Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

TL;DR I’ve been a fan of HP Microservers since the original NL36 model. When the newer Gen8 servers came to market they were a bit pricey, but the cost has come down, and cash back deals have returned. Faster CPUs, larger official memory capacity, dual NICs and remote console capabilities makes these ideal for a […]


TL;DR – The LinkIt ONE is an awesome Arduino, with a ton of great integrated peripherals, but I fear there’s too much of a gap between Arduino style development and building the next generation of connected things – though hopefully that gets covered by the forthcoming Eclipse based SDK. Introduction I was at the Web Summit in […]


FPGA

29Jun14

TL;DR Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have been around for decades, but they’ve become a hot topic again. Intel recently announced Xeon chips with FPGAs added on, Microsoft are using FPGAs to speed up search on Bing, and there are Kickstarter projects such as miniSpartan6+ trying to bring FPGA the ease of use and mass […]


TL;DR If you’re a Three customer using a 4G capable device abroad with their Feel at Home free international roaming then you may have to manually select 3G as the network preference in order to get a data connection. Update 1: Terence Eden provides a telco insider explanation what what’s going on (or should that be […]


When Paul Simmonds showed up to speak at the privacy and security track I hosted at QCon London last week he brought a Chromebook. After my own experiences using a Chromebook for a presentation my first thought was ‘this isn’t going to end well'[1]. The first issue was connecting to the ubiquitous VGA connector for the […]


Update (14 Mar 2014) Andrew Weir pointed out that I the price is per month not per year – corrected accordingly. The big news of the last day is that Google dropped its pricing for Drive storage to $9.99 per TB per month. Ex Googler Sam Johnston says ‘So the price of storage is now […]


TL;DR Banking CIOs may know about Ubuntu, and be vaguely aware of Canonical, but I’d be surprised if many could explain the difference in commerials versus Red Hat. Meanwhile engineering teams are content to stick with what they have in a combination of clinging to the past and seeking some mythical homogeneity. OpenStack might give […]


I had some fun last year putting CohesiveFT’s VNS3 cloud networking solution onto Raspberry Pi. It gave us something to demo on at trade shows, and we could also give away Pis as part of promotions. The Pis were like geek catnip. I’ll be using Pis again for Cloud Expo Europe later this month, but […]


I’ve been using a Lenovo X201 Tablet in a docking station as my main machine for about 3 years now. 8GB RAM hasn’t been enough for a while, which is why I got 16GB for my X230 laptop, and I’ve been having issues with the CPU running out of steam when using Skype and Google […]


It’s almost 3 years since I got my HP Microserver – time for a change. 8GB wasn’t enough RAM for all the VMs I want to run, and even with an unofficial upgrade to 16GB I was running out of room. The NL40 processor was starting to show some strain too. The time had come […]