A new social network started up six months ago and began picking up speed last week as it echoes the early days of Twitter. It’s called Mastodon and was born out of frustration with changes being made on Twitter, according to an interview with founder Eugen Rochko in The Verge. Last year, after Twitter began moving away from a purely chronological feed, Rochko began building the back end for what would become Mastodon. Instead of building a unified service, Rochko …
Category: Experimenting
Do you remember the days when computer magazines came with cover disks? And then with CDs that progressed to DVDs? All with must-have utilities and often free programs that were part and parcel of the PC enthusiast experience from the 80s through to the early 00s. That fell by the wayside with the advent of the modern internet and growing broadband connectivity along with worries about malware and viruses and greater knowledge and sophistication in using computers. Among many other …
In just a few days, on July 29, Microsoft will begin the public rollout of Windows 10 in 190 countries. If you want to upgrade your desktop or laptop computer, it’s a free upgrade in specific circumstances. Lifehacker has a simple flowchart that makes it quite easy to see if you qualify. The only difference to this chart is that Windows 8 won’t get you the free upgrade but Windows 8.1 will. According to Microsoft: The only requirements are that …
On July 29 – in just over two weeks’ time – Microsoft will begin the formal roll-out of Windows 10, the new edition of the Windows operating system for PCs and tablets (and Windows phones). It’s been the subject of a comprehensive beta-testing programme by around five million people since the programme was launched at the end of September 2014. I’ve been part of this programme as a Windows Insider since last October, running the incremental builds of ‘Windows 10 …
Will Microsoft’s Internet Explorer see the sunset later this year? It’s certainly not my browser of choice. Indeed, I don’t use it at all, preferring Google Chrome on the desktop and mobile and, lately, experimenting with Vivaldi, an impressive new browser that’s based on Google Chromium code. Since it first appeared in 1995, Internet Explorer has come with the Windows operating system. Unless you manually install an alternative, that’s what you end up with. In Europe until recently, Microsoft was …
Last month, I bought a Samsung Gear 2 Neo smartwatch. It’s been on my wrist every day over the past few weeks, replacing my usual traditional watch that tells the time and shows me the date. Of course, a digital smartwatch can do a lot more than just that, one of the reasons why people buy them. You want to check your heartbeat? Count how many steps you take walking, or running or hiking? Track your sleeping time? The Gear …
Wow – now you can do a Google Hangout On Air (a live video broadcast) for up to 8 hours! That’s a huge amount of additional time from the previous 1-hour-maximum you had. And remember: up to 8 hours means just that – you don’t have to do 8 whole hours. Oh what possibilities! Here are just 4: A live idea-a-thon to flesh out thinking and ideas for brand engagement via live participation with brand owners, customers and fans on …
I’ve been having some fun this morning with Jelly. Jelly is a new mobile search service announced yesterday that works via apps for Android and iOS. The company was co-founded by Biz Stone, one of the original founders of Twitter. So what is Jelly? In a nutshell, it’s an app you use to ask a question about something, such as the one about Starbucks mugs you see in the screenshot, where you show a photo of a mug you take …
Earlier this year, Google announced a new feature for search – conduct a search with your voice in the Chrome browser. To conduct a conversational search, you’d fire up Google Search; if you saw a little microphone symbol in the search box, you could click on it to activate the function, and then speak your search phrase in conversational English (or any of the other supported languages). When I tried it in May, I thought it was a bold step …
