Apple’s Passion

As you may have seen from this blog, I have something of a love hate relationship with Apple. I love their stuff, but I hate their anti-competitiveness as they act like Microsoft in the 90s but on a smaller scale yet all the open source evangelists have a Mac. It doesn’t make sense to me [...]

I’m not looking forward to Flash on my phone

The recent announcements that Adobe are working on a full version of their Flash platform for mobile is making me jittery. Over the years of developing I have been well aware that Flash, for whatever reason, hogs resources. It uses processor aplenty, battery life, RAM. I’ve even worked on some projects where it has slowed [...]

Why I’m not afraid of my online data

I’ve just read this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/02/uk_eu_data_menace/. In a nutshell, it is about a UK government system, which holds all kinds of information about us, being shut down because of a security alert.
This time it isn’t just for UK residents, it’s for residents in the European mainland too. The best part about this quaint story is that [...]

Fizzbin

I just moved home about 2 weeks ago now. It’s lovely, we’re having a smashing time. In typical “that is so Francis” fashion I had the broadband installed as we moved in. “Fantastic” I thought. But alas the line is noisy etc. and giving me about a 50th of the speed. “No worries” I thought [...]

Circuit Porn!

It’s 1am and I really should be going to bed. I received my Arduino board today which, for me, is very exciting. I had a few problems setting it up (nothing more than user error, by not selecting the right board). First stop was to get the light flashing, which I did, then to [...]

Arduino!

I am waiting impatiently for something I have been looking for for a while now. A way of programming hardware in a fairly easy way, being able to build circuits and make real life things work. This thing I speak of is called an Arduino Board. There are other controller boards out there, but this [...]

Mobile Provider Deathmatch

Whether you like them or not, mobile service providers are here to stay, they’re a staple part of our daily lives, we pretty much all have mobile phones nowadays. A question I get asked semi-frequently is “which mobile provider should I be with” (second to “which mobile should I choose next”). I have to say, [...]

The faster future

According to my favourite news source The Register or “El Reg”, C programming dominated the open source projects in 2008. I’m surprised and impressed!
I always put C down as the old thing you learn in computer science. It was certainly the first language I learnt and is a good base to start (albeit quite hard [...]

Why does it need to kill something to succeed?

A week or so ago I posted about why I was excited about 2009 in the technology world. The Palm Pre has had me licking my lips, tucking my napkin over my shirt and holding my knife and fork. However, as I surf for more information on this lovely piece of kit, I have seen [...]

Wireless charging

Technology is exciting me at the moment, really exciting me. One of my favourite quotes is “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C Clarke. And any time something like this happens I get a bit bubbly about it. Just imagine what people must have thought when they first saw a light [...]

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