Showing 1-10 of 150 results
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Covid computing
Life, James Hein, Published on 06/05/2020
» Things are quiet on the IT front. Well, that's not necessarily true, as many are trying to come to grips with the whole working-from-home existence. Many, including myself, are spending a lot of time in front of a screen. Instead of getting up and conferring with a colleague at their desk, it is a Skype chat. Instead of a walk to the meeting room, often on another floor, it is a Skype meeting or similar. Many do not have a video camera at home so it is voice only. There are new collaboration technologies like Microsoft Teams to get used to. Instead of handing a report to someone, it is uploaded into a shared area for all to browse. I find that I am sharing my screen more often to go over a document or diagram. On the plus side I recently had an upgrade to my Internet speed. This has helped with downloads but not much else, as a chat takes up very little bandwidth.
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Someone, somewhere still uses IE
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/02/2020
» A Microsoft engineer, Eric Lawrence, who worked on moving the Edge browser to a Google-driven open source base code, has suggested that people need to stop using the more traditional version of Internet Explorer. His plea was a personal one on his own blog but Microsoft cybersecurity chief Chris Jackson expressed the same sentiment a year earlier. IE still has a couple of percent of people using it -- probably those who had it installed on their machines -- that have yet to be upgraded. The technology is old and full of security holes but a number of organisations demand that it still be used.
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More data, more problems
Life, James Hein, Published on 01/01/2020
» It's time to make some predictions for 2020. A number were made by others a while back, most of which did not eventuate, like a Japanese base on the Moon, flying cars and a Beijing to London rail link. I'll try for a bit more realism.
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None more black
Life, James Hein, Published on 25/09/2019
» Accidental discoveries have been responsible for many useful items like rubber and penicillin. A couple of science types at MIT in the US wanted to see if they could grow carbon nanotubes on aluminium to increase its conductance properties. Instead they found they had made the blackest substance yet known to man. It absorbs 99.96% of the light from any angle making it 10 times blacker than the current options. Potential uses include telescopes, optical blinders and art. Carbon nanotubes, is there anything they can't do, eventually?
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What does 2019 have in store?
Life, James Hein, Published on 02/01/2019
» We've made it to 2019. There are a lot of buzzwords being touted for this year; top of the list are artificial intelligence, Blockchain and, once again, the internet of things (IoT). Yes, it's that time of year where I don my pointy hat of stars and guess what the year ahead might bring.
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The world knows where you've been
Life, James Hein, Published on 16/01/2019
» A reminder for those operating in the digital world. This includes the internet, your phone, social media and basically anything in the public sphere. You can all but guarantee that everything you post online is eventually available to everyone. It doesn't matter what promises your provider might offer -- and maybe they're even being as honest as they can be -- eventually your data will turn up on a public server somewhere. The golden rule is simple: if you don't want everyone to see something, then don't post it anywhere on public networks.
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You can forget HAL 9000
Life, James Hein, Published on 05/12/2018
» It has been over five years and it was time for a new PC. It took a while to pull together, required an eclectic set of carefully chosen components, and I paid someone to put it together for me, having done that myself too many times in the past.
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Burning issues and great expectations
Life, James Hein, Published on 19/12/2018
» Another year almost gone, another year of IT improvements, advancements and lower prices. It was a year of missing graphics cards, where Bitcoin data miners snapped up the market for a while.
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Huawei still some way behind rivals
Life, James Hein, Published on 21/11/2018
» I've had some feedback expressing surprise that I invested in a smartwatch. Yes, I didn't think I'd see the day either, but it does function very well as a watch with changeable faces and at a price point that's far below some of the faces it can duplicate. The always-on test was a success in that I only turned the watch off when I wasn't using it on some evenings. It also does sleep tracking, which perhaps provides a sterner test, but it still provided a week's worth of use making it usable for many. On a longer trip you would need to take the charger along. Note that for both tests, I kept Bluetooth on the whole time.
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Australia still trailing Thailand in broadband coverage
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/09/2018
» Wither now comms in Australia? With the National Broadband Network or NBN a certified failure, Australia seems to be working hard to ensure that to make the NBN look reasonable, any emerging 5G network must be made to hobble by banning technology companies like Huawei from providing the same kind of support it has been giving over the past 15 years to the local telcos. The given reason is a lack of trust in any Chinese company, keeping the spying eyes of China out of the country. To be fair, there is some justification for this, as China has not been the poster child of espionage abstinence across the globe. What earth-shattering useful secret info they might get from the Australians is debatable, but it looks like the Land Down Under will not be improving their communications any time soon. Thailand is still well ahead on that front.
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