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Nexus 4

My wife has had a LG Nexus 4 for about 4 months now so it’s time for me to review it and compare it to my Samsung Galaxy S3.

A Sealed Case

The first thing to note about the Nexus 4 is that it doesn’t support changing a battery or using micro-SD storage. The advantage […]

Links May 2013

Cameron Russell (who works as an underwear model) gave an interesting TED talk about beauty [1].

Ben Goldacre gave an interesting and energetic TED talk about bad science in medicine [2]. A lot of the material is aimed at non-experts, so this is a good talk to forward to your less scientific friends.

Lev wrote […]

SCSI Failures

For a long time it was widely regarded that SCSI was the interface for all serious drives that were suitable for “Enterprise Use” or for anything else which requires reliable operation. On the other hand IDE was for cheap disks that were only suitable for home use. The SCSI vs IDE issue continues to this […]

Noise from Shaving

About 10 years ago I started using an electric shaver. An electric shaver is more convenient to use as it doesn’t require any soap, foam, or water. It is also almost impossible to cut yourself properly with an electric shaver which is a major benefit for anyone who’s not particularly alert in the morning. Generally […]

No Backups WTF

Some years ago I was working on a project that involved a database cluster of two Sun E6500 servers that were fairly well loaded. I believe that the overall price was several million pounds. It’s the type of expensive system where it would make sense to spend adequately to do things properly in all ways.

[…]

Advice on Buying a PC

A common topic of discussion on computer users’ group mailing lists is advice on buying a PC. I think that most of the offered advice isn’t particularly useful with an excessive focus on building or upgrading PCs and on getting the latest and greatest. So I’ll blog about it instead of getting involved in more […]

Voltage Inside a Car

I previously wrote a post with some calculations about the power supplied to laptops from a car battery [1]. A comment on the post suggested that I might have made a mistake in testing the Voltage because leaving the door open (and thus the internal lights on) will cause a Voltage drop.

So I’ve done […]

Effective Conference Calls

I’ve been part of many conference calls for work and found them seriously lacking. Firstly there’s a lack of control over the call, so when someone does something stupid like putting an unmuted phone handset near a noise source there’s no way to discover who did it and disconnect them.

Another problem is that of […]

Geographic Sorting – Lessons to Learn from Ingress

I’ve recently been spending a bit of my spare time playing Ingress (see the Wikipedia page if you haven’t heard of it). A quick summary is that Ingress is an Android phone game that involves geo-location of “portals” that you aim to control and most operations on a portal can only be performed when you […]