As much as I love my MacBook, 2 USB ports just isn't enough! Between phone charging, memory sticks and a keyboard and mouse, I'm sick of swapping cables in and out of ports. I wanted a USB hub which didn't have a trailing wire (one more thing to get tangled or lost) and would fit neatly onto a laptop. Enter the Sabrent 4-Port USB 2.0 Rotatable Hub a £6 hub available on Amazon. It's a tiny hub - about the size of my thumb. It fits perfectly onto a MacBook Pro. The rotating mechanism will …
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Twitter have just released Periscope for Android. I'll do a full review of it later (tl;dr it's Qik with worse resolution) - but for now, I want to focus on the sign up process. You can only sign in with Twitter. That's fine, it's a Twitter product. So I pressed the sign-in button and this is the screen I saw. Is that the Twitter mobile website embedded into the app or is it a phishing page? I've no way of knowing! I can't see the URL bar - for all I know, this could be an elaborate…
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This is a quick review of the ZeleSouris Vertical Mouse and a guide to setting it up on Linux. Four years ago, I got the latest Evoluent Vertical Mouse. It's a great device, but it's starting to show its age a bit. So, time for a new model. I'm doing a lot of travelling, so a wireless mouse is a must. Sadly, the Evoluent Wireless Mouse is £75. As good as their mice are, I wanted something cheaper - so I wouldn't feel terrible if I lost it or got damaged. At around £25, the ZeleSouris l…
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I actively resent having a Google+ account. It's a bloated desert of half-finished ideas. Even the Google employees I know seem to have stopped using it. It's a necessary evil when dealing with Google products, sadly. I haven't used it in months and my profile tells people not to contact me there. That doesn't stop all manner of spammers from adding me to their "circles" - which, in turn, causes an obnoxious little notification bubble. Ok, so if you have to have a G+ account (for…
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As I scuttled through Piccadilly Tube Station last week, I noticed a relic of the past. Where once a dozen-or-so booths greedily gobbled up the loose change of passers-by - there now is a scar. What's the next thing which will be torn out of the landscape? Petrol stations are likely to remain - even if just as places to rapidly charge electric vehicles. Perhaps bus stops vanish as we use crowd-sharing mass-transit efficiently moves us around? Litter-hunting robots which crawl the streets …
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The idiot in question being... me! It's been ages since I did any real electronics. Most of my work involves software and pre-assembled bits of kit. I thought that it was time I reacquainted myself with the joys of electricity :-) Because I'm fundamentally lazy, I purchased the all-in-one Raspberry Pi 2 kit from Vilros. Lots of LEDs, some buttons, a nice case, all the cables, resistors, and all sorts of bits and bobs. Including a breadboard! What's A Breadboard? I remember - from…
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What could be worse than email spam? Animated gifs in the subject line of email spam! This is a trend I've recently started to see on Gmail - here's what it looks like and how it works. So, what's going on here? How have they got an animated image into the subject line? Here's the raw text of the message's subject line: …
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Earlier this week I appeared on BBC Radio 4's "You And Yours" to talk about the scourge of SMS Spam. You can listen to it on their website - or, if it has expired, I've grabbed an audio clip for your listening pleasure. 🔊 💾 Download this audio file. I've asked the Direct Marketing Associate to create a "Do Not Text" list - so that people can opt-out of spam SMS. They already operate the Mail Preference Service and the Telephone Preference Service for opting out of junk mail and ca…
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Here's a very silly idea. Can we use the number of followers each candidate has to predict who will win the election? No, probably not - but let's give it a try anyway, eh? Hypothesis Support on Twitter - as measured by the number of followers - is a reasonable predictor of electoral success. It is likely that the incumbent MP will have a large number of followers - having been in the public eye for five years and (possibly) being on Twitter that long. It is also likely that MPs with…
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