Showing 1 - 9 of 9
What to expect in the year ahead
Life, James Hein, Published on 31/12/2025
» The coming year will be full of artificial intelligence, robots and a Starlink communications experience that will have many moving from their current providers. Let's dig in with my predictions for 2026.
Free speech and pedestrian blues
Life, James Hein, Published on 21/12/2022
» Let's take a look at my predictions for 2022, a mixed year for technology. How did I do? Virtual reality didn't advance as much as I'd hoped. Artificial intelligence made some incremental games including as I pointed out in an earlier article, for music producers. The Neuralink interface did improve this year, if indeed that is something you're interested in, but still not available for broad human use. I also was wrong on cryptocurrency. With the FTX exposure the private firms took a hit, but governments have started to get interested in the technology. The world is poised for a crypto explosion, but not this year.
Alternative social platforms can be expensive
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/11/2021
» The alternative social media platform Rumble recently bought out another platform for creators called Locals. Rumble is a YouTube-like platform and Locals is aimed more at the alternative blogging community, including names like Scott Adams and Dan Bongino. I don't think this will be a long-term successful merger for a simple reason, and that is money. To be fair Locals is an alternative to Patreon, a platform that will nuke your account if it doesn't like your politics as evidenced by a long list of conservative commentators being axed without warning.
Social media censorship the stamp of 2020
Life, James Hein, Published on 23/12/2020
» Well, it's that time of year again when I see how well my predictions for the year performed. With the advent of Covid-19, I'm not confident that many of them came to pass.
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.
Diminishing returns
Life, James Hein, Published on 05/06/2019
» The first three months of 2019 saw Apple and Samsung collectively selling 17.5 million fewer smartphones globally compared to last year. As I've previously noted, we have market saturation and a lack of yearly upgrades for many users. I upgrade with roughly every third model, for example. The premium end of the market also continues to move out of the reach of many, meaning fewer people can upgrade as often. The innovation jump in successive models is also diminishing, so they lack the wow factor that drove earlier upgrades. These figures do not include the impact of the latest Samsung S10 range which shipped at the end of the quarter. The top three remain Samsung, Huawei and Apple. This may change with the recent US Huawei bans, or at least reduce any growth. Even after price cuts, Apple's sales fell 17.6% in the quarter leaving Samsung as the one least likely to lose their position in the next few months. Oppo and Viva rounded out the top five in sales with Xiaomi nibbling at their heels.
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.
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.
True cost of mining Bitcoin
Life, James Hein, Published on 28/03/2018
» Should you Bitcoin? Short answer in the past yes, now not so much. I've mentioned Bitcoins in previous articles and modern mining, which is how you get them, has driven up the price of graphics processors in recent times. Can you make any money using your spare GPU cycles on your PC? Answering that question is not as simple you might think, despite what a mining application may tell you. It depends on how powerful your GPU is, what the price of Bitcoin is that week and things like how much you pay for your power because you will be using more. The process works by maximising the power of your GPU, using more electricity than for regular use and keeping your PC hotter than usual 24/7. Mining works by solving complex maths equations for the blockchain which over time takes longer and longer and more processing power.