Archive for the 'General' Category
Snooping at School 18 Feb 2010
I thought this sort of thing was limited to storylines in books by overly paranoid others, but where you hear about how a school used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home you have to worry.
Kicking Off the Computer Age 4 Feb 2010
The BBC has a couple of interesting articles about the start of the computer age in the UK. The first is on the Small Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM, more commonly known as Baby), developed at Manchester University and the world’s first programmable computer. The second covers the Edsac computer developed in Cambridge with funding from [...]
The Eye of a Futurist 25 Jan 2010
I was looking at it and thinking I could quite happily read all the RSS feeds I subscribe to (short posts I read directly in the RSS reader, only if the article is interesting do I move on). This would be a great way to do it without the hassle of firing up the PC, [...]
Weighing in on Tablet PCs 21 Jan 2010
Jason Bradbury’s view that (specifically) Apple’s new tablet PC will ‘change publishing forever’ is interesting, if not a little premature I think. First off, we’re all focused on Apple’s upcoming announcement about what we assume is their tablet entry (it’ll be interesting if it’s not), but other manufacturers are already offering the devices and 2010 [...]
I Want an Unsmart Phone 10 Jan 2010
I caught this in an article by Cringely:
…this product introduction really marks the ultimate decline and fall of so-called “feature phones” and the rise to dominance of smart phones. Within two years there will be no more feature phones, at least not in the U.S.
Woah, I’m not sure I want a smartphone, I’d rather have [...]
Thunderbird 3 is out 9 Dec 2009
If, like me, you can’t stand webmail interfaces for reading and replying to emails you’ll be glad to know Mozilla finally got around to releasing a new version of Thunderbird, their email client, you can download it here.
Some of the new features:
Tabbed browsing of emails (why? not using it)
Search (better search is always good)
Message archiving [...]
Respect the ‘tache 23 Nov 2009
Apart from highlighting men’s health issues (specifically prostate cancer), Movember has the added benefit of showing just how hard it is to grow and wear a moustache and not look utterly ridiculous. People who can wear one well obviously deserve more kudos.
Read the Future 5 Nov 2009
I caught a small snippet in Wired this month about the Espresso Book Machine, which allows books to be printed on demand. The article described it as an “ATM for books.”
You can see it in action on YouTube:
Apparently it will “print, bind, and trim a 300-page book in less than four minutes…” – not [...]
Star Wars Uncut 23 Oct 2009
Star Wars uncut is a fairly simple premise: “You and 472 other people have the chance to recreate Star Wars: A New Hope. Below is the entire movie split up into 15 second clips. Click on one of the scenes to claim it, film it, and upload it. You can have up to three scenes! [...]
RSS Is Alive And Well 5 Sep 2009
I’m with Fred on this one, I don’t use Twitter, too little content and I don’t need real-time, I check my feeds once or twice a day, not once or twice a minute. RSS is still the best way to do this. Twitter is a different beast.