February 2010 archive

Erratic Electricity – The Silent Killer

UPS Utility (Categorised Breakdown)

Earlier today, my mother-in-law experienced a power outage as the result of some heavy storms in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. Depending where you live, blackouts can be a rare occurrence or they could be a more regular inconvenience. Certainly, what many people don’t realise is that the electricity coming through the socket …

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Online Ombudsman – Toothless Tiger?

In an idea floated by Independent Senator Nick Xenophon, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is investigating the introduction of an “online ombudsman”. In a nutshell, this ombudsman would deal with issues such as pornographic and obscene messages being left on the Facebook memorial sites for Trinity Bates and Elliot Fletcher, both recent Queensland murder victims. Personally, …

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PAYG Internet Kiosks – Why Bother?

At the shopping centre near my workplace and also outside one of my favourite restaurants, The Palace Chinese Restaurant, there are these Hi-Speed Internet Kiosks. If memory serves me correctly, it costs $2 for 21 minutes and you get the use of a USB port, black and white printer and of course Internet access for …

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Portable Applications – A Convenient Necessity

Have you found yourself using a computer that doesn’t have the applications you need or is locked down to the point where you can’t install anything? I’ve come across this a few times and more often than not they have an Internet connection that is rather slow making application downloads agonising. For a while now, …

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PowerPoint – The Root of all Evil

A few weeks ago, I was asked to come up with a strategy for departmental reporting and dashboards.I’ve let it simmer in my head for a while until it was thought through before knocking up a presentation. At my place of work, the default presentation tool is the cursed Microsoft PowerPoint. Why cursed, you might …

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Real Life Social Interactivity vs Social Media

Just a quick one today as I was out at the SCG watching Australia summarily thrash the West Indies. Warner and Watson had fantastic knocks much to the enjoyment of the crowd and dismay of their competitors. I attended the cricket today with a colleague from work with his sister and her two kids. On …

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Brand Loyalty in the Digital Age

Deviating slightly from a pure tech focus, I got thinking about whether or not brand loyalty still exists today as a result of digital advancements over the past decade. Online shopping has certainly taken off and one of the big sites that comes to mind is eBay. I’ve bought a stack of stuff off eBay …

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Video Card Slots – Argh!

At the moment, I have a suspect 500GB hard drive that belongs to someone else. I’ve offered to run a diagnostic utility on it to attempt to read the data from its bad sectors before consigning it to the rubbish bin. Before I can do this though, I need a working computer. For this task, …

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IMAP > POP3 – Moving to the Cloud

Today, I finally got around to installing the RTM version of Windows 7 Enterprise on my desktop computer as I was fast approaching the crippleware period 11 days from now (i.e. Windows would start rebooting every two hours). It was fairly painless, apart from forgetting to disable AHCI on my optical drive to get through …

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Hardware Review: Xbox 360 Wireless Controller for Windows

Xbox 360 Wireless Controller for Windows (Top)

Several months ago, I was in the market for a new gaming controller for my computer after purchasing Street Fighter IV via Steam and receiving Burnout Paradise as a gift (thanks Roy!). Now, I probably could have gotten by with using the keyboard for a driving game but I’ve been scarred for life trying to …

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