adambowie.com

Category: Technology

  • Powerbeats Pro Review: with an Android Phone

    Powerbeats Pro Review: with an Android Phone

    TL;DR Excellent sounding and superb fit; but some significant connectivity and synchronisation issues alongside an atrocious case. I’ve been using these new headphones for a couple of months or so now, and think that I’ve used them enough to put together some sort of review about them. The first thing to say is that the…

  • NAS Upgrading Fun

    I’m documenting this, just in case there’s someone out there for whom it’s useful. I had two NAS drives, both made by Synology. I have a DS210j that I bought back in 2010. It had a pair of 2TB drives in it with a mirror RAID array, and perhaps the most important thing stored on…

  • Longer Lasting

    Over the last few weeks, a lot of things around me have started to break. Most annoyingly, the TV that was given to my father just over 18 months ago has developed a fault in the panel – the lower quarter flickers and then stays slightly greyer and fuzzier than the rest. It’s only 18…

  • YouTube: Different Things to Different People

    There have been a few stories kicking around about YouTube’s end of year “Rewind” video. YouTube has been making these for a few years, and they’ve grown to become big-budget affairs. But this year’s video is seemingly the most “disliked” video in YouTube history. Now I should say upfront that I have not watched this video.…

  • IKEA Tradfri Lights Working with Hue, Alexa and Google Assistant

    Here’s another one of those tutorials that I really shouldn’t need to write but somehow do, because despite dozens of tutorials already existing online, it was only a combination of things that got everything working for me. In short, I already have a Philips Hue lighting set-up and I wanted to add some IKEA Tradfri…

  • Building a Desktop National Rail Dashboard

    For ages now I’ve been meaning to put together a home dashboard: a screen that gives me up to date information about my local railway station with the departure boards showing. A slightly bigger ambition was to have the dashboard also display times for nearby buses – and perhaps the weather and Twitter news feeds. …

  • Surface Go – Review

    In 2015 Microsoft released the Surface 3 and I bought one. It wasn’t the most powerful Windows PC ever. Indeed, it was very much under-powered. But it was light, portable and ran full Windows applications. I bought it to allow me to run full Windows applications when I was travelling. Although it had limited on-board…

  • Google Podcasts

    Without an enormous amount of fanfare, Google yesterday launched Google Podcasts for Android yesterday, with the possibility of being game changing. I’ve long argued that for the Android/iOS podcasting gap to be closed, Google needed to get involved and create a generic app. Apple Podcasts is a pre-installed app on every iPhone sold, and with…

  • Garmin Varia RTL510

    I seem to have a constant battle with rear lights on my bikes. The main problem is that I use a saddlebag on my full-size bike, and attaching a bike light to it is a seemingly simple task, but tends not to be brilliant. If you have enough seat-post showing, then placing the light below…

  • Facebook Pixel Tracking

    This morning Nieman Lab had a really good piece asking whether if there was a certain amount of hypocrisy coming from certain news organisations castigating Facebook for leaking data, when at the same time they’re helping Facebook collect more data on you. Recall yesterday, when I said that some of Facebook’s data was missing from…

  • Is Netflix Quite As Smart As Everyone Says It Is?

    That’s possibly a provocative title, but I’ve come to the conclusions that while Netflix is very good at some things, I’m not certain that its recommendation engine is entirely as linked up as you’d think it’d be. A couple of recent cases in point. I was really looking forward to the new Alex Garland film,…

  • Examining My Facebook Downloads

    One very good consequence of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica story is that a lot of people are discovering the surprisingly large amount of data that Facebook holds on them. The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones was “somewhat shocked” to see what it had on him. And The Verge has a good piece on the subject with particular reference…

  • Facebook and Cambridge Analytica

    I’ve been following the stories surrounding Cambridge Analytica and Facebook for some months now, and in recent days, following stories from The Observer, The New York Times and Channel 4, the story has really blown up. However, I do think that the story, while completely valid, and asking some really critical questions, perhaps over emphasises…