It has been an exciting day today for various reasons – the council published the lists of candidates for next month’s elections, I picked up my new glasses so I can read the list, and I managed to give the kiss of life to my Nexus 7 tablet.
Entries Tagged as 'Technology'
No wonder he’s going
February 20th, 2015 · Comments Off on No wonder he’s going · Politics, Technology
When Francis Maude first talked about combining all the government websites into one big one, that part of me that had worked in IT since before there even was an internet, thought it sounded a bit risky. The principle isn’t too bad: why not provide a single front end, or a portal? It could be […]
Tags: Internet
Partial fact of the day
February 2nd, 2015 · Comments Off on Partial fact of the day · Life, Technology
The fax machine was invented before the telephone. For its first fifteen years of existence it was only used to transmit transfer requests between football teams.
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A blast from the past
January 27th, 2015 · Comments Off on A blast from the past · Life, Technology
While looking for something in the system32 directory of a Windows 7 computer the other day (I still can’t quite bring myself to call it a folder) I came across the file pifmgr.dll It was a bit like when you are on Facebook or Linkedin and see the name of somebody you knew or worked […]
Todays bright idea #10 – smartphone video feature
November 23rd, 2014 · Comments Off on Todays bright idea #10 – smartphone video feature · Technology
Tonight I was being a grumpy old man at a concert in London, where I could hardly see Toyah onstage because of all the smartphones being held up by people filming it. I think we have reached the point where this is now considered normal and it is too late to stop it but perhaps […]
Tags: Bright Ideas
The Turing Test
November 17th, 2014 · Comments Off on The Turing Test · Technology
The concept of the Turing test has been cropping up a lot on the news lately, due to the current film about Turing and a competition hosted at Bletchley Park. For some reason it sparked off a whole bunch of thoughts.
Tags: Computing
Computers do it faster…
September 3rd, 2014 · Comments Off on Computers do it faster… · Technology
…but people do it better! I was quite amused to see the BBC news at lunchtime. At work we have it on screens in the lobby, with the sub-titles on. The sub-titles are, I am pretty sure generated by some computer speech recognition software, and it was having some trouble with David Cameron at PMQs. […]
How not to do a Turing test
June 16th, 2014 · Comments Off on How not to do a Turing test · Technology
There was a lot in the news last week about a program that supposedly passed the Turing test. I’m not so sure about that, for several reasons. First of all, I don’t think that Turing ever proposed a test as such, but rather made a statement about it being forseeable that one day a machine […]
Tags: Computing
I would like to tweet about this ‘ere dead parrot
May 21st, 2014 · 2 Comments · Life, Technology
An interesting article on the BBC News site today about using Twitter to complain about things. Amongst other things it says: According to a poll of 2,000 people by the communications agency Fishburn Hedges and Echo Research in April 2012, 36% of people had used a social media platform to contact a big company and […]
Tags: Virgin Media
Today’s bright idea #9
May 12th, 2014 · Comments Off on Today’s bright idea #9 · Life, Technology
I was watching Mrs. Skuds playing one of those Facebook games the other day. It may be called ‘Tribez’. It looked like a generic Swords & Sorcery meets Sim City sort of game. It made me think that the way technology is going we can’t be too far away from being able to play Sim […]
Tags: Bright Ideas·Games·Town Planning
