Computing

When I realised that the last time I'd bought myself a new laptop was back in 2007 it occurred to me that I may be making my day to day life a little more difficult than it needed to be. With an Internet connection at home not capable of 'broadband' speeds, computing was always going to be a chore regardless of what it was done on. But since rectifying that significant bottleneck it quickly became clear that an upgrade was due.

I've always flip-flopped between ultraportables and powerhouses, ...

It happened.

Friday 28th October was the eventual glorious day when the etherflow was provisioned by my ISP Spitfire, following a 'fit and test' by Openreach on the 26th. The gear they've installed is rather nice; just a single fibre is used these days for transmit and receive, with 3 spares, and the fibre modem, or "BT NTE", has dual power supplies for redundancy and 21CN (21st Century Network) branding. It supports redundant fibre inputs, but the spare isn't being used ...

I've never travelled to a foreign city before purely to explore it. My schedule has never really allowed for such endeavours, the rare moments of holiday reserved for lying in the sun doing absolutely nothing.

Data was a concern. When you're primarily going to be in one place it's easy to ensure WiFi, but there would be no way out of using cellular roaming data on this excursion. Fully prepared to have to keep my usage of iPad and iPhone to an absolute minimum, and still pay a hefty ...

Let me open by saying I'm writing this on my iPad.

I don't often write at any length on here. This, I believe, is more to do with my situation rather than the tablet itself. Right now I'm on the sofa, definitely tablet territory of the future, but most of the time I'm sat at a desk or table and in such scenarios the benefits of a tablet are deminished in the face of a sleek, modern, flash based laptop like the MacBook Air.

The tablet, then, frees us from the desk. ...

There's a theme that has driven me all my life. At nursery school I'd connect together all the toys. The staff said this wasn't a problem in itself, but it did become problematic when, post connection, I'd disallow any of the other children to play with them. Paper cups and string. Fairy lights were amazing to me; all those little bulbs connected up together. When a friend, for reasons that still escape me, was given a pager by his parents I was truly misty-eyed and, admittedly, incredibly jealous ...