adambowie.com

Category: Internet

  • Storage and Backup: Some Personal Experiences

    [Note that this is likely to be duller than usual! It’s mostly written up so that anyone who searches for similar problems might find it useful.] This all began last Wednesday when I noticed an email from Synology inviting me to update the firmware that runs that two NAS drives I own – a DS210j…

  • In “How Can This Be Legal” News…

    A report today in the FT suggests that at least one mobile operator in Europe is planning on putting ad-blocking software into their network, with Google a named target. The software specifically targets web advertising rather than that in apps, and comes from an Israeli company. The reasoning is that networks are seeing massive growth…

  • Twitter List Wrangling

    [NB. This is really to help anyone having the same problem as I had trying to add many accounts to a Twitter list in one go using a third party application. You may wish to skip this entry!] Twitter has had lists for years, but I’ve never made any real effort to use them. It’s…

  • Around the Web

    They’ve been there a while now. At first, just a few. But now they’re everywhere. And the invasion is growing. What am I talking about? “Content Discovery Platforms” typified by those “Around the Web” discovery link panels you often see on news sites and advertising supported blogs. Essentially, these are the tables of links that…

  • On “Internal Browsers” – And Twitter’s Recent Addition

    A while back Facebook integrated a so-called internal or in-app browser into its mobile apps. The ideas is that when you click to see a website that somebody has shared on Facebook, instead of being taken out of the Facebook environment, the app would display the relevant page within its own browser. The main reason…

  • Amazon’s App Notifications

    As I buy a reasonable amount of stuff from Amazon, I use their mobile app a bit. It’s a relatively convenient way to manage my Amazon transactions. It also usefully sends you updates, using Android’s notifications system, to let you know when your items have been shipped, or if they’re available for collection should you…

  • Why I’m Abandoning Google Inbox

    There was much excitement last autumn when Google launched Inbox, it’s revolutionary new email program. It came with accompanying mobile apps, and the company implored you to fully immerse yourself with it. Like any new product, it required invites to get in and try it. It’s the cool new thing. But having given it a…

  • Why is Discovery So Poor in Amazon and Netflix?

    Over on The Medium is Not Enough, Rob Buckley notes that Amazon has quietly launched a number of new US series onto the service with hardly any publicity. And I find it particularly interesting because I really hadn’t noticed despite spending quite a few hours on Amazon over the weekend. While a lot of this…

  • Mozart in the Jungle

    A mini-review of this new Amazon series, because I think it deserves it! First things first: there’s no doubt that this is a terrible title for a TV series. It’s supposed to shout something like “classical music in New York City” but I’m really not sure it does. I complain when titles are boring, but…

  • The Price of Rental

    I missed Guardians of the Galaxy in cinemas earlier this year. But it was well reviewed, and I did plan to catch it. The good news is that it came out on “home video” recently. So I could either buy it on DVD or BluRay, or watch it in download/streaming. If I choose to rent…

  • Twitter is Searchable: My Early Timeline

    Twitter has finally built a full search engine for its archived Tweets. That’s important because it has been incredibly hard in the past to find specific Tweets. I’m on Twitter of course, and have been since sometime in December 2006. But this search engine fills in a few blanks. My first Tweet was not the…

  • Podcast Numbers – Does Serial Tell Us Anything?

    In a world where there are so many metrics available, there’s often a curious shortage of figures in some parts of the tech industry where you’d like there to be. Amazon won’t tell you how many Kindles its sold. Netflix won’t say how many episodes of House of Cards it has streamed. And so on.…