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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.
Connectivity conundrums
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/06/2025
» I'm travelling as I write this, so I thought it would be a good time to cover things like connectivity and the kind of issues I face even in 2025. Connectivity will typically revolve around your smartphone and I recommend you prepare for this in advance. Option one is a new sim card that you put in when you get to your destination.
X remains an influential platform
Life, James Hein, Published on 24/04/2024
» How influential is Twitter/X? Some will remember a while back when Elon Musk gave his opinion on Disney. I won't repeat it here but it was very direct. Up until recently, Disney hadn't posted anything on X but about a week before you read this, they were back with a gold checkmark. These cost about US$10,000 (368,000 baht), which while not expensive for Disney, indicates how they see X as a platform for communicating to all those potentially interested in all things Disney. Elon Musk is still supporting people like Gina Carano in suing Disney for what they did to her and others based allegedly on their political and religious views.
Rabbit R1's AI action intrigues
Life, James Hein, Published on 31/01/2024
» A new device out of CES 2024 in Las Vegas caught my eye. At first glance, the Rabbit R1 doesn't look all that interesting. It's a US$199 (in America), orange, handheld device that looks like an old-style gaming machine of some kind about the size of a stack of Post-It notes. It comes with a 2.88-inch touchscreen, a camera, a voice command button and a 4G LTE SIM card slot for connectivity beyond Wi-Fi. This is not a smartphone and won't replace it as there are no onboard apps, it won't pair with your smartphone and it doesn't talk to application APIs like cloud service gateways.
Predictions for 2024
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/01/2024
» I hope you all had a great holiday break and are ready to dive into whatever 2024 brings us. Once again I will try and guess what we will see this year. The first one is easy, a bigger focus on artificial intelligence and even more marketing using the term AI. I wonder if we will see Turbo-AI appear. There will be more funds diverted to the growth of AI in many of the major manufacturers. I'm not convinced we will reach General AI this year but it is a possibility.
Human override here to stay
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/04/2019
» Computers are useful tools and they will emotionlessly churn through thousands of operations in the blink of an eye to produce whatever results they were programmed to do. Most of the time the results are welcomed. When it comes to malware the results generate a different reaction, and then there are those spaces in the middle. The situation surrounding the Boeing 737 Max MCAS aircraft and the recent crash is an excellent example. The latest analysis would seem to indicate that the computer engineers made some choices that have had unintended consequences. In this case overriding the wishes of the pilots by assuming the plane was crashing, when it wasn't, and not allowing the human pilots to correct the computer's decisions.
Potential legal trouble for Apple over old batteries
Life, James Hein, Published on 17/01/2018
» The first couple of weeks of 2018 have provided a series of revelations. It started with Apple finally confirming that they have been throttling the performance of their older phones. The official line is that they do this to ensure that as the batteries degrade, the retarding of performance ensures that their devices won't overheat. Some people weren't buying what Apple was shovelling, and there is a series of class-action lawsuits in the making.