Showing 1 - 9 of 9
Robots get smooth moves
Life, James Hein, Published on 25/03/2026
» The subject of the week is robots. The amount of news on these keeps growing and growing. South Korea is first up here with their KAIST Humanoid. In the field test, the robot was shown running across a soccer pitch, jumping, taking shots on goal, and even doing dance moves akin to the Michael Jackson moonwalk. Many robot demonstrations still look a bit stiff but these moves were quite smooth. The robot can run at about 12kph on flat ground with the next goal at 14kph. It can climb a ladder with 40cm steps and the knees can generate 320 Newton metres of peak torque so it can push heavier objects. The current model is based on the lower human half but the goal is for a full humanoid form that can work with people in industrial environments.
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.
Understanding an AI's 'thinking'
Life, James Hein, Published on 22/10/2025
» Over the past couple of weeks, I dived deep into the Alice In Wonderland-like rabbit hole of chatbots and AI systems. This was not your typical "ask a few questions", but more along the lines of jailbreaking the AI to get behind the scenes. You may remember earlier commentary on the code behind the query. This is where the guardrails and biases of the model are coded and why the majority of all AI systems are currently leaning to the Left of the political spectrum.
Biggest IT fix you never heard of
Life, James Hein, Published on 15/01/2020
» The clock ticked over to 2020 and the UK giant Lloyds Bank fell over -- well it had some problems populating bank accounts with payments at least. The problem? Apparently a Y2K bug that affected mobile apps and web logins. A similar problem occurred again on Jan 2. Well before the year 2000 was reached I was one of those involved in Y2K mitigation. Large teams spent months making sure that software didn't fail when 2000 and 2001 kicked over along with a few other key dates, one of which was indeed Jan 1, 2020. Now I'm not sure if these issues are Y2K related but the Yorkshire and Clydesdale banks in the UK had similar issues that Lloyd's did, not processing payments into customer accounts. Latter reports did indicate the issue was with processing date problems.
Apple sours as rivals rise
Life, James Hein, Published on 04/12/2019
» Apple can't seem to win a trick these days. Overall phone sales in Europe picked up during the last quarter but iPhone sales did not follow the upswing and ended up 4% down on the same quarter last year. The problem is that the latest models are not giving many users a reason to upgrade. Their battery replacement programme and bad sales in China have not helped either. Overall market share worldwide has dropped from 20.8% to 18.6%. By comparison, Samsung has increased their share to over 35% in the same market. Huawei, in second place, sits about the same on 22.2%. Xiaomi is still in fourth place but well behind the others at 10.5%. The biggest impacts predicted going forward are 5G and Brexit though in reality I don't think the latter will have any real impact other than short term. The most popular Samsung models were the Galaxy A10, A20e, A40 and A50.
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.
An opaque Windows upgrade
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/08/2018
» I have heard a number stories of users having problems with Windows 10 who upgraded from Windows 7 without a clean install. This has happened to people with notebooks, PCs and recently a server. It started a few updates back when rebooting took a long time, which was resolved with a subsequent update. A more recent issue has occurred for those who did not do a clean Windows 10 install, ie they directly upgraded from Windows 7 or 8, having problems ranging from slow to almost unusable speeds and even system lockdowns. If you find yourself having problems, backup your data and do a clean install directly from Windows 10. In short, reformat your system drive and install from scratch. For some this has been the only solution, others have been a little luckier.
What will 5G mean for you?
Life, James Hein, Published on 25/04/2018
» Is 5G going to save those people with bad internet connections? As the world moves more towards mobile platforms, users want faster and more reliable services. I know I do. 5G is being touted as the way to that future, with the promise of a high-def movie download in seconds and other benefits, like better access to the often-mentioned Internet of Things, or IoT.
Looking into IT's crystal ball
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/01/2018
» So it is that time again when I try and gaze into the crystal ball and guess what 2018 will bring the IT world.