Tag: technology

  • Raspberry Pi Pico Solar System

    Raspberry Pi Pico Solar System

    The October 2021 issue of MagPi magazine featured Dymtri Panin’s Pico Solar System, and I fancied building one. The Raspberry Pi Pico is a tiny microcontroller board that costs a whopping £3.60 or so. It is powered by a microUSB socket and it can run bits of code that allow it to control things on…

  • Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

    Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

    Recently Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke to Casey Newton of The Platformer, for both his newsletter and The Vergecast podcast. It was a wide ranging interview covering many of the hot-button topics of the day – not least Covid misinformation on Facebook’s platforms and what they were doing about it. But the interview kicked off…

  • Four Months In – Many Politicians are Still ‘Zooming’ Badly

    Four Months In – Many Politicians are Still ‘Zooming’ Badly

    I posted a Twitter thread on this subject earlier, but I thought it was worth exploring a little more here. This morning I was watching BBC Breakfast, and Louise Minchen was interviewing Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds from his home constituency in Torfaen. What I couldn’t get over was the poor resolution of Thomas-Symonds’…

  • USB-C: So Much User Uncertainty

    USB-C: So Much User Uncertainty

    The PC I’ve just been building (I’ll reveal all soon), has two USB-C sockets. The case at the front has a USB-C Gen 1 socket, matching the header on the motherboard, which allows 5 Gbps data transmission. The socket at the rear, is USB-C Gen 2, which doubles that to 10 Gbps. Neither of them…

  • Is Bandersnatch the Future of Television?

    No. No, it’s not. Bandersnatch is the recently released episode of Black Mirror from Charlie Brooker available on Netflix. It takes the form of a choose your own adventure book/game and I loved it! In many respects, this episode ticked just about every box for me. It was set in the eighties, in and around writing…

  • Is IP TV Really Ready for Primetime?

    Last night YouTube TV went down for an hour. That’s not YouTube the platform, but the premium TV service that YouTube offers customers in the US a range of broadcast TV channels in exchange for a monthly fee. The service went down right in the middle of the England v Croatia World Cup semi-final in…

  • Google Podcasts

    Without an enormous amount of fanfare, Google yesterday launched Google Podcasts for Android yesterday, with the possibility of being game changing. I’ve long argued that for the Android/iOS podcasting gap to be closed, Google needed to get involved and create a generic app. Apple Podcasts is a pre-installed app on every iPhone sold, and with…

  • Facebook Pixel Tracking

    This morning Nieman Lab had a really good piece asking whether if there was a certain amount of hypocrisy coming from certain news organisations castigating Facebook for leaking data, when at the same time they’re helping Facebook collect more data on you. Recall yesterday, when I said that some of Facebook’s data was missing from…

  • Is Netflix Quite As Smart As Everyone Says It Is?

    That’s possibly a provocative title, but I’ve come to the conclusions that while Netflix is very good at some things, I’m not certain that its recommendation engine is entirely as linked up as you’d think it’d be. A couple of recent cases in point. I was really looking forward to the new Alex Garland film,…

  • Pixel 2 – Review

    Note: I’m calling this a review, but frankly, it’s still early days, and there’ll be lots of things that come out in the wash further down the line. So think of these more as some initial thoughts. Not that any of this stuff prevents other sites posting reviews after less than a week’s worth of…

  • Changing Android Phones

    I’ve never been much of a fan of Apple’s iPhones. They’ve always seemed overpriced, and far too tied down. You can only do what Apple allows you to do with them. Furthermore, the ecosystem is incredibly limited. Everyone has to use one of a very small handful of models, none of which are especially cheap…

  • If People Think It – Does It Matter If It’s Actually True?

    In this week’s excellent episode of the Reply All podcast, Alex Goldman and PG Vogt explore the question Is Facebook Spying On You? In particular, a number of people are of the belief that the Facebook app is listening to what you’re saying and that’s the only way to explain why things you were talking…