A recent post at the Bleeding Edge made me laugh, since it relates to something I wrote about in August, though my thought was from a slightly different angle. We all want a screen with a big button. You know, the one you can click in a split second and then the machine does what a machines should do - work hard to produce an outcome. Whilst we can ... Read full entry

Alex Payne's list of suggestions for a hassle free computing experience. There's so much of his list I agree with I cannot pick out one point that especially stands out from the others, except possibly the plain text editor point: Use a plain text editor that you know well. Not a word processor, a plain text editor. I don't always use a plain text editor, but I rarely ... Read full entry

Actually it's an anagram but it's nonetheless a clever spot by Stephen Fry. "Laptop machines", by one of those preposterous twists of circumstance that make you wonder who is running things and why they haven't got anything better to do, just happens to be an anagram of "Apple Macintosh". If an anagram is a derivative rearrangement of essential elements, then one might be disposed to argue that such has ... Read full entry

The Apple Mac's time has well and truly come if the articles offering advice on making the cross platform migration that are springing up everywhere, are anything to go by. The first things that struck me on entering my local Next Byte store were the white, shiny surfaces that gleamed everywhere, like a scene from A Clockwork Orange before the ultra-violence begins. Funky music played while a group of ... Read full entry

Now here's something many of us may not take into account when trying to comprehend the, for want of a better word, logic of people who write computer viruses. "Why do people create viruses?". I was excited about answering this question because it is much deeper than most people think. At face value, it is easy to peg viruses as nasty little annoyances designed to wreak havoc on your hard ... Read full entry

The science of keyboard design In depth article by Amar Sagoo which examines keyboard design. As Amar points out many people spend "several solid hours" daily interacting with keyboards, so their design, or aspects of their design, are indeed a science. One of the most-cited criteria for keyboard aficionados to prefer a certain keyboard over another is "clickiness". The idea behind this is that a good keyboard should give you ... Read full entry

Linux: Who got it right, who got it very wrong? An in-depth article that looks at the uptake of Linux powered operating systems and servers. While Linux has enjoyed a moderate rate of adoption it hasn't quite been at the levels predicted several years ago. In 2004, IDC predicted that growing Linux adoption would push the operating system from three percent market share to seven percent by 2008, with sales ... Read full entry

Workin' at the Internet Cafe: Laptop Dilemma Even in paradise there is trouble lurking around the next corner, or around the time the next toilet (ok, bathroom) break beckons. I love internet cafes. Given that my job requires hours of sitting and typing, sitting and drawing, or sitting and procrastinating, a change of scenery is welcome, allowing me to be around people without actually having to interact with them, listen to ... Read full entry

The iMac turns 10 The computer that changed computers. It was the colours, the choice of colours, that excited everyone (PC users especially) more than anything else, when the iMac was first unveiled ten years ago. People realised that they were bored of the clunky beige coloured boxes currently sitting on their desks. In response PC manufacturers started producing... carbon black coloured PCs with... rounded corners. To understand how far the ... Read full entry

Ten weirdest computers The Billiard Ball computer is my favourite. Basic computing circuits like half-adders can also be made. But making something as powerful as a microprocessor this way would require acres of space - unless your balls or dominoes are very small. Researchers at IBM have experimented with logic circuits that use cascades of atoms bouncing off each other like billiard balls to pass information along their length. ... Read full entry