Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

The arrival of my EFM connection meant that I needed to find some way of balancing load (and failing over) between the new EFM and the existing ADSL. Thankfully there’s a healthy market in low end load balancers, and after digging through some reviews I went for the DrayTek Vigor 2820n. ADSL The device is […]


My firm moved offices a little while ago, and one of the things I was looking forward to was a much better Internet pipe than we had in our old place (which seemed like a domestic ADSL shared across 100+ people). Part of the plan was a fully VOIP telephone system, something that I’ll return […]


The bottom line here is that $50 (or £40) for 3G won’t get the buyer unlimited global web surfing. It looks too good to be true, and therefore it is. In the words of Admiral Ackbar – ‘it’s a trap!’. That 3G is there so that Amazon can sell you books. Whilst it may be possible to use it (for the time being) to do some surfing too at no extra cost that’s a feature that can’t be (and therefore won’t be) economically sustainable.


Tim Bray has a post up about numbers, and this began as a comment but grew a little too long. I once described telephone numbers as ‘the original digital identity‘. The trouble is that for way too long they were associated to land lines (and hence geographic locations) and then mobiles came along and tied […]


I touched upon some time ago when I bought my new DVR. The question is how are we going to achieve distribution of video around the home when analogue TV goes away? The good old way I spent part of fathers day setting up distribution in my in law’s new place. They live in a […]


When I first heard about Pleo I knew that I had to get one. My son is a huge dinosaur fan, and a toy robot baby Camarasaurus was sure to be a huge hit. I ended up ordering two ‘first hatch‘ Pleos in the hope that I could turn a quick profit selling on the […]


Yesterday the kids got a hand me down TV from their grandparents, which caused me to do a bit of reconfiguration of things in their play room. The HomePlug adaptor in the garage had died a few weeks back, so I’d swapped it for the one connected to their little used X-Box 360. Anyway, to […]


This is going to be one of those ‘to save me from repeating myself’ sort of blog posts, as I seem to have been frequently engaged in conversation recently about this topic. Apple Let’s start with the elephant in the room. Apple redefined the smartphone with the launch of the iPhone, and though I don’t […]


BlackBerry OS 5

15May10

One of the side effects of getting a new machine was that I used BlackBerry Desktop for the first time in ages. When it started up I was offered an upgrade to the newer 5.x OS, which I went ahead with (luckily I wasn’t in a hurry). Here’s my experience of running the new OS […]


This is my first follow up post after my first impressions, which went up ten days ago now. I’m using the X201 as my main machine on the road, at work and around the house, so it’s getting to the stage now where I know it reasonably well. Pimping my ride I’ve done a few […]