Writings on technology and society from Wellington, New Zealand
I talked about Apple’s latest launch, the state of Telecom’s XT network, Google being hacked in China and ACTA. I didn’t get time for Lieutenant Uhura, but she’s here.
No speaker notes for today – most of it was done off the cuff after the Apple launch. But if you missed it live, you can download the audio as ogg or mp3.
There is an utterly heart-rending scene in Miranda Harcourt’s autobiographical play A Biography of my Skin in which their family computer’s disc crashes and they lose all their family photographs.
Today on Radio New Zealand National I’ll talk about how to keep your computer backed up. It’s not a hard thing to do. I’ll also have a few other tidbits from the world of technology.
I’ll be on air after the 11am news, and soon afterwards the you’ll be able to download the audio as ogg or mp3. (more…)
Today on Radio New Zealand National I’ll talk about a whole list of things – not sure if I’ll get time for them all. I’m going to mention the rumours that IBM will buy Sun, talk about why you can’t use your mobile on the London Underground, how you can tell if your computer is infected, and about where the value lies in software, which is based on a blog post I made a few days ago. I’ll put some of my speaker notes and the links for the program behind the “more…” below.
Listen live at 11:05 or download the audio as ogg or mp3. (more…)
Tomorrow I’m going to Warkworth to the third annual Kiwi Foo Camp.
Foo is an amazing experience. It’s so energising to be there with scientists, geeks, and artists. And Nathan, Jenine and Russell do a fine job in organising it.
Part of the deal with Foo is that everyone presents (“no passengers”). I’m going to talk about “Hacking Government”. It seems that the geek community is quite bad at telling government what it wants, in a way that government actually responds to. Perhaps we can start to deal with that.
Today on Radio New Zealand National I celebrated the British attempt to break the land speed record. The British broke it last time it was broken as well, back in 1997 when ThrustSSC took the record to 633mph – a massive 20% increase on the previous record. ThrustSSC was the first car to go supersonic on land, hence the name. And every day, the project posted a huge amount of information on the Internet so armchair record breakers could follow it from around the globe. And its Internet supporters were there for it when it ran out money.
Now, the same team has started a new project – BloodhoundSSC. They want to break their own record and get up to 1,000mph on land. Wow!
Read on for my speaking notes or download the audio as ogg or mp3. (more…)
Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about Google’s new mobile phone platform, called Android. The first Android phone has just gone on sale in the US. It’s a very interesting move by Google and will probably result in dropping mobile phone prices. Can’t be bad.
Read on for my speaking notes, or download the audio as ogg or mp3.
Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about some birthdays and tried to look at what these different things had meant to us.
Read on for my speaking notes, or listen to the audio download as ogg or mp3.
This week on Radio New Zealand National I talked about computer monitors. They may sound boring, but some of us spend a lot of time staring at them. I talked about where they have come from, where they are going and how they work.
Read on for my speaking notes, or listen to the podcast!
There is a lot of confusion about this out there – some of it deliberate – as I said on the radio last week, but the usual definition is 2^10 bytes, which is 1,024 bytes. Here’s a cartoonist’s take on the whole thing – it’s funny.
Incidentally, by the definition above, a megabyte is 1,024*1,024 which is about 1.04 million, and a Gigabyte is 1,024 times bigger again at 1.07 billion.
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