My solar panels deliver pure Direct Current electricity into my house. All my house has Alternating Current circuits. Therefore, I need an inverter to change the DC to AC. This is inefficient. Most of the electronic devices I own are powered by DC. So I plug little wall-warts into the AC sockets to convert back to DC. This is also inefficient. One of the DC devices I'll be getting soon is…
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Google have just announced their brand new WiFi router - OnHub. It promises to make WiFi connectivity a breeze, increase speeds, reduce buffering, and clean your carpets. Nestled at the bottom of the annoucement is this curious specification. That seems... low. Doesn't it? I did a quick tally of all the devices my wife and I have which use WiFi. My phone Wife's phone My ebook …
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My good friend Dan Appelquist recent wrote a fascinating blog post on solipsism as a design decision. He has a set of Lifx Internet Controlled Lightbulbs. They're great fun, but have some seriously screwy ideas about how people live. One key design of the app is to allow you to automatically switch off all your lights when you exit your house. That's pretty nifty, right? I am still…
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Journalist Dave Lee pointed out a disturbing new spear-phishing attack on Twitter. The phony account looks for people who are Tweeting their dissatisfaction with Lloyds Bank - one of the largest and oldest banks in the UK - and sends them messages urging them to log in to a fraudulent site. The tweets have some realistic touches - such as ending with "^LY" to signal the initials of who is…
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Like a lot of you, my Facebook feed often fills up with dodgy adverts for discount sunglasses. In this case, Mark's account has been hacked and the spammers are tagging lots of his friends. The post then shows up on my feed as "look what your friend is up to!" Annoying. So, here's how to stop it. There's a slightly obscure FB privacy setting called: Review posts that friends tag you in…
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I'm working on a new project which, unless UK copyright law radically changes, will only be available if you pop round my house :-) Yesterday... In 1960s the predominant form of music recording was in mono. Indeed, The Beatles weren't involved in many of their stereo mixes. If you listen to some of those early tracks, you'll get an idea of how stereo worked back in the day. For example,…
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Notes to myself! Suppose you want to create a surround sound file using Audacity. The app is a little obtuse, so this may clear up some confusion. When exporting, Audacity defaults to mixing down to stereo. You must adjust these settings: Edit → Preferences → Import/Export → Use Custom Mix Lay out your audio. Keep each track as mono. You can have as many tracks as you like and then downm…
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Earlier this year I was moaning about my Nexus 6. Motorola's crappy battery technology is well documented, my phone was running so hot that the glue holding the device together became unstuck! Eventually, the battery failed. It would report being fully charged, but only run for a few minutes before switching off. Recalibrating and resetting the battery statistics failed to improve the…
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You may have heard of Chuck Lorre. He's the producer behind Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, and a bunch of other comedies. He also wrote the theme song for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! This is a quick delve in to the various international versions of the theme song. UK Perhaps the weirdest thing about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to me is that they are Ninjas. When I was…
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Earlier this year, I received SMS Spam from Paddy Power. I went into full-on Taken mode! I have a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for spammers like them ☺ It culminated with barrage of complaints and an interview on BBC Radio 4. A few months on, it's time to see what my complaining has achieved. First up, a p…
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What happens if you search the web for the Unicode character "☺"? On the one hand, it's a symbol just like the letter A or the punctuation mark "!" - on the other, it contains semantic meaning. A smiling, happy face. I decided to look at a few popular search engines to see what they'd return. First up, a surprisingly poor entry from Google. The site at the top by Tim Whitlock is fine - but i…
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See this update for a better way to do this. Being mostly notes to myself and following on from my post on Quadrophonic files. I have: A DTS album stored as a .WAV A .cue file with chapter markings I want: The single large file to be split into individual chapters with one file per chapter. Each file to be multitrack (that is, to stay in surround sound) It turns out,…
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