A customer of mine recently purchased a new laptop which had the ability to both watch and record Freeview TV. The customer asked if they needed to have a TV licence for this. I was totally unsure about this question, but all the same logic told me that if you watch TV through any medium, you will need a TV licence. So my answer (in short) was “yes”. (more…)

Bandwidth Bandwidth refers to the amount of data or information that your Internet connection can cope with. The more bandwidth you have the faster you can receive data from the Internet. A simple text-only email message doesn’t need much bandwidth, but audio and video clips require a lot of bandwidth. Typically UK broadband connections provide a bandwidth of up to 8Mbps.

This Friday, following up from the original ‘wacky waving inflating arm flailing tube man’, we get to visit the Family Guy show again. But, this time, in a Star Wars parody. If you missed the first video which goes with this, you would be better off watching that first (about 1 minute long) before watching this clip. Click here for that – otherwise it’s not all that funny.

Enjoy your Friday and weekend, and stay out of trouble, unless it looks like fun!

This evening (Tuesday), you should know by now that HM Revenue and Customs has lost computer discs containing the entire child benefit records, including the personal details of 25 million people – covering 7.25 million families overall. (more…)

ADSL Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) is a technology that provides high-speed Internet access (also known as ‘broadband’) over an ordinary telephone line. This  technology  can  allow  you  to still make ordinary voice calls over the telephone line, while you are connected to the Internet.

This week’s Friday fun is something a little different. I was this afternoon having a browse of some search engines and entering silly keywords to see what I would get, and how search engines would respond. (more…)

As I mentioned here almost to the day a year ago, it’s bugs and flu season. (more…)

Well, another future technology is on the horizon. This time it is Philips who are taking their Ambi-light technology and placing it on windows. No, not the computer Windows, but real windows, the thing you look out of! (more…)

It’s that time of the week again – Friday! Hurrah!

This week’s Friday amusement is from the hit US TV show Family Guy. We all know how annoying some advertsing can be, to name a few…I can’t (lawyers told me not to)! But I bet you can think of several. Anyway, enjoy!:-

My service provider has informed me that they are doing server upgrades on the morning of Thursday 8th November 2007, which will affect the Blogberry, but not the rest of theopenworldtechnician.com

They tell me that this upgrade to offer improved performance and functionality and should not disrupt any existing part of the site once the upgrade is complete.

During the switchover, there will be a brief period of downtime (potentially around 1 hour) while data is transferred to the new server. So if you come to the Blogberry and see an error, don’t panic - just come back later.

Update: Since the upgrade two errors did appear. One which was displayed on every page, the other was to do with encoding of text, and would replace apostrophes with euro signs and hash signs. So I have spent most of the day sorting this out – rather irritated.