Showing 1 - 10 of 27
How YouTube fails its creators
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/04/2026
» YouTube is failing in customer protection, especially in certain categories. As a case study, consider YouTuber Davie504. Unless you are a bass player or interested in bass lines, you probably haven't heard of him. He spends time practising and demonstrating bass playing in a proficient and sometimes amusing fashion. He is unassuming and obviously works hard to present good content. In general, if you are playing any musical selection in a teaching presentation, particularly if you are playing it yourself, or if the section is short and not the full song, then this should be all covered by "fair use". Enter the music industry. When you think about overbearing corporate control, this is the perfect example. Within this, some artists are worse than others, with the absolute worst being whomever represents The Eagles.
AI learning versus human creativity is a real battle
Life, James Hein, Published on 25/02/2026
» If you’ve been reading these columns long enough, you’ll probably know that I write music and I’ve written some books. With the advent of artificial intelligence, the concept of copyright and private property has blurred. The standard rule was, what you have worked hard on to create, belongs to you. As musicians and authors, ideally, we create, we write and we invent. In the world of AI, it will draw a picture, write a book and create music for you based on a simple text prompt that itself may have also been written for you by AI.
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.
Is your internet speed too slow?
Life, James Hein, Published on 09/04/2025
» How important is a good internet connection? This is one of those how long is a piece of string or what computer should I get questions. Back in the day, it was a huge jump from zero bits per second to a 2400 Baud modem. People and businesses were willing to pay a large sum to get connected because it opened up a new world of possibilities, ranging from not needing to go to the library as often and being able to sell and market products online. When and how often you paid for the next upgrade depended on your use case and the capabilities it provided. The next major jumps in speed were 4800, 9600 and 14400bps and everyone jumped to one of these as a next step. During this period, the mid 90s, the T1 at 1.544Mbps was the imaginary godlike speed we all dreamed about but didn't have money to afford. That speed provided real time video conference calls and was limited to government and large business concerns that typically involved a dedicated screening room. This was also when the concept of data compression started to gain popularity as you could send more with less bits.
Jetsons cars finally take off
Life, James Hein, Published on 26/03/2025
» Some readers will remember the old cartoon The Jetsons. This promised a future with flying cards, robot assistants and helpful computer tools. We have or are getting very close to the robot assistants, and the latest artificial intelligence offerings seem to be the automated helpers. Missing to date are the flying cars. That may have changed with the new Jetson ONE, a single person flying car I saw a demonstration of in a recent video. It looked good, seemed to fly with good stability and landed without any issue. You can find the demos with a simple search. The craft has vertical take-off and landing capability. However, I shudder to think of what thousands of these might look like in the skies above a city without some serious improvements in driving and collision avoidance.
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.
YouTube ramps up ads, moderation
Life, James Hein, Published on 01/03/2023
» If this was a YouTube video you would have to sit through up to 30 seconds of ads before you could even start. YouTube seems to be stepping up its advertising while at the same time providing less service. I still use it because it has things I'm interested in, like Chinese martial arts series and info on music products I like. If I'd written this using ChatGPT you would not see some of the material because the trust and safety filters on the AI product have repeatedly been found to be biased towards the US political left in the content it will return. Some people associated with ChatGPT have acknowledged this but it remains to be seen if anything will change.
Protect yourself when online
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/08/2022
» A friend of mine, let's call him Dave, wrote to me recently about identity theft. He told me that all of his identifying information like phone numbers, email addresses, old passwords and his usual security questions, were all available on the dark web. He also had a number of notifications of personal information breaches that resulted in fraudulent charges, the need to replace credit cards and attempts to set up fake bank accounts in his name. The latter is used if a hacker is planning to get into your other accounts so they can transfer funds to themselves under your name.
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.
Got them new phone blues
Life, James Hein, Published on 30/03/2022
» It has been 3 years and I have a new phone. Thanks to a very generous rebate from Vodaphone I have the latest flagship in my hands. It feels nice and solid but I immediately put it in a Spigen Neo case, rated as one of the best by some reviewers. I have been happy with the Spigen range over the years. I watched some drop tests and prefer the phone to stay in good shape so I'm also considering a decent screen protector.