Tech Talk Column

Australia Day. A day of celebrations around the country as we mark the 230th anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet of British ships at Port Jackson. Technology will be used extensively across the country as we take photos and videos and edit,…

My tech article this week is dedicated to FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). I have been inundated with questions lately related to bitcoin specifically – or cryptocurrencies in general. When media articles are written about people who have turned US$…

Today is the last day of the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held in Las Vegas. The 2018 version was the 51st anniversary of the largest global gathering of innovation and electronics with almost 200,000 people in attendance over the four days…

When Australian Director, Peter Weir, released The Truman Show in 1998, I am not sure he would have thought how the world would look twenty years after the release of his movie. In the movie, Truman Burbank’s entire life is being broadcast to t…

Now here is an engineering challenge to keep your mind occupied over the Christmas break. Firstly, take a geostationary satellite delivering Internet connectivity to a large chunk of the earth. I have spoken about the inherent issue with satellite te…

Christmas is coming and people are full of good cheer. Well, at least the people I associate with are full of fun and frivolity but unfortunately there is a darker side to human nature. No matter what time of year it is, security is important. Regula…

With Christmas just around the corner (where did the year go?) I thought it was time to look at what gifts were available for the geek in your life. As any friend/partner/acquaintance of a true geek knows only too well, buying for the technically foc…

“Merry Christmas” And with those timeless words, a new communication tool was born. Twenty-five years ago last Sunday, Richard Jarvis, a director at Vodafone, was attending a party in Berkshire. His mobile phone made a noise like a phone …

The Internet isn’t broken, so Donald Trump has decided to fix it! And so starts the discussion around Net Neutrality. Let me start by giving a simple explanation of Net Neutrality. I have a water mains that brings water into my house from the C…

One of the most common concerns I hear from people contemplating putting anything in “the Cloud” is the fear that their personal information will be viewed by someone else. It is not that most people have huge dark secrets about a secret …

CVC. CR. AVC. PoI. FTTP. FTTN. FTTB. FW. Mbps. RSP. I think the National Broadband Network (NBN) has lots of people suffering from TMIS (Too Many Initialisms Syndrome – OK, you caught me, I made that one up). My general feeling is that people d…

Just when we thought there was one site left in the world that encouraged succinct and carefully chosen language, the rug has been pulled out from underneath us. On 21 March 2006 Twitter was born. The idea was simple. Jack Dorsey thought it would be …

The two largest companies on the US stock market launched their latest phones this week. The Google Pixel 2 went on sale on Tuesday and the first sales of the iPhone X started today. With the latest technology on offer from these two behemoths of the…

Back in the glory days when Australia had locally made cars, I was lucky enough to be escorted through the Toyota plant in Altona, Victoria. At the end of the tour, I asked the plant manager why the Camry still had a spare tyre. He looked at me as if…

“Now look at them yo-yos that’s the way you do it; You play the guitar on the MTV. That ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it; Money for nothin’ and [outdated and politically incorrect] chicks for free.” Wit…

In a Fox News interview in the US last month, Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates, admitted that he no longer uses a Windows based mobile phone. It was an admission of massive proportions. Windows 10 Mobile has been floundering in the marketplace with o…

I have spoken before about the Smart Home and the variety of devices that are either on the market or about to hit the market that aim to be at the centre of the Smart Home. For some people, the total integration of the home and taking that colossal …

This month witnessed the nineteenth anniversary (note anniversary not birthday) of one of the most recognisable names in the tech world. It is a company that touches 90.3 per cent of Internet connected users on a daily basis, and sits at number two o…

The days don’t come much bigger than today in the tech world. A triple launch day with the two largest phone manufacturers in the world involved. At 8am today, Samsung launches the Note 8. After the massive failure of the Note 7 and the complet…