For years, PC games companies have been pushing me towards pirating their games. Anti-piracy technology (DRM) has become so invasive that some games hardly work at all for legitimate customers, and we risk our computers being damaged if we dare to install a shop-bought game.

Meanwhile pirates get DRM-free copies that work perfectly and don’t do any damage.

I had three choices: (1) buy the game but then download the pirate version to play, (2) don’t buy the game and just pirate it, or (3) don’t bother with it at all.

So I stopped playing PC games. I still buy games on the PlayStation 3 but not nearly as many as I used to buy on the PC, so the games companies are losing out.

I’m finding that a similar situation is developing with movies…

Last night my girlfriend and I went to see Dear John, a film we’d been looking forward to seeing since we saw the trailer a month ago. We went to the Vue cinema in Inverness.

After we’d bought our tickets, the guy behind the counter asked if we’d like to pay £1.30 extra per ticket to get VIP seats. These are big, comfortable, leather seats in the middle of the cinema. As it happens I only had £4 left after buying the tickets, so either we took the VIP seats or Katie had her ice cream. It is a brave man that denies a girl her ice cream. No VIP seats for us

But I had noticed that the car park was nearly empty so I asked the guy who was serving us, half-jokingly, would it be okay for us to just sit in the VIP area if there was nobody else there. He said no, they have VIP seating monitors who go in to the theatre during the film and check to make sure people in the VIP seats have VIP tickets. If we didn’t have the tickets then we’d be removed.

Fine. We took our regular tickets and went to see the film.

In a theatre with maybe 20 other people, we had been allocated seats over at one side. So I guess if you don’t pay the extra for VIP seats, you don’t just take pot luck on finding a good seat — you actually get put in bad seats. Nice.

The film was great. Better than I expected, in fact.

But a lot of it was spoiled by the half dozen kids on the back row who were constantly talking and, for some reason, rattling boxes of sweets. All the way through a 2-hour film.

The previous film we went to see, Shutter Island, was similarly spoiled by noisy people.

Interestingly, in a cinema that forbids you from sitting in an unused VIP seat, nobody bothers to enforce a NO DICKING AROUND WHEN OTHER PEOPLE ARE WATCHING THE FILM policy.

Now I write this as someone who has wanted to write for film from an early age, and who still wants to one day. I love film. I totally appreciate that films need to make money or there won’t be any more films, and the world will be a darker place. (Literally, when the projectors are turned off.)

But I’m feeling more and more like it’s not worth going to the cinema. You get charged extra to see a film in 3D, you get charged extra for a nice seat, you get punished with bad seats if you don’t pay the extra for a good one, you have to put up with kids ruining the film and nobody from the cinema makes the slightest effort to go up to them and ask if they could please SHUT THE F*** UP because they’re annoying everyone else.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that, if I feel this way, there are probably quite a few other people who feel this way. So maybe cinemas need to buck their ideas up a bit before we all start pirating films and put the cinemas out of business.

Here are a couple of pictures of Highland Cows in the fields around Ruthven Barracks near Kingussie. Not done for work, just thought they’d make nice pictures.

Tough day. Didn’t get to bed until the small hours last night, so didn’t get up until 10am and had to dash straight out to a coach crash about 20 miles away on the A9 at Dalwhinnie. There were already huge tailbacks by the time I arrived so I left my car at the side of the road and walked the rest of the way, which turned out to be three miles! On one of the warmest days of the year so far.

Still, you gotta do what you gotta do. Fortunately a kind press officer from Northern Constabulary gave me a lift back to my car after the shoot. Honestly I think another 3-mile walk would have just about finished me off so I was very grateful for the lift.

I often tell people that the most important thing for a news photographer to have in their bag, after their camera, is a child’s toy. That way, when you get to an accident scene, you can put the toy on the road to make the scene more poignant. That’s a joke of course But look what was lying in clear view at this scene. The coach had been full of tourists who were returning from their holiday in the Highlands, and one of them must have bought a Scottish cuddly toy. Or it may have been a mascot propped up against the front window of the coach because that’s where it was lying.

The incident caused tailbacks of six miles…

Some of the injured passengers had been taken to Kingussie Medical Practice:

A few papers had staff photographers covering the incident scene, but I was the only person who got photos of the un-injured passengers at the hotel in Newtonmore where they had been taken until another coach could be arranged.

So overall a good day’s work, I’d say. Tough to do it without having had anything to eat all day, but satisfying to know that I made the effort and covered the story well from all angles.

After languishing in Apple’s approval process for an epic 20 days, the Opera Mini web browser has finally been accepted for inclusion in the iPhone App Store.

Just a wee bit late for me, Apple. I cancelled my O2 iPhone contract yesterday. I’ve had way too many ongoing problems with missed calls, not being able to send picture messages, visual voicemail not working, tethering not working on 2G/Edge, etc.

In fact the problems have been so bad that O2 even waived the £200 termination fee, which I would have had to pay due to there being six months left on my contract. Getting the fee waived took around 90 minutes of arguing with unsympathetic call handlers, but on principle there was no way I was going to pay it, so I persisted and eventually got through to a manager who was very understanding, reasonable, and helpful.

Tomorrow I pick up my HTC Desire, which is reserved for me, and I’ll be getting it on Vodafone. Although I’ve made sure it’s an unlocked phone, just in case I need to jump networks again.

So… after all that waiting, what is Opera Mini like on the iPhone?

First impression is that it’s pretty good. The most obvious improvement over Safari is that scrolling around web pages is much faster, and you don’t get the big grey gaps that you get in Safari while the rendering engine tries to keep up with you.

However there are a couple of obvious problems that I’ve spotted already, although they seem to be ‘features’ rather than bugs. For example, when I load my own web site, look how it wraps the text:

Similarly when I load Slashdot, it re-formats it like this:

Still that’s not a deal-breaker because you never read web pages full-size on a mobile, you zoom in. You can double-tap or un-pinch to zoom in Opera just like in Safari. But you can’t then double-tap or pinch to zoom out, you have to press the button at the bottom left of the screen. This is something they need to fix in a future release as double-tap to zoom out is standard on the iPhone.

One quick mention of a nice time-saving feature. When you type a web site address, as soon as you press ‘dot’ you get a selection list with alternative top-level domains:

I’ll have a proper play with Opera later today. I’m especially interested to see how it deals with having multiple sites open in separate tabs, as it’s meant to handle that more elegantly than Safari.

Photos from today’s Dawn of the Shred snowboard competition. This popular event attracted competitors from all over the UK to Cairngorm Mountain where they enjoyed glorious weather and superb snow conditions on the country’s largest purpose-built snowboard park.