Showing 1 - 10 of 20
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.
Doom, not gloom kicks off my 2025
Life, James Hein, Published on 29/01/2025
» Over the years, the game Doom has been ported onto some amazing platforms including a pregnancy test kit screen. The latest iteration of this practice has turned up in a version that will run in a .PDF file. If you are like me, then this will cause your mental processing to pause for a moment and your next thought may well be: "Wait, what?" The Portable Document Format (PDF) was developed to present documents in a manner that is independent of the software, hardware and operating system showing them. While it does this well, some malware writers have exploited its complexities.
Q&A, truth, lies, the web and you
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/04/2024
» The online world is changing and not necessarily for the better. I'm old enough to remember what you were looking for came up as the first search result, when there was a search facility, that is. The old Bulletin Boards kept their subject matter to the topic of the board with opinions kept to opinion sites. Sites on science were not one-sided as they presented the facts along with the supporting data for checking and verification. If people disagreed, they also brought their data along to challenge a thesis and a healthy and often robust debate followed. That was then.
Samsung's A series phone is a big fat L
Life, James Hein, Published on 26/10/2022
» Nothing at all back from Samsung corporate on the A53-5G, if that changes I'll let you know. The new phone is a brick and after some research it turns out that more often than not Samsung only has a local warranty. I've since spoken to a number of people who've had issues with charging.
When AI is not smart enough for the job
Life, James Hein, Published on 14/09/2022
» I was wondering what to write about this week and then I saw the Japanese Amazon story and how it relates to artificial intelligence. Labour unions in Japan have been a thing since World War II, but delivery drivers for Amazon Japan were not unionised, until recently.
Metals and energy shortage is a looming threat
Life, James Hein, Published on 20/07/2022
» I know the word rare gives it away but the world is facing a rare earth metals shortage. The Chinese are currently the largest producers of this resource and they recently cut their production by half. Turkey is another potential source but that region has been unstable for centuries. Most modern technology cannot expand further without these resources and the whole idea of ramping up renewables requires lots of them. Elon Musk has said we don't have enough in the world for all the plans of our governments and other experts agree.
Scams on the rise as inflation bites
Life, James Hein, Published on 06/07/2022
» We start this week with a webserver with extras in a single file that runs on any x86-64 operation system. Enter redbean 2.0. Created by Justine Tunney, it uses the "Actually Portable Executable" that you can read about here, justine.lol/ape.html. When you compile a program to its native binary, in this case x86-64 code, and don't call any external code, then the only difference between a Windows and a Linux would be the file format. If you can solve this, then it could run on any platform. To do that you need Cosmopoliton libc because any real program needs to make some calls, in this case the standard C ones. So, with Cosmo and the APE format, you can write a C program and compile it to a single file that will load and run on six very different operating systems and the same binary can also be booted directly from the PC BIOS. It's not perfect, but any programmer would be scratching their heads by now. Pause for techie amazement.
Samsung again pushing foldables
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/08/2021
» Samsung is betting on foldables. The new Galaxy Z Fold 3 will come with IPX8 water resistance, support for the S-pen and an under-display selfie camera. It will be interesting to see how they solved the clarity issue Apple faced with that last one. The front screen will be an adaptive 7.6-inch 120Hz.
The benefits and risks of neural interfaces
Life, James Hein, Published on 17/02/2021
» This week is dedicated to the brain-computer interface, or BCI. For some time now, sci-fi movies and TV series have presented the idea of a mind-to-computer interface that controls technology, retrieves information and displays it on virtual screens. Meanwhile, in the background, a number of companies have been working on this and the technology is close to realising some of the outcomes only seen in fiction so far.
Redefining your normal and other tech predictions
Life, James Hein, Published on 06/01/2021
» Thank goodness 2020 is finished. Hopefully 2021 will be better and that in this case not all of my predictions will come true.