Last week I dragged an old Hewlett Packard netbook out of the cupboard to put it to use as a secondary laptop. It was released in 2009, has a low power single-core Intel Atom processor, 2GB RAM, 160GB drive, no optical drive, and a very low resolution 10” screen.

My first attempt at getting it back into operation was by installing Microsoft Windows 8. Everything installed perfectly, it detected my hardware, and the performance was reasonably acceptable. However none of the new Windows 8 programs would work; the screen was of such a low resolution that I got errors every time I launched a program – email, web browser, weather, maps, everything. Not a good start.

I then tried an operating system called Joli OS from French company Jolicloud. Joli OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux operating system, and was released in version 1.0 back in 2010. The current release, version 1.2, has been around since March 2011. Joli OS is designe ...

(crosspost from my personal blog http://adamfowlerit.blogspot.com.au)

Hello,

This is a crosspost from my blog at flamingkeys.com.

One of the people I was lucky enough to meet at Tech·Ed Australia 2011 was Mr Paul Cunningham, who runs the popular website Exchange Server Pro. Paul is one of the most respected names going around when it comes to Exchange, and he has the real world experience to back it up. As a favour to the community (and our profession) Paul has decided to produce a free (as in free beer) boot camp for those wanting to learn Exchange 2010. The boot camp consists of four modules  containing physical challenges, early morning runs, rope climbs*, text, screen shots and videos to help you learn the basics of Exchange Server 2010. Having worked through this boot camp myself, I can say that this is an invaluable resource for those getting started with Exchange Server, and also those who may have managed an Exchange environment but not installed one before.

Please make sure you check the boot camp out, and also be sure to stick Paul’s blog ...

After reading about the improved battery life in the 4S, I had a great first day with the phone. After actually getting it and turning it on from about 8:30am, playing with it for the morning, and then doing a full restore from my old phone. Apart from the charge while the restore was going on, I didn't charge it for the rest of the day. Played lots with it in the afternoon and had about 10% charge left by 11pm that ...

If you've been living under a rock, you would probably know that Apple released the iPhone 4S on the 14th of October, to much noise and hullabaloo. I was one of those who trekked out early to pick one up on the day of release. Now the noise has gone away, and I've had it for just over a look, let's take a look at it and see how it goes.

As a point of reference, I had an iPhone 3GS for over 2 years, didn't upgrade when the 4 came out, and have been struggling with iOS 4 on the slower processor for some time. So naturally, an upgrade to a 4S would be a sizeable one, regardless of the features of the new phone.

Image (c) Apple, 2011

The Apple iPhone 4S is the latest smartphone from Apple. In many ways an upgrade from the iPhone 4, the new device sees Apple enter the dual-core mobile processor era, with the 1GHz A5 dual core chip with 512MB RAM. Apple claim the A5 processor improves graphics performance by up to 7 times, and while it's hard to ga ...

Hi,

Thanks to Telstra, I've been given a 4G card to trial - so let's see how we go! This is just a quick 'Out of the box' experience and not intended as a full review or guide. 

First, I've put the SIM into the rather short and fat 4G modem, and plugged that into my laptop. It's autodetected and kicked off an installer.   Several minutes later, the installer is done and launches the Telstra Mobile Broadband app! But, it's saying 'Cannot detect SIM card'. What have I done wrong?  

I pull out the modem, open it up and switch the SIM card around the other way. It's not too clear as to which way it's supposed to go, but looking at the manual it does confirm I had it incorrectly inserted.   Back in it goes, and look it's now detected and showing me signal strength!   I click the 'Connect Now' button and am instantly connected.

The Telstra Mobile Broadband program pops up a top news story, as well as giving me links for some Online Services - BigPond H ...

Hello,

Lying in bed last night, I had a revelation about where I can see us heading in the next few years. This is mostly reliant on better broadband though (hello NBN!) but regardless I believe my idea is where we are heading.

Firstly, if you use more than 1 PC/device then you'll know the frustration of having to either do multiple installs of applications you use, or re-do settings. A good example of this is your browser's favorites/bookmarks list. Sure you can type in the websites, but it's nice to have a full list to just choose from. To fill this void, services like Delicious http://www.delicious.com/ popped up - your bookmarks in the cloud! Now it doesn't matter where you are, you can access that same list.

Email went the same way - Outlook is nice to use, but it doesn't help you when you're at work and want to check your personal emails. Again, the solution was to have your emails in the cloud and sync all your devices/PC's to that single point, or even just use a web interfa ...

27/09/11 Update: Tommy Tudehope has written an article on his thoughts here: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2913064.html

Today I was listening to the current affairs show 'Hack' which airs daily on Triple J at 5:30. One of the topics today was from a Social Media Consultant Tommy Tudehope (on Twitter at @TommyTudehope), who was predicting that SMS would be dead in 5 years, and Email dead in 10.

For the audio of the broadcast: http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/daily/hack_wed_2011_09_21.mp3

Webpage of Triple J's Hack: http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/podcast/

Tommy's claims:

"... People think SMS is one to one, of course it is, but is it really private, who has access to it, and are you always relying on your service provider Telstra or Optus to connect you through."

"...A lot of businesses have trouble working/collaborating with other businesses so sending mass emails to different people who you're working with. Now with Google Plus, you can h ...

“It’s simple, straight-forward, intuitive, and ‘just works’. ”

That statement is the reason for my blog ...

Yesterday, Microsoft released the Windows 8 Developer Preview to the general public - Microsoft's first public release of their new Windows operating system. We have seen hints of the new OS in screenshots leaked and posted on their blog, so naturally plenty of people jumped at the chance to grab a functional copy of the new Windows operating system. You can grab yours from here.

Lots has been made of Microsoft's new OS, including what it needs to do to stay competitive against Apple's OS's in both the desktop and mobile space. Microsoft has announced that Windows 8 will be the same platform across x86/64 desktop devices and ARM-based mobile devices - importantly, tablets and mobile phones, which Microsoft entered recently with the Windows Phone 7 operating system.

There's plenty to remember when reviewing any software that is essentially still in Alpha, or brand new Beta. Importantly, it's not complete software. Many people often review software at this stage as completed software, wh ...

So, a few miffed tweets and a blog post or two, and I find myself picked up by itnews.com.au (totally without my knowledge, mind!), and the story grows legs, and takes off all on its own.  That said, I stand by what I have written, and I firmly believe that I have delivered an even handed and fair appraisal of what occurred from my personal perspective surrounding the issues with the Pre-Conference Technical Training at Tech.Ed Australia 2011. Bottom line, most delegates in the training did not get what they paid for.

Technical failures happen.  In our industry, we all have to deal with them.  In a previous blog, I made mention of the fact that a great organisation is made by how they respond to this sort of event.

As a result of my blogs and tweets, I had some chats and emails with people from Microsoft such as Jeff Alexander and Sarah Vaughan.  Both of these guys made every effort to apologise and to make sure that I was listened too and responded too ap ...

OK, so the journey continues on my Tech.Ed Australia adventure for 2011, and I must say that things are one heck of a lot better than yesterday.  Those that have been playing along from home, or keeping tabs via this site or on Twitter will have read from yesterday's blog that things did not get off to a very good start with the Pre Conference Technical Training Labs.

Attendees were basically served up crashing VMs, couldn't log on, or were forced to sit through an unfortunate barrage of 'Death by PowerPoint' sessions as a result of the SAN running the VMs having a hardware failure.  The trainers all did a great job of trying to save face and deliver meaningful content to the attendees, but at the end of the day, none of us paid the aforementioned $715.00 to attend a PowerPoint slide-deck-fest.

This morning, things were markedly different.  On arrival in my lab, I noted that the workstations we were using had been re imaged overnight to include all labs on ...

This is a review for something that I own, a neat little video camera called a Flip. It is a flash drive unit, it records 60 minutes of video, and, via a usb connector that is built in, you can upload to storage on the computer, to email, to twitter, to facebook and, in the latest version of the software supplied in the device, to a cloud storage system. Neat. The Flip cameras are multi-system compatible, they work with windows systems and macs, and there are versions of the software preloaded on the camera, so there are no requirements to connect to a website before being able to use it and upload from it.

There is an ad running at the moment about a kid who has had a party, trashed the house and his mum calls to let him know they are on the way home. He looks at the carnage and tells her to"take the scenic route" - in the background, we see his little sister videoing the house and him, plugs it into her laptop, uploads the video, sends to an email address, her mum's, and then we hear the mother ...

Many years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and the net was what you caught fish in, I discovered that if my father and his colleagues at a large computer company ran a series of commands to a massive thing called a computer, it would print, on a large dot matrix, a massive picture of the moon and its craters. And so it was done, and it was good. (for me) Never knew what trouble I got them into for doing it, or the money wasted on paper, ribbon and processing power. I had kudos for at least a week at high school over that one...

The computer "lab" had an apple IIe, and we could control a "turtle" on it. wow. riveting stuff.

My father decided to get a computer - a scaled down one for "me" at home. He bought a personal computer, a microbee series 3, with a whopping 32kb of memory. It was so cool, but, sadly, it was on a green screen. (about a week later, my neighbor got a commodore 64, and his house was THE place to be for the neighborhood kids)

Dad then sent me off to my usual ...

I was lucky enough during my orientation at my new employer to get a look at a modular server. Yes, it is another ASI product, and yes, this is my opnion, not that of my employer.

 I have had experience over the years with blade servers, from the IBMs to the HPs, I have seen a broad spectrum of these devices. I have even visited blade.org to get an idea of the baseline design structures of these servers, and what makes them so interesting. I like the idea of running multiple blade servers in a chassis to increase performance, throughput and uptime.

When I saw the ASI Modular server, I immediately thought it was another Blade server. I was wrong, and realised my mistake only after the product manager pointed out that the blades have no hard drives, so cannot really be called blades. They are compute modules. Made me think that I was back in my youth, learning about technology in school - compute module sounded like a different way of saying CPU, as we knew it back then.

So I go ...

[UPDATED 9th February 2012 - see end of the review]

If you’ve read past product reviews of mine, you’d know that I tend to avoid reading other articles on a given product, at least until I’ve done my own. So it is with the Fritz!box, in spite of the impressive buzz that’s been going around ever since Internode announced their partnership with broadband specialist PCRange to bring the German product to Australia. I’d already known that Internode was looking for hardware that could sustain National Broadband Network (NBN) speeds of at least 100Mbps, with most routers on the market being unable to sustain these. The Fritz!box 7390 is their solution to this, along with the cheaper – and lower throughput – 7270 model, which provides sub-100Mbps throughput.

The Fritz!box 7390 has an impressive range of features that certainly make people sit up and take notice;

You have a Twitter account. You Facebook. You post on forums. But you don't have a personal website or blog. Does this mean you don't exist on the social landscape?

It's a topic I have been pondering for a number of weeks now, but I've finally put it together, after applying for the Telstra Windows 7 Phone Social review process. Now this isn't a whinge about not getting it, nor is it a suggestion of their preference in allocating positions (congratulations to those who did get chosen, especially the AuTechHeads regulars!). Rather, the process made me think about the topic a great deal. Which is why I'm here.

Having your own blog is a pretty decent undertaking. For it to be good, you must generate fresh content on a pretty regular basis, be a good writer, without necessarily making anything back on your investment of time and thought. However, blogging about your personal areas of interest, passion and experience can be a rewarding experience, especially knowing that your readers share your ...

The aim of the seminar series is to generate discussion between the small to medium business owners in our target regions and their existing IT consultants around utilising Virtualisation, Cloud, Communications, Green Technology and ...