ramblings on tech, photography and other geekery
This is a complex question, and what’s ‘best’ will depend on the network, strength of signal, and whether it will penetrate the Faraday cage that your van effectively becomes. Generally speaking, getting the external 4G/LTE antenna outside of the giant metal box is a Good Thing (TM), so you want...
Firstly, I should probably explain a little of my background: a fair chunk of my work involves designing point to point wireless networks between buildings, and consulting on rural wireless broadband deployments for people in parts of the country which can’t get fibre broadband, and which BT have shown no...
A little bit about how the electromagnetic spectrum is allocated. There are 2 elements to this: frequency and power. Let’s talk about power first: the more power you drive a signal with, the further it travels (within reason), but the closer you are to it, the more of that signal...
In the UK, the spectrum that’s going to be used for 5G deployments is the old analogue TV space around 700Mhz. It’s been in use for well over 50 years, and TV transmitters output at *vastly* higher power levels than cellular transmitters. The data layer – 2.3Ghz (recovered from the MoD)...
Don’t rely on ‘percentage opens’ as an entirely accurate metric. To elaborate: the way most mailing lists determine whether a message was opened is by embedding a small, usually transparent, image in the HTML which is loaded from a remote web server when the message is viewed. That then indicates...
In the run up to RIAT week (anyone else going to be there this weekend and fancy meeting up?) I thought I’d do a quick test on some of the USB power packs I have kicking around here to see how close to their claimed capacity they really are. The...
Interested in people’s thoughts about encryption at rest in a datacentre environment. There was a request for web hosting in a certain discussion group earlier today, and I noticed one of the respondents mentioned their web server encrypted content at rest. I must admit, I’m in two minds about this....
It’s worth reading the political background to this post if you’ve not already done so: Facebook and the cookie jar As bad as the recent Facebook news stories have been, it’s fairly unlikely many of us are going to stop using it – it’s just too useful as a way...
It’s been a tough week for senior management at Facebook, as the world’s press has finally caught onto what many of us in the tech industry have warned our friends about for years: all those little quizzes you’re doing aren’t just harmless fun. It’s like the world has finally noticed...
A question came up recently: “If mining for crypto currency is so profitable why would anyone sell the tech to do it?” Mining is – at the basic mathematics level – searching for hash collisions. Hashing algorithms are an integral part of modern cryptography systems and allow you to create...
I suspect like many others in the UK, my new Google Nexus 5 smartphone arrived today. I’m not going to go into a long review about it – there are plenty of news sites out there far better at covering that than I. What I will do, though, is document...
Every few months I get a pressing urge to try and throw Outlook off my Windows machine – it’s bloated, isn’t a particularly good IMAP client, and with each passing version gets gradually harder to disable HTML mail entirely. In the past, I’ve ended up trying another mail client, but...