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Software defined radio makes for a happy hack

Posted by Rupert Goodwins on 31 January, 2012 17:49

"So, Rupert," said the company. "Twenty years on the job. Ask for anything and it shall be yours."

I thought for a moment. "A pony, a robotic kitten made out of gold and water-lilies, and a Flex-1500 Software Defined Radio, please."

There's apparently some health-and-safety issue with the pony, and the robo-kitten's still in beta after it burned a small village to the ground with tail-mounted lasers, but... Read more

The European internet's oddest places

Posted by Rupert Goodwins on 18 January, 2012 13:15

Many countries consider internet access numbers to be a good measure of how up-to-date their citizens and industry are, with higher penetration rates signalling good things. Dig down into the figures, though, and you can find some peculiar numbers that may or may not say more about their geography than plain old economics .

Thanks to Internet World Stats, here are some figures from 2011 that cast a slightly... Read more

Happy Birthday, Sinclair QL - 28 years today

Posted by Rupert Goodwins on 12 January, 2012 16:22

It was a time before the GUI, when computers were micros, when memory was measured in kilobytes and storage strategy meant choosing whether to buy a second five and a quarter inch floppy drive. It was eleven days before the launch of the Apple Macintosh. It was 12 January, 1984: the day of the Sinclair QL.

For those who weren't born then, the QL was the quintessence of Sinclair Research — home of the ZX... Read more

ZDNet's guide to beating New Year tech torpor

Posted by Rupert Goodwins on 11 January, 2012 15:21

January. Not so much a month as 31 days of post-party comedown, where every pleasure is circumscribed by resolution and, let's be frank, those long, empty, fiscally-fraught acres of calendar between now and payday.

There is one self-indulgence that is neither immoral, illegal or fattening: reading. So here are three excellent ways to economically entertain and inform yourself, taking you away from these leaden... Read more

Rooting Android Part 3: A taste of despair, and of victory

Posted by Rupert Goodwins on 6 January, 2012 12:30

ERR indeed.

The phone had gone to its own Valhalla. I restarted it: a yellow exclamation mark and the message "Firmware upgrade encountered an issue. Please select recovery mode in Kies & try again." was all it would show.

Now, Kies is the phone management software that Samsung suggests you use to keep your phone up to date, synced and with your media in order. I'd installed and run it earlier, to make sure... Read more

Rooting Android Part 2: Breaking the Norse code

Posted by Rupert Goodwins on 5 January, 2012 14:30

Having decided to take control of my Samsung Galaxy S II by installing new system software, I needed to know two things: what and how. Start by asking Google about "rooting Samsung Galaxy S2" — it doesn't really matter what the topic is these days, the basic skill you need in making a good start is framing the right Google query. All those years understanding operating system theory, not so useful.

It was a... Read more

Rooting Android Part 1: Samsung Galaxy S II on the block

Posted by Rupert Goodwins on 4 January, 2012 11:35

The festive break presents the technically inclined with challenge and opportunity. The challenge is that petty annoyances with wayward IT can seem much more significant during those long winter days where normal work is absent. The opportunity is to use that free time to do something about them. The combination can be seductive - and dangerous.

So it was with my new Samsung Galaxy S II phone, my first non-HTC... Read more

Cameron's conference Wi-Fi code calamity

Posted by Rupert Goodwins on 5 December, 2011 16:03

OK, it's not much of a calamity. But when you want to be seen as leading a government intent on making the internet a safer place, heading up global cybersecurity and locking down the nation's digital jewels, it's a bit bad to be the agent of — oh, I don't know — encouraging attacks on VIP laptops.

So it's a bit of a shame that David Cameron has just appeared live on national TV from a conference in... Read more

ZDNet UK hits Exeter University - come along!

Posted by Rupert Goodwins on 26 October, 2011 12:10

Jack Clark, the man who lives on data the way plants live on sunlight, and myself are at Exeter University today. We'll be talking to all sorts of people about all sorts of research during the day and at 5pm, we're chairing a round table with guests from IBM, Rackspace and others on the subject of what it's like to have a career in IT.

If you're around, drop by - there may be a little something for some lucky... Read more

Open source's disdain for enterprise

Posted by Rupert Goodwins on 24 June, 2011 17:30

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. It's a simple lesson, one learned by most of us by the time we're twenty (OK, fifty). But it's lost on some very high profile open source efforts, which seem increasingly to think that the workers of the world don't deserve the benefits of decent software. If something can be changed, it should — and that's a fatal approach for enterprise IT.

It's not that... Read more

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