Applications in the Cloud vs Thick Clients

In news that I came across yesterday, Google bought out Picnik which is a photo editor in your web browser. I’ve never heard of it before so I gave it a very quick test drive (which you can do for free and without registration) and was pleasantly surprised by its ease of use and the …

Continue reading

Cash – Relevance in 2010

Some time over the last couple of days, my wife and I were talking about how annoying it is to go through the ritual of forking over physical money when you purchase food or go down the shops. Of course, once all your money is gone, you need to go visit the hole in the …

Continue reading

Hard Drive Revival – Part 1

Seagate Barracuda Hard Drive (Bottom)

I thought I would document my experience with reviving a seemingly dead hard drive that I have taken receipt from a friend and small business owner. To set some background, as is often the case, this hard drive contains precious data which has largely not been backed up elsewhere. Furthermore, any attempts to boot up …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

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, …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

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, …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading