophe befalls your computer, even if you have copies of these magical music files, won’t the same mechanism stop you using them? Aren’t you a bit bummed in the face?

Maybe not. I’m sure there’s some clever “associate my music library with this account” trickery available in iTunes. But I don’t think it’s reasonable, or sensible, to expect the user to keep backups of their music files. Of course, anyone who doesn’t back-up their documents is asking for trouble, but music files? Hardly top of the priority list.

You can freely delete your ripped music files and simply rip them again on your new computer – why not allow iTunes Music Store purchases to be re-downloaded? Buying something digitally is patently not the same as buying a physical item, and as such it is difficult to think of them in the same way. If you lose a CD, you know it’s gone. If you lose a computer file you downloaded, there’s got to be some way to download it again – right? Right? I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking this way. But in iTunes’ case, I’d be wrong.

Curse you Apple, curse you.

It’s 2006, and what better way for spammers to start the year than to discover this superb web site! Obviously you should ignore any annoying spam messages that you may find littering the place like crates of dead sheep, while imagining yourself shooting a spammer IN THE FACE.

It could improve your life!