I confess that I take every hacking attempt personally. Every attempt to log into my accounts. Every attempt to set up a sync. Every contrived phishing attempt. Every unusual spike in traffic. Feeling myself targeted, it might just drive me to silence. Daily, I ponder pouring my thoughts into an air gapped laptop alone. To …
After all that effort, turning the house upside down in search of a VGA cable… When I eventually found it, I discovered my monitor doesn’t even support that obsolete connector. It’s sad really, discovering what a squanderful generation we have been, those bags of tangled cables standing witness against us. Old SCART to USB converters. Old …
It only took me about three years to get around to it, but I finally sorted out our home WiFi network today. I dreaded having to reconfigure every connected device, but it turned out not to be so onerous in the end. Surprisingly easy, actually. Well, what else are wet Bank Holiday weekends for? One …
Had a brain wave this evening. Came across a long-abandoned Chromebook in a dusty bag while looking for a display cable. “Hmm,” I thought, “I wonder if I could use this to watch YouTube while lazing on the couch.” A long shot, given that it was given to crashing repeatedly when our daughter last tried …
Most of the time, the simplest solutions are best, no matter how old school.
Helping my elderly neighbour with his computer is a real eye-opener. There’s so much we take for granted, which others simply don’t understand. It’s a good lesson in the importance of simplifying transactions when we build services for populations with a range of needs.
I find it so strange that the fidelity of Microsoft Office documents opened in Microsoft web apps is so poor, while the same opened in OnlyOffice is nearly perfect. How come the format owner gets it so wrong, while a third-party pulls it off seamlessly? Maybe it’s time megacorp ploughed its trillions back into their …
Don’t expect too much from the latest tech. It mostly disappoints. After agreeing to donate a slightly older Mac Mini to a family member abroad, I decided to upgrade our daughter’s machine to one with the latest M3 chip, thinking it a future-proofed investment which would see her through sixth form and university. I was …
Uh-oh, I should have lowered my gaze. The ASUS Zenbook Duo 2024 has me enthralled. A new object of desire to irrationally play on my mind until I can resist no more. Perhaps I’ll get myself one when I become a goat herder and digital nomad.
Do the failings of the Post Office Horizon system shock me? Hardly. Too many services commissioning technological solutions to perceived problems simply don’t understand what they’re dealing with. Usually, they’re non-techs, incapable of distinguishing marketing hype from reality. Often they will circumvent the expert advice of their tech teams, intent on proceeding regardless. The latest …
The kids think I have something to do with Spotify being unavailable this evening. I’ve told them they’re awful conspiracy theorists. Now they’re not sure. For some reason, they think I have the power to block sites or cut off the internet at will. I’ve explained that because we have 5G broadband, their websites have …
I toy with returning to Windows as my desktop ecosystem of choice. I always was a Windows man, before one of my previous managers converted me, helped along by my dad. A Dell XPS or Surface Laptop might suit me very nicely, I sometimes think, although it’s more likely I’d be offered some scruffy Dell …
There’s that name again: Fujitsu, winner of hundreds of government IT contracts over the past thirty years. I first encountered them twenty years ago when I was employed to support a project manager rolling out elements of a national programme for IT locally. Fujitsu, a major supplier for the programme, went big with the freebies. …
If you ever need to set up or support a computer in a language other than your mother-tongue, Google Lens is your friend. It will translate all the menus and dialogue boxes in real time, enabling you to complete the task with barely a worry. Clever stuff. That’s not to say it will be plain …
Finally fixed the website connectivity issue on my trusty 2009 MacBook Pro. This the benefit of leaving it for a year, then attempting it on a day my head is at its clearest. Otherwise known as Christmas afternoon of the non-celebrant. Inspired by scoping refurbished computers for a niece in Turkey, wondering if I can …
