Category: Technology
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On DAB and Five Live
It was a really interesting day for radio today with several important announcements. Of most interest to me was the formal announcement of the advertisement for a second national DAB multiplex. You may remember that back in 2007, this multiplex was previously advertised with Channel 4 winning it ahead of NGW the transmission supplier (since…
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Podcasting – What Next?
Tomorrow evening, there’s a Radio Academy event taking place in London looking at podcasting. As I’ve written previously, you always feel that podcasting is the perennial bridesmaid and never the bride in the digital media, and digital audio world. I suppose I’ve been thinking a little more about it recently because one of my favourite…
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Future Thinking and Unthinking
A couple of big US tech firms made some big announcements today. Amazon will get the lion’s share of attention for its new Amazon Fire Phone. Essentially it’s a mini version of their Kindle Fire, using their forked version of Android, but with a phone. The big excitement is that it’s 3D. Well all phones…
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Uploading Large eBooks to Amazon’s Cloud
A bit of a ramble, but in short – does anyone know how to get large files (over 25MB) into the Amazon Kindle Library aside from via email? Read on for the detail… If there’s one thing that’s for certain, it’s that buying eBooks on Amazon is very easy. It could be easier – they’ve…
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Installing Plex Media Server
Note: Just to be clear – I’ve installed Plex on a DS210j and not a DS214se. This is going to be a bit dry, but it may or may not help others. I now have a couple of Synology NAS drives. I first bought a DS210j about two or three years ago when I started…
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Wireless Charging
A few days ago I needed to “juice” my phone, and actually chose to sit in the Sacred Café part of Stanfords in Covent Garden because it had a healthy selection of power sockets under the counter. But as I sat down with my tea, and was about to root around for a charger that…
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TV Apps’ Shortcomings
You know when something should be easy but it just isn’t? Well this is what I often find with apps on smart TVs and other devices. They’re just there to try us. While they function adequately for normal use, it’s those edge cases where they break. Here are two examples. Last weekend, I decided I’d…
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Blaze Laserlight – A First Look
Back in November 2012, I backed my first Kickstarter project – the Blaze Bike Light – and today it arrived fresh from manufacture in China. Blaze Laserlight – A First Look from Adam Bowie on Vimeo. Now known as the Blaze Laserlight, its description basically explains what it does. It’s a regular bike light with…
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Short Nexus 7 2013 Review
Since I’ve had it a few weeks now, I thought it was worth writing about the new Google Nexus 7, which annoyingly doesn’t have a particularly distinct new name to differentiate it from last year’s model. So let’s call it the 2013 model. I was a big fan of the first Nexus 7. It was…
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Samsung Chromebook
For the last few months, I’ve found myself carrying a full-size laptop around less than I did in the past, and instead using my Nexus 7 more and more. In many respects it’s excellent, and I would (and have) happily recommend it to anyone who’s looking for a 7 inch tablet. Indeed I’m convinced that…
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In Praise Of… What?
Here’s a curious thing. The Guardian has a regular “In Praise Of…” column on its leader page where rather than just moaning about things, it’ll sometimes, well, praise something. It’s quite a refreshing change to read something positive in that part of the paper. Last night, I saw the column above published online, and while…
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Killing Google Reader
I suppose that we’ve all known that it was coming. But Google is finally killing off Google Reader completely. Their reasoning, buried away in a brief note about “Spring Cleaning” (i.e. things they’ve started and decided to finish with) is that usage had fallen. Not visiting the Google Blog on a daily basis, on the…