STEPHEN FRY

Stephen Fry explains the suitcase of cables he takes with him when travelling

Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 18th October 2008 in The Guardian “Dork Talk” – The Guardian headline.

It’s farewell for quite a few months, I fear, as I head off to Africa, Mauritius, Indonesia, New Zealand and the Sea of Cortez to make a documentary about disappearing species. I shall be out of reach of broadband, mobile phone and even landlines for much of the time. That will not stop me from taking a suitcase full of cables, chargers, memory cards and connectors, however, and I thought I might, by way of valediction, give you an inventory of what this particular dork packs when he travels.

Photograph: Alamy

First of all, should all else fail, I will make sure that there’s at least one of Trevor Baylis’s products in my bag. Baylis, you may remember, pioneered the wind-up radio. On the eco-gadget site biggreensmile.com you can find his company’s practical and hardy hand-crankable media players, the latest (the Eco Media Revolution) offering radio, video, music, photo, text, phone-charging, memo recording and storage in most of the useful formats and codecs, all for £129.99. One minute of winding makes for 45 minutes of play, that’s the promise: a big British bargain. The same site has a Freeloader solar charger for £24.95 that will help with juicing up all my gadgets when I’m too hot and knackered to crank.

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Stephen Fry explores the high-end of digital music technology

Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 11th October 2008 in The Guardian “Dork Talk Listen to this” – The Guardian headline.

Mankind’s hunger for what Emerson called “a better mousetrap” is unquenchable. I can think of few technological solutions perfect enough to force inventors and innovators to proclaim, “Right, that’s it. Problem solved. Let’s move on.” The Screwpull came along in the 80s and was declared the last word in corkscrews, yet innovations continue to stream from the world’s drawing-boards. Coffee makers: I could hymn on coffee makers until you begged for mercy. Pencil sharpeners, umbrellas, cigarette lighters: mankind will never cease from reaching ever upwards towards the paradigmatically perfect implement. Actually, you might argue that in the last category Zippo reached the sunlit uplands decades ago: wind-proof, reliable, a design classic that works every time and comes with a lifetime guarantee. Pity no one smokes any more.

Katie Melua listening to her iPod. Photograph: Linda Nylind

There is surely no climb to perfection more impossible of completion than that of the ascent towards the ultimate high-end sound system. How can we hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture with which music originally smote us amidships and enslaved us for ever? The rainbow we chase is to make music sound new again. Hi-fi is like wine: dangerously expensive as taste refines and jolly enthusiasm turns to pernickety connoisseurship. Audio shops still exist where twins of the Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy sell valve amplifiers, record decks and styli as if the digital revolution never happened. They’re probably right: nothing matches vinyl and analogue for audio range and richness. I want, however, to consider users who are hunting high-quality portable, digital music.

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Are you Coke or Pepsi? PC or Mac? Oxford or Cambridge? Nikon or Canon? Stephen Fry reveals where his loyalty lies

Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 20th September 2008 in The Guardian “What kind of camera are you?” – The Guardian headline.

Every Coke has a Pepsi, every Visa a MasterCard. Who do you support in the Boat Race and why? Don’t you dare tell me you couldn’t give a fig either way: it’s Oxford or Cambridge, at some point one must develop a preference, for whatever reason. It’s Harvard or Yale, Harpic or Domestos, AA or RAC, PC or Mac. Binary tribalism: Gilbert and Sullivan wrote a song about it.

Canon EOS 1000D: All the convenience of a compact, but underneath lies the potential of a real grown-up SLR

In the world of serious SLR photography, the choice has always been between Nikon or Canon. The single lens reflex (SLR) camera is best defined as being the sort of camera where what you see is what you shoot. As the initials tell you, it is a single lensed entity, a lens that can be changed with a twist of its bayonet. A clever mirror ensures the viewfinder’s image is more or less congruent to that of the lens. The SLR is the choice of photojournalists, paparazzi, sports photographers – anyone who needs fast, accurate shooting. The camera goes up to the eye and will be manufactured (with apologies to Pentax, Olympus, Leica and Minolta) by Nikon or Canon. A huge range of Nikkor F-mount lenses for the Nikon and EOS EF lenses for the Canon have built up over the years; they are forwardly and backwardly compatible with new DSLR and old SLR bodies, but not across the brands. An EOS won’t fit a Nikon body nor a Nikkor a Canon. There are issues with older Canons and with some Nikon auto focus lenses, but generally speaking, this broad description is correct. A profitable war zone where two major powers continue to joust.

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Stephen Fry: I Skype, you Skype, he/she/it Skypes, we will have Skyped, they would have been Skyping

Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 13th September 2008 in The Guardian “Save yourself a packet on mobile calls” – The Guardian headline.

Every once in a while a proprietary device or process strikes it lucky and becomes The One. A combination of apt nomenclature and mass-market penetration will allow it to achieve the ultimate accolade of being used as a verb – we have been Googling for the best part of a decade. But who would have guessed that a company from Tallinn, Estonia, might join this elite group? But I Skype, you Skype, he/she/it Skypes, we will have Skyped, they would have been Skyping.

3’s Skype phone

Skype is the best known of the VOIP services, utilising the Voice Over Internet Protocol to allow anyone with a net connection to make free calls to other Skype users. You can also top up a Skype account via credit card or PayPal to get a SkypeIn number, and make and receive local and international calls, taking advantage of all that bandwidth at a fraction of the price your home telecoms company would charge. On top of this are Skype’s videoconferencing and instant messaging services, akin to iChat, AIM, Jabber and Windows Messenger.

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