Tech Talk Column

My eldest daughter lives in a residential college at a University in Sydney. As with most groups of people in their late teens and early twenties, they enjoy themselves. This might involve parties or dancing or maybe even a few drinks. Probably not a…

I regularly joke that we can do so much with our smartphones that we often forget that we can still talk to people on them! When Alexander Graham Bell filed US Patent Number 174,465 on 14 February 1876, he may have had an inkling of how the telephone…

The last bastion of escape from the connected world we live in is about to disappear. As much as I love my technology and the idea that we are all connected in so many different ways – no matter where we are or what we are doing – there i…

Think streaming services and in the music industry Spotify and Pandora immediately come to mind. In less than nine years, Spotify has secured over 100 million users. With over 30 million songs available it has been incredibly successful in creating a…

The pressure on a batsman as he walks to the crease in the second innings if he has managed a duck in the first innings is immense. No batsman wants to walk back to the dressing room with a pair to his name. Less so a ‘king pair’ with a g…

Over the last two weeks I have spoken about data and how the size of data is defined. One issue that is always an issue when it comes to data on your computer is when it comes time to update or dispose of a PC. The data that is on a local hard drive …

Last week I went into great detail about what data is and how it is measured. For the sake of a refresh, I estimated that for an average user, 1GB may equate to 20,000 Word documents or 250 photos or 5 videos of 30 seconds in length. That is a very s…

Data, data, everywhere, do I have enough to sync? In a modern twist from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s line from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, it seems to me that we are surrounded by data – yet there are two interesting issues associated …

Today is the last day of Mobile World Congress (MWC). It is the largest event in the world for the mobile industry to gather and showcase the latest products on offer. It is part conference, part exhibition and part one-upmanship announcements &ndash…

I am sure all of the readers of this column have a family member who is lucky enough to be technically obsessed – so today I thought I would look at some gift ideas for those people who think a piece of sporting equipment would be a great devic…

Today I want to ask the seemingly simple question. Does technology improve our lives? The word technology is all-encompassing. The shaping of a rock to be used as a crude tool to cut trees for shelter or shape branches for spears could be classified …

Penny: “How are flower berets gunna appeal to men?“ Howard: “We add Bluetooth” Sheldon: “Brilliant. Men love Bluetooth.” Penny: “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You wanna make a hair beret with Bluetooth?&rdquo…

My official start in technology businesses goes back to 4 December 1989 but I well remember my interest in the technological world being stirred up when our school, St. Johns College, purchased two Apple II computers in the early eighties and I start…

With the NBN rolling out throughout our region and people enjoying faster connections from their home to the Internet, it has highlighted the need for faster connections throughout your home. When the Internet was first introduced in Australia on 24 …

When I was growing up I used to enjoy spending time with my Dad attending race meetings at the Dubbo Greyhound Racing Club. While at the meetings, I would grab a race book and try and pick a few winners and Dad would give me a dollar to put a bet on …

The first Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite was launched in 1978 by the US Military with the intention for it to be for military use only but in 1983, then President Ronald Reagan, announced that GPS would be made available for civilian use. …

Happy New Year! I am a firm opponent of resolutions for the New Year but if I was going to make a resolution, maybe it would involve learning another language – or maybe not… If you remember back to the 1978 bestselling comedy science fi…

The second last day of the year seems like a good day to review the tech that we saw this year – but with the ten highest patent lodging companies combining for 36,108 patents amongst them, picking just a few items is tough (so go easy on my if…