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| The Computers That Were More Successful Than They Deserved To Be (Part 1) |
| There is quite often a discussion among computer enthusiasts about systems that did not do as well as they should have done. Hardware that was ahead of its time but failed to capture the public imagination. Such technology luminaries as the Sinclair QL, the SAM Coupe, the Apple Lisa and the Atari ST can all be classed as computers often thought of as not reaching their full potential. |
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| Bin Your ISP Router (Part 8) : Virgin Media Hub |
| As with the BT Home Hub 3 and the Sky Hub, features are thin on the ground. The router is nominally dual band, but those networks can’t be run concurrently, so unless you’re willing to cut off your 2.4GHz devices from the internet completely, the 5 GHz mode is redundant. |
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| Bin Your ISP Router (Part 7) : Sky Hub |
| If there’s one thing that ties ISP-supplied routers together, it’s a lack of high-end features, and the Sky Hub (model SR101) is no exception. It’s a single-band router operating an 802.11n network at 144Mbits/sec speeds; all its network ports are the slower 10/100 type; and there’s no sign of anything as useful as a USB port for sharing a hard disk drive. |
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| Bin Your ISP Router (Part 6) : Netgear D6300, Netgear DGND4000 |
| The D6300’s maximum nominal throughput over its 802.11ac 5GHz link is 1,300Mbits/sec, dropping to 300Mbits/sec over 2.4GHz. Yet, with the $92 Netgear A6200 USB adapter plugged into a free port on our test laptop, we saw an average speed at close range of 25.1MB/sec. That’s good, but not as fast as we had expected. |
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| Bin Your ISP Router (Part 5) : DrayTek Vigor 2710n, Edimax BR-6478AC |
| That’s mainly due to its inability to keep up with the Joneses when it comes to wireless technology. The Vigor 2710n is the only non-ISP-supplied router in this Labs not to feature support for concurrent dual-band wireless networks. In fact, the Vigor 2710n is 2.4GHz only, with no support for 5GHz whatsoever. |
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| Bin Your ISP Router (Part 4) : Cisco Linksys EA2700, D-Link DIR-845L |
| Cisco’s new app-centric approach to its routers is evident. Instead of the text-heavy Linksys web UI, the EA2700 displays a user-friendly dashboard when you first log on, allowing you to view the router’s status via a selection of large modules in the center of the screen. The settings are accessed via a short series of links on the left-hand side, and the front-end can be customized by replacing modules, or dragging them to new positions. |
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| Bin Your ISP Router (Part 3) : Belkin Play N600, BT Home Hub 3 |
| The Belkin Play N600 looks very similar to its flagship cousin, the AC 1200 DB, and is reasonably easy on the eye. With its rounded corners and slender, wedge-shaped profile, this ADSL router will fit unobtrusively into all but the most stylish of settings. |
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| Bin Your ISP Router (Part 2) : Asus DSL-N55U, Belkin AC 1200 DB |
| When you connect to the DSL-N55U’s web UI, it delivers class-leading usability. The first page helps you set up the ADSL connection. Once that’s done, there’s a wireless and security setup wizard to go through, and you finally land on the router’s dashboard page. This displays a network map, showing an at-a-glance view of the health of your internet connection, and the status of the wireless network. Click an item on the map and further information appears in a panel to the side. |
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| Bin Your ISP Router (Part 1) |
| Most major ISPs supply a router for free when you sign up to their broadband services, but are those units holding back your Wi-Fi speeds? We've pitched BT, Sky and Virgin Media's offerings against nine third-party routers to find out if it's worth switching |
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| Accessories And Add-Ons For Your iOS Devices – July 2013 (Part 2) |
| The Dodocase mini for Apple’s smaller iPad isn’t quite a hardcover book, but it brings forth all the qualities I love about books. It’s a bound, hardcover shell with a (much improved) bamboo tray for your digital device. The cover folds back to create a nice typing plane, and the case has embedded magnets in the cover to sleep and wake your device. You can even use the iPad’s rear camera through an optional camera hole. |
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| New Gadgets For July 2013 (Part 3) |
| One of LG's finest recent launches, the LG Optimus G is packed with a 4.7-inch True HD IPS Plus Display and a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro 1.5 GHz Quad-core processor, the Optimus G transcends the constraints of a traditional phone to provide you with the ultimate smartphone experience. |
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| New Gadgets For July 2013 (Part 2) |
| Despite its size, the BRV-1 is certified as ‘IPX5’ water resistant a test that requires it to survive “12.5 liters of water per minute being hosed on it at 30kPA pressure from a distance of 3m”. That means it’ll certainly cope with splashes in the bathroom, as well getting a soaking on the beach or being dropped on a ski slope. |
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| New Gadgets For July 2013 (Part 1) |
| The Fujifilm HS50 has added another camera to their bridge series. The camera possesses a high-precision manual zoom of a massive 42x that translates into a focal length range of 24mm -1000 mm, is an all-in-one high-speed performer with an ability to capture images with stunning crisp quality. It offers focal lengths which would require several different lenses on a DSLR. |
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| SaaSID Cloud Application Manager |
| UK start-up SaaSID has a novel approach to this problem: its Cloud Application Manager (CAM) uses a lightweight software agent that plugs into the user’s browser. It also provides freely available software for iOS devices. |
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| QNAP TS-870U-RP 10GbE NAS Network Storage Server |
| Qnap’s latest NAS appliance has finally brought lOGbE performance to a price point SMBs can afford. The TS-870U-RP is an eight-bay rack-mount appliance that provides a couple of PCI Express expansion slots, which support a wide range of optional lOGbE adapters. |
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| TP-Link SafeStream TL-ER6120 |
| TP-Link has a reputation for low-cost networking products, and its latest VPN router is no exception. For just over $235, the SafeStream TL-ER6120 supports up 100 IPsec VPN tunnels; it has dual Gigabit WAN ports that can be used for load balancing or backup links; and security extends to service blocking, application controls and website filtering. |
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| Understanding Geo-blocking (Part 3) |
| If you simply want to watch videos on your computer, or a Home theatre PC connected to your television, the Hola browser plugin should serve you well for Hulu, Netflix, Amazon and BBC iPlayer. Try both Chrome and Firefox if you run into problems. If you get no joy, experiment with proxy servers or try a DNS-based service – substituting its DS servers for your defaults. |
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| Understanding Geo-blocking (Part 2) |
| Virtual Private Networks also act as middlemen, with the added bonus of encrypting all your traffic. You’ll find free VPN services such as Hotspot Shield and VPNBook, along with paid services like WiTopia and StrongVPN. Once again you’re at the mercy of the speed of the VPN. WiTopia offers multiple servers in many countries – servers in large cities are faster but also more likely to be blocked by content providers. |
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| Understanding Geo-blocking (Part 1) |
| It should also be mentioned that a lot of geo-blocking techniques will require you to obfuscate your actual address. If the thought of any of these practices make you uncomfortable, then we recommend that you should probably stay away from geo-dodging. However, should you wish to understand just how it’s done, you can safely read along. |
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| Control Your Bionic Hand With An iPhone (Part 2) |
| Despite careful medical care helping to ensure the healing of her flash and bone, Wilding’s arm was crippled, dramatically changing her life. Some movement to her upper arm has been restored by nerve implants, but if she wants any greater functionality from this part of her body, it will take rather more drastic measures to achieve it. |
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| Control Your Bionic Hand With An iPhone (Part 1) |
| As a certain time-honored advertising campaign so famously said: “There’s an app for that” – and of course, it’s true that iDevices and the iOS platform that powers them have expanded so many people’s sense of precisely what a mobile phone can be expected to do, ever since the first iPhone’s emergence in 2007. |
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| The Wet Servers |
| Cooling a significantly sized server room is a challenge in itself. The energy requirements necessary to keep a constant air temperature are quite extraordinary, making the server room a less than green approach to providing adequate cooling. |
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| StarTech SV231UAF 2 Port USB VGA KVM Switch |
| The SV231UAF is a new KVM product by StarTech aiming to address a number of snags that typical KVM (Keyboard Video Mouse) switches normally throw up, such as the fact they usually only accept peripherals of the PS/2 variety, rather than now-ubiquitous USB ones. This box offers two such ports specifically for mouse and keyboard, while also channeling both VGA and audio sources. |
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| What's Hot in Tech – July 2013 |
| Explore the web with ease and confidence. BullGuard's special feature checks all the sites that come up in your search results. It tells you what they are about, which are safe, and cautions you about the ones harboring malicious code or phishing attempts. Installs in minutes. |
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| The Architecture Of Cloud Foundry |
| The router, as the name implies, takes an incoming request, and forwards it to the appropriate DEA. It also distributes the load among DEAs, like a load balancer. Like a hardware router, the Cloud Foundry router maintains a routing table, which is referred to before making routing decisions. |
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| Code Sport - Scale-Up vs. Scale-Out Storage |
| Most of us are familiar with the concepts of scale up and scale-out computing as they apply to server computing. A scale-up server is a single system with high CPU power and huge memory, and hence is able to handle increasing workloads. |
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| Network Deployment And Alternative OSs |
| These are exciting times for devices. End users have the options of Android, ChromeOS, FirefoxOS, KDE Plasma Active, etc., to choose from. Here’s a look at how similar or different these OSs are from each other. |
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| Simplifying Deployment On The Cloud With Heroku |
| Many developers assume cloud deployment to be tedious, costly, insecure and even sometimes unreliable. However, with the advent of platforms like Heroku, deployment on the cloud is being widely adopted and it is empowering a large number of developers. Let us dive into Heroku and its offerings. |
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| A Look At Open Source Nosql Databases And Cloud Computing (Part 2) |
| Apache CouchDB is an open source NoSQL database. CouchDB uses JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, lightweight data-interchange format) to store data. JavaScript is used as its query language. CouchDB is published via the Apache Software Foundation in 2008. In CouchDB, each database is a collection of independent documents. |
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| A Look At Open Source Nosql Databases And Cloud Computing (Part 1) |
| The focus of traditional databases is mainly on consistency, but being relational is not necessary for some specific use cases, and can add avoidable overhead. The use of NoSQL databases opens up the scope for enormous scalability, the ability to grow the capacity of your database on demand, low latency, and a relatively easier programming model – which SQL databases do not provide in a cost-effective manner. |
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| Getting Started With An Open Source Circuit Simulator |
| The Quite Universal Circuit Simulator (QUCS) is an open source electronics circuit simulator development. Though it is very stable, there are things missing here and there, so let’s look at what it can and cannot do. The QUCS GUI is based on Qt by Trolltech. |
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| Open Source-Packed Innovations |
| For some, innovation is fun. They like to create new products or do things in new ways, just for kicks. For others, innovation is a cause, often with a social twist. They look at it as a means to provide for the poor, or to improve the lives of specially-challenged people. This month’s Innovation page features both kinds – the common thread that binds them is open source. |
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| API Design - Learning From Mistakes In The C Library |
| Design is hard, and API design is harder. This is because applications and systems are designed to be used, while in the case of APIs, we design them not just to be used but also reused. Applications are designed for end customers to use; however, with the APIs in libraries, platforms and frameworks, the end user is another programmer who wants to get the work done via the API. |
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| Ubuntu Phones To Hit Stores In October (Part 3) |
| App for Android, which is currently, supported by some of the Linux distributions. The second release of the app is expected to arrive soon, which will be supported on all platforms – Windows, MacOS X, and all Linux distributions and binaries. LibreOffice Impress Remote is a free remote control app for presentations. With this, you can control your LibreOffice presentations from your Android smartphone. |
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| Ubuntu Phones To Hit Stores In October (Part 2) |
| The Reserve Bank of India has given the go-ahead to a special card reader that will allow you to pay your bills via your Android phone. Priced at Rs 1500, the cigarette box-sized card reader that will come along with an Android phone, can perform all tasks that a POS terminal can. |
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