Here’s a business idea. Loud, raucous extroverts have everywhere taken over the agenda, our playlists, subscriptions and feeds brimming with their over-excited clamour. It’s time the quiet ones seized the initiative to develop an alternative platform, that just calmly simmers away, offering up restrained output that nourishes the soul. No need for likes, shares, and …
Despite making a living from the web, meaning I really should know better, I’ve somehow managed to leave digital footprints behind all over the place. A source of great regret. One of them, an old Facebook account, somehow never properly closed before losing access to the email address and phone number associated with it. Try …
In software development, cheeky engineers sometimes hide “easter eggs” in their code, which often remain long undiscovered until undocumented commands or a combination of events bring them to light. That’s why I sometimes invoke the analogy of living in an advanced virtual reality metaverse: because I keep on encountering the likeness of easter eggs in …
To phone home, you used to have to use a special access code to get cheap international calls, but still you’d keep them short. Then came that era conversing via MSN Messenger, firing up the dial-up internet. Later, attempting to video call, only to spend hours faffing about trying to help the other end get …
Can computing be taught in an interesting and engaging way? Our lad is cross with me for making him take such a boring subject. I feel sorry for him, because I felt exactly the same way. In my day, we had to share one computer between three of us. In the early days, they were …
Apple, you truly deserve that epithet. You’re the new Microsoft, deploying buggy software you haven’t bothered to test on anything but your latest hardware. How can it be that your latest OS “update” crashes constantly because WindowServer can’t cope with me having two external monitors plugged into my laptop, something I have been able to …
Well done, Microsoft, you finally got it right: Windows 11 is a pretty decent OS. I have it running on an officially unsupported device, over eight years old. I had to do some jiggery-pokery in the registry to enable an install, but it was worth the effort, for the computer is now snappier than it …
Apart from those who occasionally surface to like or comment on a post, I have no idea who reads my blog. The basic hosting tier I have provides very limited usage stats; to integrate Google Analytics, I’d need to pay more. I can’t see your IP address. I can’t even view granular geolocation data.
On Friday, I received a phone call from myself. I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business, when my mobile started to ring. When I glanced down, it showed me a slice of cake, which is my profile picture, and my name. I didn’t answer as I was a bit spooked. What if …
I hate binning tech. I consider it squanderful, both of the resources used to produce it and of the money with which it is purchased. But computers — unlike my grandmother’s Kenwood Chef which remained fully functional after sixty years of continuous use — have a problem: software evolving with ever-increasing complexity, which renders the …
What does dad know? That know-nothing kitted his kids out with a Mac Mini each at the height of their great home-learning adventure last year, complete with great big LCD monitors and peripherals. Everything they’d need to complete their homework and coursework over the next five years. But what does he know? Nothing it seems, …
A gift from a brother-in-law I haven’t seen in five years: a bricked backup drive which, as the resident IT pro, I must spend my afternoon recovering. Apparently I agreed to this on the phone about a year ago.
When working remotely, data can be much like the natural spring which feeds our home: a precious resource to be managed carefully. Just as we have an enclosed reservoir up there in the forest in which the spring water gathers and rests — an often finite resource, limited by the flow rate in and our …
I love Logitech’s backlit bluetooth keyboard. Recently purchased to replace the cheaper K380, which I’ve been using the past three years. That one has served me well enough, but has started to squeak, presumably because our lad managed to get marmalade into the switches.
The real tech nerd builds their own VPN. Although, I admit, I’m not quite the nerd I once was. Five years ago I used Streisand scripts on a Linux server hosted in AWS, so I could work remotely while appearing to be elsewhere; combined with a Skype number with a local area code, only my …
