Andys Computer

  I remember my first portable MP3 player, it was a Samsung Yepp YP-E32 that I bought in early 2000 from a shop on Tottenham Court Road in London. For those who are unfamiliar, Tottenham Court Road is, or strictly speaking was, the place in the UK to get the latest tech gear. Think of it as the Akihabara of London. No big box store sold MP3 players at that time, heck most people didn't know what an MP3 file was. But I knew that if I could find this extremely sleek and classy looking new player anywhere, it would be on Tottenham Court Road...   And they didn't disappoint, it could be mine for a little under 200 UK pounds after the customary haggling. 32MB of on-board RAM meant it could hold 32 minutes of music at the 128kbps quality rate I and most others used at the time, so I coughed up another 65 UK pounds for a 32MB Smart Media card which gave me an hour of music for my commute to work, although I'd have to listen to the same music again on the way home. So...

    I decided to dig out my old Amazon Kindle, a 3rd generation model with keyboard, which I last used, well, probably 3 years ago. Unsurprisingly the battery was flat, which feels weird when you're looking at a screen with writing on it because we're used to screens being dead when they have no power, but that's the beauty of e-ink I guess. But after sitting dead for who knows how long, was the battery toast? I plugged it in to a high power USB charger overnight but in the morning it was still as dead as a dodo... Hoping that I wouldn't need to break it open and swap out the battery, I tried unplugging it and plugging git back in a couple of times. Eventually the orange charging LED on the bottom lit up (I had forgotten it existed) but it would stay on only for a second before flashing quickly and shutting off. I kept unplugging it and plugging it back in and eventually the light stayed on which indicated it was charging so I left it alone. When I came ba...

  There are several ways to tell how long someone has been into computers, and one is to watch how they react when they see a box with the Sun Microsystems logo on it. It doesn't matter if it's a server or a desktop, if they stare blankly at it, you know they're new to the business. You see, for those of a certain age, certainly those of us who graduated college before the millennium, the brand carries serious cachet. Back in the nineties, one of the computers on my "wants" list was a Sun workstation. And now, nearly a decade after they stopped making them, I have one. Sort of... Let me start by explaining what a workstation is, as it may be a term you're not familiar with. A workstation was a machine that sat above what we call PC's. They were more expensive, more powerful and more reliable. I'll give you an example: In the spring of 1992 Sun released a machine called a SPARCstation 10, and PC vendors started shipping their 486DX33 models...