Friday 13 August 2010

Mobile Technology

I'm currently sat on a 2 hour train service into London victoria and its fun to look at all the tech that I'm using as I travel. My HP Mini's battery timer is telling me I have a good 3hr 20Mins of battery left to use writing this blog, browsing the web, doing a bit of classic gaming and generally doing online and offline things. The online part is made doable by my Mifi. Its sat there hooking my laptop up to the 3 Mobile network pretty well. Its a snappy service most of the time anyway. And on my left is my Phone. I'm listening to music and it's using its GPS to tell me the speed of the train. (89mph atm) It's just awesome the way tech has come along. But all I want to do is look out the window and enjoy the view. I'm on the way home so that I can make it into work tommorow and I really do enjoy my job and feel very privileged to do it.

As a PC technician I cover building pc's of all shapes, sizes and specs. Aswell as diagnosing and fixing lots of Hardware and Software problems. I really enjoy working with the team of people at the shop and it always gives me something to look forward to at the weekend. There's tough parts, Dealing with stroppy customers or those who simply wont listen or accept anything your saying, and then there's intermittent problems. oooooh I hate intermittent problems.

An interesting thing I've found about my 311 is that running on access virus scanning really slows down the system. I'm still waiting for them to develop virus scanning that uses the GPU to offload the work. alas. Kaspersky were working on the idea at one point, but i've not heard anything about it since. All I can say is that where most computers age and get further behind the performance curve, This little Mini is only getting better. With better GPU support for almost everything I simply can't wait for the future of this machine! I'm hearing rumblings about the new IE9 Beta being available in september and that promises to bring GPU acceleration to Browsing. That means faster page rendering times, faster HTML5 features, Generally awesome stuff for the Mini. I wish apple would add some gpu acceleration to Quicktime, but I'm not holding my breath. Once a bit more of the works been done and all the tough stuff is offloaded to GPU's its going to be an interesting way to upgrade an old machine. And I reckon it will do good things for the sale of budget GPU's.

Even now Badaboom on my ION converts H.264 at ~35Fps. That's past viewable speeds! With the right software I could watch back a video as I convert it on the fly, With an ATOM!!! Speaking of which I tried an iPhone App Streamtome the other day. Promises ot convert videos on your computer on the fly and stream them over your LAN or over the net. Unfortunately I haven't yet been able to get it to work with a single video (tried various formats) but I haven't really had time to look into it propperly. Oh by the way. Down to 88% battery left (and because I'm just typing not doing much with the system, Battery Bar reckons I've still got 3hrs 42Minutes left :-) happy days.

Video of the day has got to be this one, saw it the other day and lol'd a bit. Links back to what I was saying about the GTX 460 the other day which BY THE WAY, has got a new BIOS you can flash which raises the clocks on all the cards... And It's Official from EVGA O__O
Anyway Enjoy



So there you have it peeps, this is Andrew Girdler, telling it like it is in IT, and the weather is Sunny!

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