• TECH

  Google bets on offline stores

  Life, James Hein, Published on 09/06/2021

  » Google is looking to venture into the area where Microsoft failed but Apple still does well, the brick-and-mortar retail store. The first of these will be opened in Chelsea, New York, allowing customers to find their devices like Pixel phones and Pixelbooks, Fitbits and Nest at a physical location. All subject to the latest Covid rules of course.

• TECH

  Graphene semiconductors mark new start

  Life, James Hein, Published on 17/01/2024

  » We have just started 2024 and there are already exciting announcements. The clever people at Georgia Tech in Atlanta have built the first scalable semiconductor using a graphene base. Graphene, a wonder product, is not a scalable semiconductor on its own, so they bonded silicon carbide, or what we call carborundum, to a layer of graphene creating the necessary bandgap to have a working switch. A switch means binary and from there they can make wafers like those currently used in the chip manufacturing process to make CPUs and other devices.

• TECH

  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.

• TECH

  Samsung's future flex

  Life, James Hein, Published on 26/05/2021

  » So whatever happened to the rollable displays we were promised some time back? Turns out companies like Samsung have been working on them, presenting a few at the recent Society for Information Display (SID) annual exhibition. The key to this technology is the OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display because it doesn't need a backlight. This allows for paper thin, flexible displays. In keeping with their usual nomenclature, Samsung calls their first device the S-foldable. Their range starts at phone size and unfolds twice to a 7.2-inch screen. They also presented a slidable screen that pulls out to give a wider view. Then came the 17-inch foldable screen that starts as a tablet that can be used as a small monitor tagged as the "Carrying Small Seeing Big". For now, these are concept devices that we should see in the wild next year. Not to be outdone, LG demoed a 65-inch rollable OLED TV along with a 12.8-inch rollable device. China is also in the mix with Visionox showing their rollable OLEDs.

• TECH

  Digital world backslides into autocratisation

  Life, James Hein, Published on 03/03/2021

  » - I love new technology and I often pick up the latest gadgets from sites like Kickstarter. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder are one step closer to using humans as batteries.

• TECH

  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.

• TECH

  A tablet of note

  Life, James Hein, Published on 11/11/2020

  » I have used my new Onyx Boox Note Air for a couple of weeks now and I like it. Having a user manual in English would be very useful but I finally found the setting to enable the auto rotate feature.

• TECH

  Change is nigh?

  Life, James Hein, Published on 14/10/2020

  » A long-awaited US congressional report into Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google has been published. The surprise for some is that this report from the Democrat-run House Judiciary Committee concludes that the online giants are monopolists that need to be broken up.

• TECH

  World wide the web isn't free

  Life, James Hein, Published on 30/09/2020

  » The dream of an open, transparent Internet that accepts all and their opinions is all but dead. The story starts on Jan 1, 1983, when the then ARPANET adopted the TCP/IP protocol and then really started to take off in 1990 after Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. It began like most things, simply, with topic driven bulletin boards and online forums, then it moved to personal websites and the first blogs. At the turn of the century this morphed into the Web 2.0 where social media platforms were developed and started to grow and opened up the world and different countries to each other at the personal level.

• TECH

  A new era for Windows?

  Life, James Hein, Published on 29/01/2020

  » When you read this, Windows 7 will have reached its end of support, but it still has about 27% of the current market share on Windows desktops. The Microsoft term "end of support" refers to technical support and security updates/fixes, and it means that over time your operating system will become less secure and more open to attack by malware.

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