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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My father tells a story of when I was very young and helping him do the shopping in the local supermarket. As I started to lift apples into a bag, he told me to stop, "We don't buy fruit from South Africa," he explained. A woman near us in the aisle turned to him and said, "Quite right too! Imagine all your fruit being touched by black people." At the time, South Africa was control by violent racists who strictly segregated the non-white population. This was Apartheid. There's not much…
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One of the most popular blog posts I have written is called "I Don't Want To Be Part of Your Fucking Ecosystem". In it, I rant against service providers trying to lock their customers into a monoculture. Companies are always looking for the edge which will make them stand out - they think that restricting what their users can do is the answer. It is not. Openness and network effects are the biggest drivers of usage - an MP3 bought from Amazon works on an iPod bought from Apple, and an MP3…
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I've recently moved in to a new house. The WiFi from my lounge just about stretches to upstairs, but it's a fairly noisy radio environment as everyone on the street also has WiFi. The 5GHz range is clear as a whistle - but only a few of my devices support that frequency. So! It's time to turn to HomePlugs. These nifty little gadgets create a wired network over your power cables. The most recent version promise up to 500Mbps transfer speed (a theoretical max which is never reached) - and, as…
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The leaders of several huge corporations have issued statements saying that their companies do not allow the US Government to illegally spy on their users. I'm sure they believe that. I'd even go so far as to say that I'm sure the entire board and top management genuinely have no knowledge of any malfeasance. Why would they? We're talking about spies - experts in the art of subterfuge and espionage. Why would a spy agency do anything as crude as ask permission? Consider the Greek…
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In Terry Pratchett's book "Going Postal" he writes about the impact on the Discworld civilization of the semaphore tower. A new - but relatively basic - technology which revolutionises how people work, play, and interact. It changes the fortunes of the humble and the mighty. It is as useful for individuals as for nation states. In our universe, the modern semaphore tower was first conceived by Robert Hooke in 1684. Yet it the optical telegraph didn't really exist until 1792 - over a…
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Compare and contrast... [The] Xerox 914 copy machine [...] was used in soviet embassies all over the world. The machine was so complex that the CIA used a tiny camera designed by Zoppoth to capture documents copied on the machine by the soviets and retrieved them using a "Xerox repairman" right under the eyes of soviet security. Xerox Helped Win The Cold War And Samsung printers (as well as some Dell printers manufactured by Samsung) contain a hardcoded SNMP full read-write community…
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I've just seen this amazing short film - The End by Ted Evans Ted also has a blog which talks about all the awards The End has deservedly won. The premise of the film is simple - what if there was a cure for deafness? What if that cure was mandated? What if you refused? All good sci-fi stuff - with neat parallels to today's society. What really got me thinking was the way technology can have a profound - and often detriment - impact on communities. I'm not going to get into the politics…
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Last night, I attended Ada Lovelave Day Live. An inspirational and entertaining evening celebrating women in technology. One of the ways that people can get involved in Ada Lovelace day is be blogging about women in tech - I blogged in 2009 and 2010 but - to my shame - I didn't in 2011. So, here is a double post in penance :-) Mary Anning (21 May 1799 – 9 March 1847) First up, Mary Anning. I was in the British Museum yeasterday, they have a wonderful collection of fossils. The most i…
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Having sex is pretty good fun, isn't it? I enjoy it. I dare say you enjoy it. But, tell me, is it really appropriate for me to associate your products with having an erect penis? You see, being a heterosexual male, I'm biologically predisposed to be sexually stimulated by images and videos of women in various states of undress. When I'm sexually stimulated my penis has this tendency to experience a rush of blood, which makes the spongy tissues expand until the whole organ is fairly rigid. …
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Why do some people in the technology community seem so susceptible to snake oil? I suspect it's because of two things. We trust our friends' judgement. We are experts in our fields and, therefore, trust our own judgement in matters we don't fully understand. Compare and contrast the following two statements. On the announcement of the original iPod, one influential pundit declared... "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." Source: Slashdot.org's original iPod discussion On …
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QR codes are an awesome free resource for charities. Sadly, they are often misused. Charities can use them to drive SMS donations - here's a quick example of how this works. Sightsavers Sightsavers is an incredible charity, working hard to combat blindness in developing countries. I'm picking on them only because their poster caught my eye this morning. It's an effective poster with a strong call-to-action; "Text now". They've even included a QR code with it. Due to the proximity of the …
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