LAN Cards – Not for Minors

August 8, 2009 | Comment

I have been looking for a network card with wake-on-lan for one of my machines at home. I thought that I would have a look and see what Amazon had and turned up the item shown below.

I was a bit surprised to see this text alongside the product: “Not for sale to persons under the age of 18. By placing an order for this product, you declare that you are 18 years of age or over. This item must be used responsibly and appropriately.”

Could that be because there are all sort of scary things that you can access … Read the rest

Getting Software onto your Netbook

August 7, 2009 | Comment

A friend of mine recently bought a netbook and was wondering how he could install software onto it that he had on CD.

There are a number of ways to achieve this: buy an external usb-CD/DVD drive to plug in, share the disk out from another machine and access across a network or create an image of the disk and transfer this to the netbook.

The former is probably the simplest solution but requires an additional outlay which, quite frankly, is probably not justifiable for the small number of times that you are going to have to do it. It … Read the rest

Free Mp3 Tracks with Future & WH Smiths

July 30, 2009 | Comment

T3 Magazine Subscription Future Publishing and WH Smiths are giving away 10 MP3 tracks via 7digital with selected magazines. The price of a download on 7digital is about 99p per track so 10 tracks are worth just shy of a tenner, although if you buy a complete album you will pay closer to £8.

The cheapest mag I could find doing the offer was T3 at £4 so on the face of it that seems to be a pretty good offer.

Get down to you local WH Smiths now and look for the magazines with a bit of card welded to the back … Read the rest

Free for Free

July 27, 2009 | Comment

FREE by Chris Anderson Chris Anderson, the Editor of Wired US, is currently pushing his book Free which is all about the free price point in the modern economy. This picks up on, in part, the freemium model I spoke about recently.

Of course it is difficult to argue that free is the new price point when you are trying to sell a book with a cover price of £18.99. To get around this difficulty Anderson has managed to persuade his publisher that they should give away a limited number of copies of the book in various formats. So right now the … Read the rest

Simple Mind for the iPhone

July 21, 2009 | Comment

I attended an event today, hosted by the Thames Valley Innovation and Growth team, on developing iPhone applications. A couple of Apple employees were on hand to walk us through the process and answer any questions.

When I have attended these sort of events in the past I have tended to take notes in my notebook in the form of a mind map. I thought that this time I would try doing the same on my iPhone using the SimpleMind application.

SimpleMind is a mind mapping application that comes in two versions, free and paid. The only difference between the … Read the rest

You Have to be up Early to be a Neil Thompson

July 14, 2009 | Comment

If you are called “Ernest Bumblebee” you will never suffer from the problem I have – namely that there are simply lots of me. This was highlighted just recently when Neil Thompson was appointed by the UK government to oversee cyber crime. Another prominent Neil Thompson is Microsoft’s “Senior Regional Director, Northern Europe, Entertainment & Devices Division”. So, basically, he gets to play with XBoxes all day.

I have written about the other me a couple of times before (here and here) and for Thompsons it is a real issue as there are so many of us. … Read the rest

Services I use and Recommend

July 9, 2009 | 1 comment

In a previous post I talked about the freemium model and how it has affected my attitude to software purchases. I wanted to go through the services that I use regularly and pay for and highlight them.

This is obviously just a personal selection. Over the years I have tried out numerous applications that rival the one that finally made this list. In the end it is just personal preference as much as anything else. You may prefer something else but these are the ones that made me put my hand in my pocket and purchase a subscription

So in … Read the rest

Museum of Computing Re-opening

July 2, 2009 | Comment

Last night I had the privilege to attend the opening of the Museum of Computing based in Swindon. Or should I say re-opening as the museum has actually been closed for a year while looking for new premises. Swindon Council have provided a place right next to the theatre and walking distance from the town centre. On display last night was just a small selection of museums collection and it plans to change the exhibits on display every six months.

I was able to re-acquaint myself with my first ever computing experience – the good old Teletype. The school I … Read the rest

iPhone 3.1 Software

July 1, 2009 | Comment

Well that was quick. The iPhone 3.0 OS has been out less than a month and already the next version is released to beta testers. There is a slew of changes that have been identified so far and to be honest pretty much all of them are of only passing interest. With the exception of being able to access Voice Control via Bluetooth.

Voice Control was introduced in the latest version of the software and was a nice little addition that not only let you make calls by barking instructions to your phone but also to control the music player. … Read the rest

Paid Apps and the Freemium model

July 1, 2009 | 2 comments

Over the years I have tended to avoid paying for applications because the up-front cost was prohibitive. So I either went without, used an older version that may have been given away with a magazine, or found an open source equivalent. However, I am now finding myself committing to a number of applications because of the small up-front cost and, quite often, after a period of using the service for free – the so call freemium model. The question is whether that is good value for money.

The applications below are all ones that I use on a regular basis, … Read the rest