Fairfax Tech Talk Column

16 April 2006. Chittagong. The first day of the last Test in the Australia versus Bangladesh series. Jason ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie shared the new ball with Brett Lee. After Gillespie had finished his first five overs, he had the figures of three for eleven and wasn’t used again in the innings. The Tigers were all out for 197 late in the day and Dizzy had the best bowling figures and best economy rate for the Aussies. When Australia went out to bat, Gillespie thought he was fi ..

It may seem like quite an easy feat in our current environment but way back in 2006 I had an interesting request from a friend. His elderly father had passed away and their family was spread far and wide around the globe. Unfortunately, it simply wasn’t possible for one particular sibling to make it home from overseas. The friend asked me to setup a live stream of the service. It wasn’t called a live stream back then but the concept was the same. I somehow felt slightly awkward s ..

When I was young, I would sometimes sit with my hip and groovy (much) older teenage sisters and listen to their music – usually on records but sometimes just listening to the radio. I remember one night when I heard Kiki Dee’s unique soul vocals pump out “I’ve Got the Music in Me” and at the end of the song, the radio announcer declared that she must have swallowed a radio! It was a poor joke but we found it amusing and rang the radio station to tell the DJ of o ..

As humans we have a basic desire to be loved – and an innate curiosity. If you want to see fast actions from a person, mix these two ingredients and stand back! “This is a tech column,” I hear you thinking. “Why is he talking about psychology?” This last week we saw the twentieth anniversary of one of the most infamous computer viruses the world has ever seen – and it relied on these two aspects of human behaviour to be so devastating. Looking ..

I walked in to a local sporting goods store many years ago to buy a sports watch. The typical sort of thing for the day. A chunky watch with a separate external armband to track GPS location and a chest band to monitor heart rate. I remember asking the salesperson if there were plans to incorporate, at the very least, the heart rate function into a watch on your wrist and possibly even GPS functionality. The salesperson was quite confident that a watch would NEVER have the capabilities t ..

The first car I owned was a V8 253 Holden HZ Ute - although I am ignoring my brother’s VC Valiant which he accused me of borrowing so often that I thought I owned it! I had gained most of my mechanical skills working on motorbikes as I was growing up but, after having owned the HZ for a number of years and visiting auto-wreckers around the nation, I was well and truly acquainted with the inner workings of the 253 (and the Valiant). In our modern world, it is unlikely that I would h ..

The earliest archaeological evidence of any type of wheel was discovered in Mesopotamia dated around 5,500 years old. Those early wheels were used for pottery creation so it was left to the Ancient Greeks to develop the wheel for transportation in some basic axle carts. The wheel has developed somewhat since those early wheelbarrows and, despite the fact that the US Patents Office alone has issued more than ten million patents, the wheel is generally regarded as the greatest invention ever.  ..

NBN recently released information to demonstrate just how much additional data we have been using since the start of COVID-19 restrictions. In less than a month our usage in the evening has increased by 25 per cent; the early evening has witnessed an increase of 30 per cent and 21 per cent is how much more data we are seeing during business hours. This doesn’t include increased data on the mobile phone network. To give you an idea of the sheer volume of data, the evening now sees a pea ..

Do you remember the old days? The days when we could jump in a car and drive to a local tourist destination and gather with other people whilst viewing the attraction? Or cast your mind back further – when we could fly across the seas and visit a foreign land. Once at a faraway location, we had the pleasure of patiently standing in a line in the sun/rain/snow/heat/cold (insert applicable for your favourite destination) and paying good money to gather amongst the crowds and see a gl ..

Many people talk about the pace of change ‘these days’ but I think it would be fair to say that COVID-19 has delivered a world where the pace of change is not measured in years or months but in hours and minutes. Just when we think we have somewhat of a handle on how the world will look going forward, the ground shifts from underneath us. From a technology perspective, I spend the majority of my days helping clients improve their remote connectivity to satisfy their requireme ..