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  • News & article

    The reality of AI is less scary than the movies

    Life, James Hein, Published on 17/08/2022

    » I was talking to someone at work recently and mentioned the Palm Pilot. He never heard of it. Some of us remember it being released in 1996 before the smartphone and social media, and in the early days of the internet. It drove the creation of the smartphone, though the people at Intel at the time didn't see how a portable, hand-held device like this could become common. One of the founders and inventors was Jeff Hawkins who also founded Handspring and worked on the Treo that evolved into a very early smartphone with a camera, which this brings us to today's topic, artificial intelligence.

  • News & article

    Microsoft Paint might be fading

    Life, James Hein, Published on 02/08/2017

    » What is the one program you can count on to be in Windows, apart from say Minesweeper? Microsoft Paint. It's the poor man's drawing tool and screen capture tool where it is as simple as Alt-Printscreen, Start-Run MSPaint, CTRL-V, Crop Marquee Select Crop, CTRL-A CTRL-C, Switch to email and CTRL–V to get something from your screen into an email (or anything else).

  • News & article

    Size counts in the world of IT

    Life, James Hein, Published on 04/05/2016

    » When it comes to implementing systems, it is all about scale. If you have ever been a system tester you will know that what works one at a time may not work well if a whole bunch of them are processed all at once. Those who have ever used an old fashioned typewriter will understand this. Volume testing and scalability of system is one of the biggest problems a development testing team faces.

  • News & article

    The future is here and it's all about AI

    Life, James Hein, Published on 04/01/2023

    » Well, here we are in 2023. The last two years of Covid are behind us, some organisations are starting to rebuild and the future will hopefully be brighter.

  • News & article

    Those pesky pixel trackers

    Life, James Hein, Published on 12/10/2022

    » I've written about the tracking in TikTok. I recently found out you don't need to have the app installed to be providing tracking data to this platform. The term you need to learn today is "tracking pixel".

  • News & article

    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.

  • News & article

    Always check your sources

    Life, James Hein, Published on 15/09/2021

    » At the dawning of the internet age the aim was to provide a platform to share information, initially between higher education facilities. It was a golden age of what was essentially a library of information shared across the United States and later the world. The early fact checkers were academics interested in facts, data and a robust discussion.

  • News & article

    More data, more problems

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

    » It's time to make some predictions for 2020. A number were made by others a while back, most of which did not eventuate, like a Japanese base on the Moon, flying cars and a Beijing to London rail link. I'll try for a bit more realism.

  • News & article

    Translating ear buds and builder robots

    Life, James Hein, Published on 09/05/2018

    » Let's face it, technology is cool. Google is claiming that they will have translating ear buds you can use when you travel that will allow you to understand almost any language, instantly. Yes, it does sound like something out of a sci-fi book and I think they should name them Babel fish, but that name was already "stolen" from The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy series in 2012 that later became Bing Translator. The good news is that first versions of these may be ready for tourists in the very near future.

  • News & article

    VPNs outlawed in Russia

    Life, James Hein, Published on 08/11/2017

    » By the time you read this a new law in Russia will have banned the use or provision of virtual private networks (VPNs). ISPs will be required to block websites that offer VPNs and similar proxy services, currently used by millions of Russians to bypass state-imposed internet censorship. President Putin justified this draconian step as a measure to prevent the spread of extremism online. Its real purpose is to restrict the population to information approved by Russian regulator Roskomnadzor, being the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, or more simply censorship.

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