Showing 1 - 10 of 34
Caveat emptor is undefeated in online shopping
Life, James Hein, Published on 11/03/2026
» It is becoming more common to buy things online. The majority of my shopping, not counting groceries, is now done that way. In the past I've warned about prices that are too good to be true, like a 4TB thumb drive for a few dollars from sites like Temu and AliExpress. There is now a kind of middle ground where the price could be correct and it's coming from, say, Amazon. Recently, even though I had some doubts, I bought a 5TB SSD drive from Amazon for around half of what I'd expect it to be. I did this knowing I can easily send things back to Amazon.
Marketeers have simple choices
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/02/2026
» If you use a mobile phone for playing any games, then typically along with that comes all of the advertisements and marketing presentations. First however, there is the "free download", this means you can download it for free, install and run it. After that, things may not be free at all. This is to be expected as advertising is one of the few ways to make any income from the games being played by millions of people across the planet.
Microsoft put on the naughty step by Aussie regulator
Life, James Hein, Published on 05/11/2025
» Microsoft has been at it again. The Competition & Consumer Commission in Australia has started a legal process against the Redmond giant for apparently misleading users of the policies for its Microsoft 365 bundle. Microsoft advised users with a Personal and Family plan that "to maintain their subscription they must accept the integration of Copilot and pay higher prices for their plan, or, alternatively, cancel their subscription".
Android is now the new Apple
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/09/2025
» Some may be wondering why have I used an Android phone up to now compared to, say, Apple iPhone? In the beginning, it was for the following four reasons -- a headphone jack, a removable battery, the ability to insert an SD card for storage and the ability to load a program into the computer. That last part may sound a little strange but a 12GB device with 1TB of storage and a graphics unit built in is a computer now. The "program" loading here means you can put your own operating system on the device and install applications, bypassing the Play Store. So where are we now? No headphone jack, no SSD support, no removable battery and based on a recent announcement, no ability to "side-load" programs any more. In other words, Google phones have now or will soon be turned into iPhones.
Beware the AI bots
Life, James Hein, Published on 04/06/2025
» I recently joined a Facebook group that supposedly represented Kat Timpf, a regular presenter on the Gutfeld! show. I posted a couple of comments and a couple of weeks later, I received a tag in social media purportedly from Dana Perino, a regular on the Fox show The Five. Initially this was a surprise. Why would a famous TV star want to chat with me? After a few chats, it became obvious something was off. The tag name in Messenger was just Dana Perino but the conversation had a few structural errors, not something a former press secretary would make.
Popularity of cable news is waning fast
Life, James Hein, Published on 06/11/2024
» The age of the cable news provider is waning. Within 24 hours of the Joe Rogan podcast with former US president Donald Trump, it had over 30 million views on YouTube alone. This is far more than any mainstream news or media outlet gets for any of its shows or presentations.
Latest AI reveals its bias yet again
Life, James Hein, Published on 13/03/2024
» Google's latest version of AI, once Bard but now called Gemini, is yet another indication of how biased the current batch of AI platforms are. I was going to include a bunch of examples but this has received so much coverage that everyone should have seen it by now. Basically, the product offers anything but a white-skinned person in requested pictures. This gave rise to some short-lived pub games. Many found this amusing but after a while it became obvious that Google has shut Gemini down for re-education.
Graphene semiconductors mark new start
Life, James Hein, Published on 17/01/2024
» We have just started 2024 and there are already exciting announcements. The clever people at Georgia Tech in Atlanta have built the first scalable semiconductor using a graphene base. Graphene, a wonder product, is not a scalable semiconductor on its own, so they bonded silicon carbide, or what we call carborundum, to a layer of graphene creating the necessary bandgap to have a working switch. A switch means binary and from there they can make wafers like those currently used in the chip manufacturing process to make CPUs and other devices.
YouTube hypocrisy deserves flagging
Life, James Hein, Published on 27/09/2023
» YouTube is behaving badly again. A prominent presenter I occasionally watch, who has millions of subscribers, has been demonetised, for some possible actions 20 years ago. This is not a commentary on potential innocence or guilt, but on YouTube's processes. There are people whose lives are supported by revenue from their presentations on YouTube. This ranges from small fries all the way up to the big fish like the one here. When an individual is demonetised they can lose the ability to support themselves. In this case allegations were made by the media, not the police or authorities, and at the time of writing there have been zero charges made. YouTube is essentially saying, bring us all your viewers so we can hit them with ads and we can make lots of money, but you will be getting nothing for your work.
Apple sets sights on VR market
Life, James Hein, Published on 21/06/2023
» The biggest announcement of the past week or two was the Apple Vision Pro VR system. There has been so much on this recently. The quick summary is -- two 4K eyepieces, no controllers required and it can replace your TV and computer monitors. I was more interested in the battery life being two hours, or if you were using them, not enough for the full Apple presentation. The price is also an amazing US$3,500 in America so out of the range of most people. One argument is that by the time you don't need to pay for a TV upgrade or new monitors it is worth the investment. My counter is if you have a four-person household that price becomes $14,000, a lot more than the cost of a new TV. Oh, and you can mostly only use it with Apple kit which really limits options.