I read this report on BBC's Newsbeat site with interest. Particularly the last few paragraphs, where my distant Future colleague Chris Jenkins, a man whose opinion I trust not simply because of our shared employer, explains that you do indeed need to invest in a good cable to get good results.

He argues that more expensive cables do make a difference, especially in more complex home cinema setups and over cable runs of longer than one metre.

"As you connect more and more items together, say an HD box and games console, or multi channel amplifier, you will need better and better quality cables to maintain the quality of the signal.

"£120 cable for your first purchase? No. But certainly don't try to get away with a £1.99 cable"

Chris' advice is to budget around 10% of a system's price for HDMI cables.

This absurd reliance on expensive cables is a huge shame. I utterly resent paying £Stupid for a poxy cable.

Here's my problem. HDMI was invented relatively recently. It crams a million signals into a tiny thin cable with a puny connector. This is a glaring flaw considering the ever-present threat of signal cross-talk, which anyone who's ever waved an unshielded VGA cable near a kettle lead will know all about.

It's as if HDMI's inventors - blasted audiophiles, no doubt, with solid unobtainium speaker cables surrounded by signal-blocking moats, each maintained by a private cable-butler to dust off every speck of signal-reducing muck and ward off filthy interference-laden plebs - decided to produce the most awkward cable possible just to mess with us normal people. "You want it? Fine! But my stereo is more expensive than both my houses. I expect similar investment from you!"

Yes, HDMI is svelte, but why? Who cares? Was there anyone specifically asking for a small connector that would require a month's wages to work properly? SCART is massive. It has pretty much served its purpose in its current guise but a new version, using cheap existing tech to make a new product, would have worked just fine and slid in way under HDMI's extortionate budget.

It's too late to moan about this, I know. And hey, my assertions are probably way off the mark. But it would be sad if we all started worrying more about our cables than the bits of kit attached to either end of them.

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According to the industry, 3D is the next big thing. TV manufacturers are chomping at the bit to sell us new monitors. Sky is planning a huge 3D blitz this year, including the launch of a dedicated 3D TV channel. Games are an obvious contender for the 3D treatment, thanks to the fact that they have all the data they need to produce an effective world already built in. Verily, the planet is on the cusp of an incredible 3D revolution and we should all be excited!

But I’m not. To hell with 3D. If I could change one thing about the cinema-going experience – other than shooting bloody Pearl & Dean into the sun – it would be to watch every blockbuster in IMAX. That would be a genuine improvement. 3D is just another gimmick, right down there with Smell-O-Vision, electric shocks coming through the seat, vibrating cinema chairs and, of course, the last 17 times that the industry has tried to make 3D into the Next Big Thing. And we still don’t need it.

I’ve never, ever seen a 3D movie that so much as breathed softly on my socks, never mind blew them off. Realistically, the technology offers exactly two tricks of note. There’s the annoying one, as demonstrated in Monsters vs Aliens, which opens with a guy batting a ball at the screen just to go, ‘Ooooh! 3D in your face!’ If I never see that one again, it’ll be too soon. The other one, which is largely pushing the 3D revolution, is all about adding depth to scenes. This can work, I’ll admit, and it can also be effective. You definitely notice it – especially in a film such as Avatar – but, more importantly, you can actively not notice it and still get some benefit, which is what really matters.

At least, in theory.

The problem is that, for all the potential benefits, 3D just seems to be Hollywood’s most expensive way to give me a headache, even including the Bourne movies and the continued acting career of Shia LaBeouf. Yes, this is probably just a question of my rubbish eyes, all maggoty with astigmatism and myopia as they are, but I don’t care. By the end of Avatar’s seven-hour running time, my whole face felt as though someone had just opened the Ark of the Covenant over on the next row. My eyes oozed blood and gooey eyeball juice into my popcorn. Still, at least it stopped anyone else from stealing any.

Even before that point, though, Avatar only gave me about five minutes of genuine 3D ‘Oooh!’ before the effect faded, as any effect inevitably does. From that point on, the glasses, the popping tricks and the background shimmer – in fact, all the pieces of technology that were meant to be immersing me in the action – served only as a constant lingering reminder that I wasn’t in fact on a distant jungle planet with lots of sexy blue people, but in a cinema and in need of some aspirin. The trade-off simply wasn’t worth it, especially when coupled with the dark tint that the obnoxious 3D glasses put over all the film’s beautiful bright colours. Also, the film was a bit rubbish.

Even watching great 3D movies, such as Pixar’s Up, I’ve never been able to settle in and just enjoy the film or get completely lost in the action, not with every background shimmering away like a desert mirage and each character popping into the screen. I quite often lift up the glasses just to compare the two images and every time it’s the same: any power that the 3D version of the film has ultimately comes from the 2D version being exquisitely made. I’ve never wanted for that extra half a dimension as much as I craved the brighter colours and a lack of intense eye-trauma after leaving the cinema.

Of course, it’s no wonder that the industry desperately wants 3D technology to be a big deal. Right now, it’s the only real benefit cinemas can offer over home theatre systems, aside from ever-more obnoxious advertising and snot-smeared pick ’n’ mix. Looking ahead, hardware companies see it as the next big reason to make us all upgrade our kit. And good for them. It’s still not an upgrade I can see myself rushing out to make, or can imagine recommending anyone else to go and do likewise.

When we finally get TVs that can add that illusion of depth without needing glasses, we’ll have a genuine step forward. Until then, it’s just a gimmick – an effect we’ll all get accustomed to and subsequently bored of in a couple of weeks. If anything, the best thing for 3D would be for it to stay as popular as it is now – an occasional treat for people who like it, something that’s to be savoured and allowed to maintain what power it has. Taking it mainstream can only ruin the effect in ways that my astigmatism and quick-drying contact lenses can only dream of – and you can bet that losing the magic won’t come cheap.

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Without warning, they invaded. The Graze packs. Little boxes of nuts, dried fruit and other healthy snacks, designed to be delivered to a busy office desk for a quick mid-morning snack.

First there was one, sent to Production Editor Caity as a reward for topping up her mobile phone. Inside was a number - a special promo code offering a pound off another box if someone else signed up for a freebie. Two days later, there were three. The next week, another round of snacks landed in the post.

And so it began.

As marketing strategies go, it's a winner. Over the last couple of weeks, our office has been inundated with free and cut-price boxes, each holding a few handfuls of olives, chilli crackers and such, and every time, at least one person has come over, gone 'Ooh!' and walked off with a code.

If you've never heard of it, Graze is a subscription-based service, the idea being that you get a box of goodies on specific days, and while everyone claims they're going to cancel after their freebie, I can't help noticing the boxes still rolling in. Should we be worried? Yes. I'm no maths expert, but if things continue at their current rate, I calculate that Graze will have all the money in the world by 2017. The only thing that can possibly save us is our postroom getting sick of delivering them and demanding a cut. That's not much protection against global financial annihilation, especially if they're willing to take their share in dried morello cherries.

Even then, nature will find a way. I predict the current sleek boxes being replaced with something in an 'anonymous brown wrapper' style by the end of the year, or perhaps an impromptu underground railway being set up in our office basement. Or maybe everyone will just get bored and move on. Stranger things have happened.

On principle, I've yet to sample anything from any of the multitude of boxes. If I'm going to have a snack at my desk, the last thing I want is for it to be "healthy". I'm not against the basic idea, though; just waiting for Graze's evil mirror universe equivalent, Shovel, to break through the dimensional barrier and offer a similar system built around pick and mix. Chocolate! Liquorice! Toffee! Jelly babies! That could work, but (Hi, Production Editor Caity here. Sorry for interrupting whatever it was that Richard was talking about, but I just wanted to say that to try a free box of Graze for yourself, head over to Graze HQ and use the code C2M149P. Join us! JOIN US! Ooh, and you've got to try the chilli and black pepper olives. Mmmm!) and I'm not sure that mail order toast will ever take off. Still, you never know. They're doing amazing things with lasers these days, and orphans are increasingly affordable.

SHOVEL! For MEN! Also WOMEN! And CHILDREN! But NOBODY ELSE!

The downside of services such as these is obvious: the lack of instant gratification. There's definitely something to be said for anticipation - waiting for a new game, a film, the latest issue of your favourite computer magazine - but when it comes to food, now is always going to be a better time to get it than next Tuesday.

What I'm really looking forward to is a world where we can order anything online - healthy, unhealthy, living, dead - and have it delivered to us the same day. It's already starting, although only on a small scale - for instance, Amazon now offers same-day evening delivery in both London and Birmingham, and in several cities in the US as well. Admittedly, it costs £15 per delivery, so it's probably not something you'll use for any old paperback. For the rest of us, the best we can get is Amazon Prime (which I've used for a couple of years). This gives a year of next-day deliveries for a one-off payment of £50. It works well, but who has time to wait a whole night for a delivery?

The logistics of same-day becoming the standard would be a complete nightmare for both stores and courier companies - but consider that we've gone from waiting weeks for the average purchase to having it show up the very next morning. We're not talking much more of a push, and the stores in particular have good reason to make it work. Imagine the impulse buying potential! How would anyone ever get anything done again?

Of course, even in a world of almost instant deliveries of anything we want, the good feelings won't last. Soon enough, we'll be bitching that things took a whole hour to arrive. In a world of transporter beams and replicators, failing to anticipate the demand would irk. When that problem's licked, we'll hate ourselves for being so predictable, and the shops for being so forward. It's a no-win situation, especially since, by this point, Graze will have had all our money for the last decade or so, so we won't actually be able to buy anything anyway.

Sigh. Hungry now. Wish I'd thought to order a Mars bar last Thursday.

Luckily, there are vending machines downstairs.

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The post-Christmas sales are a good excuse to expose yourself to bleeding-edge technology. Trawling the shelves looking for a laptop, I saw Acer’s multi-touch notebook available at a bargain price of £690. Just 48 hours later the Windows 7 preinstalled laptop has become the focus of this column – it’s a tale of repeated mistakes and missed opportunities.

This is my second Acer and my fourth laptop overall (I prefer the cheap horsepower of a desktop), but the first that came with a preinstalled operating system. Normally I would go for the version without an OS, or with a sorry excuse for an OS such as FreeDOS, then wipe it clean and install Ubuntu or Fedora. But this laptop saved me paying for a Windows 7 licence separately (I wouldn’t be a very good Linux commentator if I didn’t keep an eye on the other camp).

Still, I was disappointed that this laptop didn’t offer a Linux alternative. When Acer, rather boldly I might add, introduced the Aspire One netbook that dual-booted Windows and Android – which Google continues to maintain is meant only for mobile phones – I imagined it would start a new trend of offering multi-boot machines and other vendors would follow suite. Unfortunately, no such thing has happened. Laptops and their vendors continue to be biased towards a single OS.

How so? This laptop has a 320GB disk and the whole thing is one huge partition (or so it would appear) with Windows sitting pretty inside it. Rest assured, your average computer user would lack the skills and patience required to prepare this disk for receiving another OS.

In case you’ve run into this problem yourself, try the wonderful Gparted Live CD. It boots into a front end for the venerable GNU Parted program. So I popped in the CD and it revealed that there are actually three partitions on the disk, two of which don’t show up inside Windows. Maybe they’re for restoring the Windows install. I let them be and resized the huge Windows partition to make up 150-odd GB for Linux. There were lot of bits of data to move about and the process took a couple of hours.

When it’s done Windows failed to boot. The Windows boot loader complained that it couldn’t find the Windows installation. So I grab the boot manager, GAG, and hey presto – it finds and boots Windows without any issues.

It’s one thing not to put a laptop on the shelf that dual-
boots Windows and Linux. But it’s completely ridiculous to make the process of installing a Linux distro, or any alternative operating system for that matter, this difficult. And my reward for all that hard graft? The Atheros wireless device that Acer loves so much continues to demonstrate its very poor support on Linux. Moreover, the multitouch screen doesn’t even work! This is pretty surprising because the multitouch support isn’t alien to the Linux kernel.

In fact, a group of researchers at the French ENAC Interactive Computer Laboratory have built on the multitouch support in the kernel and have a proof‑of‑
concept code that supports swipe, slip, rotate, and pinch-resize gestures – everything you can do with the screen inside Windows 7 and more. For a demo, take a look at their video on YouTube.

This is where it hurts. Since version 2.6.30, the Linux input system in the kernel has had an interface for multitouch events. Yet there are only a handful of kernel-
space drivers for feeding the input system with multitouch.

The Acer touchscreen devices are made by Cando, which is a subsidiary of AU Optronics, the third-largest LCD maker in the world. Its multitouch device is the first to be certified for Windows 7. What’s stopping it from adopting the same level of support on Linux, considering that the hard work has already been done by the kernel developers? Forget the few thousand Acers. If you believe industry sources, Cando is currently receiving orders for these multitouch panels from both HP and Lenovo. Just think about it: put together, that’s a massive number of machines that wouldn’t offer the benefits of a multitouch touchscreen to Linux users.

I don’t expect HP or Lenovo to do anything about it, but maybe Acer still can. It’s the only company to put an operating system meant for a mobile phone onto a laptop and deliver an instant-on device when users were just fantasising about it. Soon we’ll be drooling over cheap multi-touch touch-screen displays. Will the vendors be able to look beyond their obsession with Windows and put in the extra effort required to bring this experience to Linux? Just for once it would be nice to have a vendor or two on our side.

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Yes, at heart it's a bigger iPhone. 10" screen, multitouch, Wireless N, with double-pixels for iPhone applications and full-resolution on offer for new ones. More impressively, it's only $499, which begs the obvious question: why the hell is the iPhone so expensive, Steve?

Oh, right. Because mobile phone pricing is a rip-off.

Still, no matter. As ever, it's a phenomenally cool looking piece of kit, with a keyboard dock so that you don't have to type on the screen, and support for 3G if you need internet access on the move. It looks like Apple's covered all the bases and created a seriously desirable iPhone companion.

More as it happens at TechRadar, including UK pricing information, how we'll be connecting with it, and when the damn thing will be in our hands.

Will you be buying one?

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