Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

I’ve just returned from my third trip without a laptop – the longest so far, with a whole week in the US. Mostly this has worked out very well. Power to weight ratio Just like with fast cars/bikes, this is the key to success. I’m finding that the iPad 2 can make it through a […]


I ordered an iPad 2 on the day that they were made available in the US (and had it shipped to a friend I was visiting a few weeks later). A few days later I got a note from one of the R&D guys at work saying that a Galaxy Tab was on its way […]


This might well be the bargain of the decade, and I must say that I’m quite cross that the news took so long to find me. A couple of days after I bought my NAS a friend tweeted: I asked Leslie how it was so cheap. It turns out that the (ex VAT) price was […]


One of the great frustrations for me with my iOS devices (and PSPs before them) has been the need for transcoding of video files before watching. This was always a time (and CPU) consuming and fiddly process, and for some insane reason the files often ended up being larger than the original. When I got […]


For quite some time I’ve run my main PC as a hybrid workstation and server. When I built the machine (over 5 years ago) I got a fancy motherboard with onboard RAID5 and popped in 4x300GB drives. It got a mid life upgrade to 4x750GB (which gave a usable 2TB volume), but that was bursting […]


Too many devices I seem to accumulated a proliferation of devices recently that want to have SIM cards in them for mobile data: Personal laptop (well actually a tablet, but not in the way that people use that label these days) Work laptop iPhone (not just data) Android phone (could be not just data, but […]


More Android

24Mar11

This post will likely be trollbait for that special flavour of Apple fanbois and their anti equivalent… Weekend away I spent a most enjoyable weekend away at Maker Faire in Newcastle, and I took my iPhone 4 and the San Francisco (ZTE Blade) with me (along with my old Lenovo s10e netbook). The Blade made […]


When I started my new job I had two choices for mobile device – a company owned BlackBerry or buy my own iPhone and get company email using Good. I didn’t want to go back to having two phones in my pocket, which would have been necessary if I’d gone down the BlackBerry route (as […]


Last week I was very impressed to find this at my desk in the Westin Jersey City: and yesterday I found this in the Crowne Plaza Zurich: NB The D-Link pocket WiFi router being powered by the media bar USB. For some odd reason this hotel doesn’t have WiFi (but thankfully it does have free […]


This post is about the madness of corporate web filters in the age of ubiquitous consumer devices with Internet connectivity. I typically see three types of connectivity in any given corporate setting: The company network. Usually wired, but sometimes with a wireless adjunct, this network offers the same liberty as an oppressive Middle East regimes[1]. This […]