What’s next for smartphones?
I think we can all agree that excitement is dead for the smartphone market. Except, of course, for the occasional exploding Galaxy Note 7 joke. From personal experience, iPhone users tend to upgrade every other year. For Android users it seems to be even less frequent, except for users like me who buy a new phone…
Why Can’t We Get Minecraft Bedrock on Mac with Apple Silicon?
It’s 2025, and Apple’s M-series chips have proven themselves as some of the most powerful consumer CPUs on the market. MacBooks and iMacs with Apple Silicon rival high-end PCs in raw performance while sipping power like mobile devices. Yet for some reason, there’s one glaring omission for gamers: Minecraft Bedrock Edition is still not available…
Things I use, but am not 100% happy with…
Recently, I moved to a larger house after living in apartments and town houses for almost 20 years. Living in small places wifi had never really been an issue to me, and other than the occasional reboot of the router, I was very happy. In the new house, I tried to use my trusty Linksys…
Problems with digital home assistants
For the last several months, I have been testing both Siri and the Google Assistant as voice controllers for my home automation products. While neither product is really very good at this point in time, I have less overall problems with Siri than I do with the Google Assistant. In this post I will outline…
Ultra Street Fighter IV Benchmark on Surfacebook
I recently got a Microsoft Surfacebook at work. I have been busy installing all the programs that I use for data collection and analysis as well as development and content creation. I am very happy overall and this machine is set to replace my not-so-old MacBook Pro because Apple seems to be unable to provide…
The death of the PC needs to be rethought.
It is a very common theme in tech media and podcasting these days to refer to the post-pc era or that the PC is dying. I agree that the desktop PC market is shrinking, but the need for workstation grade computers is not. Content creators regardless of the media type (video, games, text, graphics or…
What is up with Google, Spotify, Waze and Google Music?
Recently, I have been driving to work after a very long stretch of either walking or taking subways/trains. I have found that the GPS apps are pretty useful for letting me know if there is traffic on I-95 South. Currently, I am juggling Waze and Google Maps as my go to apps as well as…
I wonder if today’s kids know why drive letters start at C
I was thinking about this the other day in the lab. I was thinking many people know about floppy drives and the a:\ drive being the default, but the b:\ drive? That is a different story. In the old days the OS would boot from the floppy and it was considered the a:\ drive. I…
It is a total mystery how to select the default Windows Hello device
I find the Windows Hello login very useful. It is quick and generally very accurate. There is one complaint I have that is really a bit of a mystery — how the heck to you pick the camera that you want to use for Windows Hello? There does not seem to be a way to…
Are you using LastPass yet?
Passwords suck. When was the last time you said: “Yeah! Another password!”? Yet, what else can we use? At the moment, there are many viable approaches to eliminating passwords from single sign-on solutions, biometrics, mobile device-based alternatives to more out-of-the-box style approaches (see SQRL for an interesting idea). While these are interesting and a few…