Showing 91 - 100 of 119
Connecting becomes hard work in China
Life, James Hein, Published on 25/09/2013
» I was recently on a trip in China and while I was there I bought myself a SIMM with a data plan to use Skype and to play the game Ingress. As a technologically advanced and well-developed nation I expected that the communications system and technology in general would be advanced, stable and ubiquitous. I was wrong.
Sysadmins know all the best secrets
Life, James Hein, Published on 11/09/2013
» After all the hoopla about Edward Snowden, now a new resident of Russia, you may be asking yourself how he managed to walk off with all that information. After all, the US National Security Agency, or NSA, is meant to be the be-all and end-all of security. They can supposedly listen to everyone's phone calls and all information is carefully monitored with employees blocked from copying files. So people are calling him a genius who brilliantly made off with all that sensitive information. The truth is a little more mundane. He belonged to a group known as System Administrators.
Samsung unleashes 4K video recording
Life, James Hein, Published on 04/09/2013
» It seems like every time I fire up the computer there is another new smartphone or mobile device announcement. This week it is the Koreans and the Chinese. The Samsung Galaxy Note series has been very popular all over the world, but especially in Hong Kong. The latest version has a good-size screen and a battery that lasts long enough for most people. So what do you add to such a device? Samsung has decided that 4K video recording will be the way to go. The plan is that buyers will then rush out and buy a Samsung 4K TV to play the images on. By the time you read this Samsung will have announced more details, but one prediction is 24-bit audio support. The problem here is that the camera lens will still be a tiny thing so I doubt the resulting video will be anything close to a real 4K recorder in quality like those Canon has just released across their new range.
Flash in the pan
Life, James Hein, Published on 21/08/2013
» As you might imagine, companies that make flash drives are working on making them faster, have them last longer and keeping the prices down. At a recent Flash Memory Summit in California a Facebook representative was urging them to "just make it dense and cheap". His reasoning is that there are some types of information that don't need fast access speeds such as logs, usage metrics and even some user data that they hardly ever access. How many photos have people uploaded that they looked at once and are now stored in memory bytes somewhere? "Write-once, read-never is probably the spec for a lot of this," the rep suggested. In other news, there is such a thing as a Flash Memory Summit.
Google going great, greater, the greatest?
Life, James Hein, Published on 31/07/2013
» In 2010 the figure was a mere 6%, but according to the monitoring firm DeepField, data to and from Google now accounts for a quarter of all traffic in the US across the internet. We all knew that Google was big, but until now no one was sure just how big they were, at least in the US. When it comes to sheer bandwidth demand at certain times of the day, the winner is Netflix, but in terms of overall traffic Google beats Netflix, Twitter and Facebook combined. Remember that Google includes YouTube and a wide range of other services.
Old Apples prove tasty
Life, James Hein, Published on 24/07/2013
» An Apple 1 recently sold for more than 15 million baht, so hang on to that old computer as one day it may be worth something again. I admit to using an Apple 2 computer while teaching in the Maldives many, many moons ago. There were better available at the time, but that was all they had. All it had was green writing on a black screen, a simple operating system and some very simple applications, but still a very useful device back then.
Sympathy for the old devils
Life, James Hein, Published on 17/07/2013
» If you are below the age of 30 you were born into a world with global connectivity on your phone, at home and in your office. You probably grew up using mobile devices and social networking applications like Facebook to keep in contact with all your family, friends and business associates. In some countries you are doing most of your shopping online, doing your business with the government online and you probably don't have a fixed-line connection in your home or apartment. In short, you are connected everywhere you go.
Formicidae, neurons and the tweeting mass of life
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/07/2013
» The members of an ant colony work together as if they were a single organism. The human brain has neurons that work together in the same way: one neuron is not "intelligent", as such, but a whole lot of them acting in unison make us what we are. The secret is communication, connectivity and the processing of information. In the modern world millions of people are communicating with each other in almost real time using Twitter, SMS, Facebook and other social networking tools. If a billion people are doing this and we think of each person as a single neuron, does it mean that we starting to create some kind of global intelligence?
Uploading pics? Strip out hidden data
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/06/2013
» So there you are at the park near your home. You take a few snaps of your children and post them on Facebook or another social media site. A few days later there's a show at the kids' school, so you take a few more snaps and also post them online. If you're using a modern camera or a smartphone then the photos will contain a lot of information. Time, location, camera type and other bits and pieces will be coded into the snaps. Anyone could grab the pictures and start building a profile of where you live, where your children go to school and where they go to play. You can change what info is captured. Depending on the model of your iPhone you will find the settings under General/Location Services on the older iPhones or Settings/Privacy/Location Services in the newer ones. For Android devices, open Camera and change the GEO tagging setting under Menu. If you want to keep your location private, then you need to turn Geocoding off. Another option is a free product like Pixel Guard that you can find at pixelgarde.com. You can use this to strip all that hidden information from your photos before you post them.
It's time for an overhaul
Life, James Hein, Published on 24/04/2013
» So the question of the next big thing seems to be, why would you need to have a watch and a phone? I have noticed that most of the younger generation, the ones with a smartphone, don't have a watch because the time is prominently displayed on the phone. One simple answer might be that a watch is still useful for when your hands are full, or swimming underwater, or when you are doing something that doesn't include pockets.