Apple iPad in depth: the travelling experience

Friday, May 21st, 2010

I have a large laptop bag that will probably look rather familiar. It’s black, well padded, has more pockets than I know what to do with – but I’ve been very happy with it for the year or so I’ve had it. In this bag I carry my laptop, spare battery, charger, assorted paperwork and a plethora of other stuff. Fully loaded it weighs about 7.3 tonnes and, after a day lugging it about, leaves indents in my shoulders.

And since my Apple iPad arrived I’ve only taken the bag out once. (more…)

In praise of walkit.com

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

Anyone who’s read PC Pro over the last few years will know that we’re interested in green issues – occasionally indulging in a spirited argument with our friends over at Custom PC who are doing lots of good work by supporting the Folding@home scheme… but at the expense of energy consumption – and one of the ways we do this is by sponsoring the Sustain IT awards.

It’s through this that I happen to know about an excellent site called walkit.com, which describes itself as an urban route planner. The key difference, as it ever-so-subtly hints with its name, is that all its routes are for people who want to walk rather than drive or take public transport. (more…)

Life Imitates Art

Monday, January 19th, 2009

Passing through Heathrow T5 just after Xmas on my way to Bavaria for a meeting or two, I grabbed Charles Stross’ “The Jennifer Morgue” to read on the plane – and doubtless, in some airports too, since ground temperatures dropped to -20 practically while I was in the air.

Stross is definitely Our Kind Of Author, though I find he has that breathless Linux-Nerd way about his writing which immediately puts my teeth on edge (but doesn’t stop me reading). He clearly has some technology scars about his person and has done at least one book (Halting State) which suggests a high degree of familiarity with the online world and software development.

Anyway, at one point in “the Jennifer Morgue”, Stross stymies his heroes by having their transport crash – in software, not by running into something solid. As he no doubt intends, I had a nerdy chuckle at that while the Airbus 319 speared through the crystal-clear air across a Europe whiter then even the dreams of the BNP could make it.

Then I got in my hire car.

(more…)

Put your brains on the border

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

The last time I crossed the Swiss border was from the south: Mr Honeyball and I were going from Cannes to Mulhouse and the Schlumpf Museum (link is noisy – speakers off!), and I figured out that the best way to do this is not to schlep all the way round the French Alps, but instead go through the Gotthard pass and overnight in Lucerne.

As always, the Swiss border guards are like someone from Friends Reunited: cautious, a bit shy, and then the minute you are nice to them you are their best friend ever. Jon was expecting to be taken away and have his fillings sent for assay, but I deliberately picked a small crossing on the SP3 from Varese & Malnate, knowing the traffic would be light and the guys would be relaxed – and we wanted to drive over the bizarre ground-loops we found on Google Maps.

This friendly but thorough encounter – and a previous visit, going in through Basel, where the guards spent longer marvelling at the Japanese tax-disc on my personal import Subaru that they did looking at my passport – put me in mind of people’s approach to firewalls.

Working with a home network is not about appointing yourself a nice Swiss border guard (say “Gruezi” to the ones in the eastern half of the country if you want to be well treated, and make sure you roll the R without typical British embarrassment). it’s far more like having a garden wall with five different colour coded Tradesman’s entrances, all with doorknobs wired up to the 3-phase at your nearest substation – and yet so many devices now want unlimited access both to, and from, the web.

This last month I have had more questions about PS3 and XBox cohabitation on home networks, than all the other enquiries put together. It seems like those machines want to stand on the net unprotected and unencumbered: the fact that attack traffic seems to backtrack into all the addresses where games consoles announce themselves, on the principle that people playing games are probably not terribly au fait with protecting their other compute resources, seems to support my suggestion:

Buy yourself a proper, separate, hardware firewall. Not some freebie that hacker dudes can treat like a Swiss border guard.