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For those who may have been exploring their Consciousness in a cave in the Andes, or perhaps have 5 children under five years old to look after, and thus may not know, for some time now there has been a controversy raging over whether or not Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is occurring.

This graph is the major source of the problem

Keep in mind, in this argument, nobody is suggesting we haven’t had recent warm weather, nor even that the Earth isn’t getting warmer. Indeed, standard Science has said all along that, since an event called The Little Ice Age about four hundred years ago, the Earth has been on a steady warming trend. (more…)

So if you have a reason to upgrade, and the money to do it, you should spend a little bit of time to work out just what needs upgrading. In the examples from Upgrading a Computer, Part 1, there’s not a lot of point in buying a new computer if all you want is more space. Most computers have extra hard disk connectors so you can simply add in a new hard disk.

For better game play, you can add more memory to your computer or purchase a new video card and see a remarkable difference in how your machine responds. Most games don’t actually (more…)

One of the pleasures in owning a computer is the variety of things you can do with it. Or rather the pleasures of owning a computer and the Internet. Or maybe it should be the pleasures of owning a computer and the Internet and high speed access.

You don’t really know how much pleasure high speed access is until it is suddenly not there. It isn’t so frustrating to use dial-up for internet access - until you have had the use of ADSL (Broadband) that runs at 10 or more times the speed of dial-up.

We have a Broadband plan that runs at ADSL2+ speeds. This means, particularly at the off peak times, speeds that allow downloads of 200MB’s in just a few minutes. It’s not unusual to start a download of sixty or seventy MB’s & have it finish so quickly you think something went wrong with the download.

So, what do you do with all that speed and bandwidth? Well, Mr JM regularly downloads TV shows that I haven’t seen. He downloaded a couple of seasons of Charmed for me – I hadn’t been able to watch them before I came to Australia – and we’ve caught up on all the new Doctor Who and Torchwood episodes.

But one of the most addictive things to do is Google Earth.
Google Earth lets you strap on a satellite (more…)

Have you looked, really looked at what is on your TV lately? I mean, leave behind the ideas about the shows you ‘can’t miss,’ the daydreams about the actor(s) you are never going to get into your bed but really wish you could, & take a good honest look at the content of your weekly viewing.

Take away the soap operas. They have no redeeming value at all – they’ve become so far removed from anything approaching normal life they can’t even be viewed as societal commentary.

Minus the ‘interview’ shows – programs like Oprah or Dr. Phil have (more…)

Spyware can be hard to spot and the effects are many and varied. Spyware sounds like all it does is spy on us, but it can do much more.

It doesn’t restrict itself to watching what we do, although that is a big part of why it gets installed. Spyware watches what is done and tracks website visits, but it goes further.
Spyware can install other software, can (more…)

In our ‘modern’ society, we’ve moved away from knowing the people around us.

Once, back in time, we lived in communities, close knit and small enough that we would know everybody we were likely to see. Depending on the circumstances, strangers were either welcome distractions or hostile presences needing to be removed soonest.

Now most of us (more…)

I write on a number of blogs sites, mostly for 451Press but also at Web TV Hub about YouTube videos. Recently I’ve noted a problem with the YouTube videos I write about. A number of times that videos I want to view or to reference in my posts aren’t playing.

I thought it was a problem with the YouTube site and mostly just looked for other versions of the videos to use.

There was one I wanted to show to Mr JM. We’ve been watching the Planet Earth series by David Attenborough and there’s a number of bird mating dances that are quite funny. It’s truly amazing what some creatures do when there’s a possibility of sex.

Yes, that’s a bird making that big mouth face.

But the video (more…)

One site that has become a major force in the Internetting world is YouTube. For the three people on the planet who haven’t heard of it, it’s a site (obviously backed by large storage capacity and lots of servers) that allows people to upload their videos.

Careers have been kick started by YouTube; musicians have posted their compositions online and found fame enough to give them a mainstream life. Others have become famous and boot-strapped their lives from that fame. Some have become rich by using their YouTube presence as a stepping stone.

Now to get to YouTube, you need a connection to the Internet and a browser. There are a number of browsers but by far the two most popular are Internet Explorer (IE) from Microsoft and Firefox from Mozilla.

IE is installed with Windows – it is VERY difficult to have Windows without it, in spite of a court case some time back about such practice from Microsoft. Firefox is a free download from Mozilla and made most of it’s gains by being firstly, small and secondly, more useful than IE.

Firefox introduced an in-built popup stopper, password saving, and most popular, tabbed browsing. In IE, if you wished to open a new site (more…)

So, the Max Headroom style of talking computer isn’t really something that is available for now. The text version of AI (Artificial Intelligence) doesn’t really fill the slot either. What we want is for our personal Computer to talk to us and hopefully, understand what we mean when we talk to it.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, we met the HAL 9000 computer, one which certainly fit the description of a computer that could talk to, and understand humans.

Text to Voice is one step along (more…)

surf - to float on the crest of a wave toward shore
surf - to search haphazardly, as for information on a computer network or an interesting program on television.

If you leave out ‘the shore’ in the first definition it could still apply to the Internet. The crest of the wave that has yet to recede. Millions surf the net every day, some seem addicted to it. It’s a trap that can grab us out of the blue as we track down an idea or follow links that show on an otherwise innocuous site.

We could be starting with an innocent question - someone mentioned the Baha’i religion in a conversation so you take a Google at it. That brings up a Wikipedia page so you click on it…
Then you see (more…)

Internet computing has a long history - longer than most of you would believe. It began back in the 1960’s and has two roots. One is the desire of Universities to connect up their computers and the other, more well-known is the original DARPA set up. (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency)

The web cam was one of the first graphics uses for the internet; http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/03/07/worlds_first_webcam_coffee_pot/ documents the demise of the coffeepot involved.

Where most people come to know the internet is at the point when the graphical interface was added and we had the birth of the World Wide Web (www) Now, after more than a decade (more…)

How much of what we read on the Internet should we believe? The web is a place of mystery and absurdity, knowledge and fantastic concepts, but it is also open to a high level of abuse.

Even leaving out the dangers of which we’ve all heard of being stalked and having young children misled and abused, there is the issue of just how true the information we find might be. We need to know just how reliable the facts and figures are that we find in our searches. Take a look at this…

Now this search was from a (more…)