Technology fetishism
I don’t understand why Facebook keeps changing my “most recent” news preference to “top news“. I don’t trust “top news” because it keeps hiding stuff from me that I want to see, and showing me stuff I don’t. Comments here indicate I’m not alone.
Both my digital camera and my electric shaver are on their last legs, in need of replacement. I don’t think either has done too badly. The Canon A70 camera was bought in April 2003, and from memory cost me about $600 at the time. The technology has got better and cheaper, and I expect a ... [More]
I’m about due for a phone upgrade. I haven’t made my mind up whether it’ll be iPhone or Android. Some will have very strong views on these. I’ll make up my mind closer to purchase time, but meanwhile there are some other factors I’m considering. Radio waves All phones emit radio waves. Some more than ... [More]
My Internet access account got shaped on Sunday afternoon, for the last day-and-a-half of the billing cycle, as we apparently burnt through 30 Gb (peak) in the month. No big deal — it may just mean Youtube is unbearably slow for 36 hours, and I’ll have to curb my practice of having lots of browser ... [More]
In the 90s, phone numbers were going to run out if we didn’t take the plunge and switch from nine digit 0x-xxx-xxxx numbers to ten digit 0x-xxxx-xxxx numbers. The telecommunications industry (led by… was it Austel?) got everybody switched over okay. (In the US, they decided not to expand the number of digits for local ... [More]
If you have your own internet domain name, you may have come across the Domain Registry of America (DROA), also known as the Domain Renewal Group. They’re a bunch of scammers who regularly and repeatedly send out letters which look like an invoice for a domain name, but are in fact custom advertisements for overpriced ... [More]
The other day some colleagues were having a little rant about the lifts, which in recent weeks have been performing badly. I blogged about this ages ago — in many buildings the problem is not the position or size of the lifts, but how they’re programmed. Evidently in 13 years, not much has changed. Apart ... [More]
Occasional commenter Peter from Murrumbeena has sent me this video of Myki short term tickets setting off a shop alarm. Apparently it relates to the RFID technology used in the tickets. When a number are placed in close proximity, they look to the shop alarm like the tag attached to protected goods, setting off the ... [More]
A few weeks ago I did brain surgery on my computer. My PC (named “Tintin”) finally got a CPU upgrade — which I needed to move off Windows XP onto Windows 7. It’s quite incredible how much dust was inside it. Just obtaining the faster CPU wasn’t straightforward, as sometime in the last couple of ... [More]
Cattle class, anybody? The picture is from a Friends of the Earth stunt in London, protesting against factory farming, and their link to rainforest destruction. There’s some great images of cows on the streets and on the Tube.
Fifteen years ago today, Windows 95 was released. (Who’s feeling old now?) Many would remember the adverts, which hit TV screens around the world, to the tune of the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up”. It was arguably the first modern version of Windows (despite it still apparently having DOS under the hood), and arrived just ... [More]
Uh oh. My sister’s iPad got the Blue Screen of Death. Who knew they suffered from that? I thought Steve Jobs, being all-powerful, would have abolished them. It happened while playing Rocket Bird. We resurrected it by doing a hard reset.