Showing 1-10 of 13 results
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Safe surfing with a VPN
Life, James Hein, Published on 27/08/2014
» So how safe is your surfing? Not the water, board and shark kind, but what you do on the web. Sitting in front of your computer you will either have your own internet protocol (IP) address or be assigned one as part of a pool that is doled out by your internet service provider (ISP). Somewhere between you and the rest of the internet will be a domain name server (DNS) that knows how to get a message from out there back to you and vice versa. Or to put it another way, they know where you are.
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World wide the web isn't free
Life, James Hein, Published on 30/09/2020
» The dream of an open, transparent Internet that accepts all and their opinions is all but dead. The story starts on Jan 1, 1983, when the then ARPANET adopted the TCP/IP protocol and then really started to take off in 1990 after Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. It began like most things, simply, with topic driven bulletin boards and online forums, then it moved to personal websites and the first blogs. At the turn of the century this morphed into the Web 2.0 where social media platforms were developed and started to grow and opened up the world and different countries to each other at the personal level.
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A lot of money for fairly little phone, Apple
Life, James Hein, Published on 26/09/2018
» So, the news of the week, or at least as I write this, is the release of the new Apple iPhone range. There are three models ranging from the 5.8 and 6.1 inch models up to the XS Max at 6.5 inches. The latter is a real departure from the early days of Apple declaring that no one needed a large-screen phone. Compared to the latest phone specs across other brands, the features in the new iPhone range are not so special. They do all have very special prices and the bottom of the line starts at US$749 (Thai prices are TBA) and goes up from there topping out at $1449, which would make the whole range easily the most expensive phones per feature on the market today. For this you get no fingerprint reader, no headphone jack, average pixel density and cameras, no expansion memory port but dual SIMs, wireless charging and face detection. Even my most ardent Apple-lover friend will not be forking out their cash for those kinds of prices. I don't expect this range to sell anywhere near as well as earlier models. Seriously, what were they thinking?
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How to be a Scrivener
Life, James Hein, Published on 31/08/2016
» As readers might appreciate I have been writing in some form or other for many years. This includes two-and-a-bit novels the first of which I am in the process of final editing and until recently I was using Microsoft Word. In the world of self-publishing and preparing for Amazon's Mobi or for everyone else's ePub, Word is not the right tool. My recommendation is Scrivener which is available for Mac or Windows. This appears to be the ultimate tool for the writer, be they fiction, non-fiction, researcher or blogger. The application is inexpensive even for a lifetime licence that covers everyone in your household. It handles everything you will need to prepare what you are writing for publishing apart from your own creativity. My only criticism is the lack of a version for Android but hopefully that will come. You can get a 30-day free trial from www.literatureandlatte.com and there is a lot of free training materials available.
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How to be a Scrivener
Life, James Hein, Published on 31/08/2016
» As readers might appreciate I have been writing in some form or other for many years. This includes two-and-a-bit novels the first of which I am in the process of final editing and until recently I was using Microsoft Word. In the world of self-publishing and preparing for Amazon’s Mobi or for everyone else’s ePub, Word is not the right tool. My recommendation is Scrivener which is available for Mac or Windows. This appears to be the ultimate tool for the writer, be they fiction, non-fiction, researcher or blogger. The application is inexpensive even for a lifetime licence that covers everyone in your household. It handles everything you will need to prepare what you are writing for publishing apart from your own creativity. My only criticism is the lack of a version for Android but hopefully that will come. You can get a 30-day free trial from www.literatureandlatte.com and there is a lot of free training materials available.
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Data security is of utmost importance
Life, James Hein, Published on 29/06/2016
» If you are a security manager or in charge of a company's PCs, when it comes to what people can do on their machine I have a few warnings for you. I recently went through the process of a new Ops Manager at work deciding to limit access on my PC to the point where I couldn't even see the contents of a ZIP file anymore,making it impossible to do some aspects of the job. This lasted for a couple of days and while it was possible to have someone else do it for me that wasn't the point, it was the issue of security becoming so restrictive that I couldn't do my work. I'm sure that there are many readers that have experienced this at some time or other but in the modern age for it still to be occurring is either a lack of thinking about consequences or perhaps an indication that those it happens to should start looking for a new job.
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The perils of an electronic voting system
Life, James Hein, Published on 13/07/2016
» I was talking to some friends in Australia about the recent election and by the time you read this, a week-and-a-half later, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has declared victory for his conservative coalition. The reason it has taken so long besides it being very close is that the process is still a manual one. People put numbers in boxes with a pencil and other people then count all of the numbers entered on the ballots to eventually work out how many people voted for which people in what order. To make it more complicated Australia has a preferential voting system that can see someone with 0.5% of the vote get a Senate seat due to redistribution rules. The discussion was around how difficult it would be to set up an electronic voting system.
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2015 tech scene, with Hein-sight
Life, James Hein, Published on 30/12/2015
» So how did the tech sector fare in 2015?? As far as the Chinese phone manufacturers, they made a lot of ground.
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Do not feed the trolls
Life, James Hein, Published on 14/10/2015
» The internet is full of nice people who just want to make everyone feel good about themselves. Yes, of course, I'm just messing with you. While there are some people and some sites that are indeed supportive there are many others that are full of anonymous cowards who lurk in wait and revel in making personal attacks. The term "trolls" is a common one and some of these are even paid to wait for an organisation, website, blog or specific individuals to post something so that they can instantly slither in for the attack. It doesn't seem to matter if the subject is somewhere from aardvarks to zebras there will be someone out there to take an opposing position like that one guy in the audience who just doesn't like what you are singing in a pub.
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Producers don't give a 4K about Ultra HD
Life, James Hein, Published on 11/02/2015
» Will Ultra HD, sometimes called 4K, technology take off? As someone who likes new technology that provides a sharper picture, I hope so, but the industry pundits are lukewarm on the subject for the simple reason that there are very few ways to get any content with movie studios and TV producers slow out of the gate.
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