Monthly Archives: January 2009
Stuck Pixels
One of the most annoying problems that you can encounter whilst using a computer is a stuck or dead pixel on your monitor.In the case of the former you will be left with one pixel of your screen being a completely different colour and if you suffer from the latter the pixel will be always off, hence appearing black.
I bought a TV last year that arrived with one of the pixels constantly stuck as a bright green.You would imagine that with 2,073,600 pixels having one of them a different colour wouldn’t be a problem but unfortunately it was – I found myself constantly staring at this one pixel whilst ignoring the 2,073,599 ones which were functioning perfectly.I sent it back for a replacement as fortunately the law states that if you purchase a product by mail order that you automatically … Read the rest
Flightgear
I have always been astonished, confused and secretly impressed by the amount of time that people voluntarily spend creating or helping others online.As an example, there are hundreds of thousands of forums online with specific themes that anyone can use; Hayley is taking her first steps to opening a salon and the advice given by a whole community of holistic therapists has been invaluable.They spend their evenings answering the questions of others without any incentive other than that warm feeling of having done something nice.
Open Source software is another interesting topic.If you’re not aware of the term, ‘open source’ refers to a piece of software which can not only be downloaded free of charge but the source code is also available meaning that anyone with the right knowledge can alter or add to the code.Google has produced a fair amount of Open Source software but there is always the … Read the rest
Predictions for 2009
With a New Year looming it seems appropriate to look to what the coming year holds for us from a technology perspective.Although the lack of anything major on the horizon almost caused me to shelve the idea, I am an eternal optimist and so must look forward in anticipation of any planned advancements as well as wait in hope for those that are unpredicted.In no particular order, here are my technology predictions for 2009:
-Solid State Drives: Rather than storing data on a standard hard drive (typically the slowest part of a computer), I predict that in 2009 Solid State Drives (SSD’s) will become more affordable and hence start to make their way in to more machines, especially laptops where size and power consumption are important factors.Conventional hard disks rely on spinning magnetic disks which are typically slow, unreliable and noisy but the move to SSD will mean … Read the rest
