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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…)