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 […]
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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 […] To convert video files between formats I use Makefiles, this means I can run “make -j2” on my dual-core server to get both cores going at once. avconv uses 8 threads for it’s computation and I’ve seen it take up to 190% CPU time for brief periods of time, but overall it seems to average […] The Age has an interesting article about how Apple supposedly killed the Netbook [1]. It’s one of many articles with a similar spin on the news that the last two companies making Netbooks are going to cease production. The main point of these articles is that Apple decided that Netbooks were crap and killed the […] I just had a conversation with someone who thinks that their office should have no servers. The office in question has four servers, an Internet gateway/firewall system, the old file server (and also Xen server), the new file server, and the VOIP server. The Internet gateway system could possibly be replaced by a suitably smart […] I’ve just broken my second SATA connector. This isn’t a lot considering the number of hard drives I’ve worked with, but it’s still really annoying as I generally don’t break things. The problem is that unplugging a SATA cable requires pushing a little clip, this isn’t overly difficult but it unfortunately doesn’t fit well with […] I’ve just seen a mailing list post from someone who needs an ancient printer to work with their old software. As the printer is no longer manufactured and changing the software is expensive this puts them in a difficult situation – which can be profitable for someone who happens to own an ancient printer that […] Don Marti wrote an amusing post about the lack of standards for Android phones and the fact that the iPhone has a better accessory market as a result [1]. I’d like to see some Android phones get standardised in a similar manner to the PC. The big thing about the IBM PC compatible market was […] Augmented reality is available on all relatively modern smart phones. I’ve played with it on my Android phone but it hasn’t delivered the benefits that I hoped, there is a game where you can walk through a virtual maze which didn’t work for me, and a bunch of programs which show me the position of […] On a recent visit to my local e-waste disposal place I noticed an open PC on the top of the pile with a pair of DIMMs that were begging to be removed. I also noticed three PCI Ethernet cards that were stacked in a manner that made them convenient to grab – possibly some nice […] |
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