Given that I recently upgraded my digital camera after spending quite some time researching the options, I thought I would share what I have learnt about the various camera systems available at the moment. I am generally company agnostic for the most part, so I was interested in learning what the relative strengths and weaknesses of the camera manufacturers are at the moment. I’ll leave the disclaimer here that I am not a professional photographer and I have not tried […]
I’ve found myself in somewhat of an atypical situation recently: I have three different operating systems (OSes) installed on my desktop computer. This gives me the ability to make somewhat of an objective comparison about how each system functions for the tasks I care about, and so I thought I’d use this opportunity to do just that. A couple of disclaimers before I start. First, this is not a comparison looking at technical details. Rather, it is designed to show […]
The electric car revolution has been underway for a few years now. Elon Musk and Tesla have clearly had quite a lot of influence on the future of electric vehicles from a technology standpoint, whilst cars like the Nissan Leaf, Renault Zoe, and BMW i3 have tried to bring electric motoring to the masses. Yet, we still have some way to go before electric cars become the norm. In this article, I want to briefly cover some of the main […]
A while ago, my Triton electric shower started cycling onto ‘low-pressure’ mode every 10-15 seconds. This meant that the water would flip between hot and freezing cold. Not pleasant. A bit of internet searching revealed that this is a fault in a safety sub-circuit, which is ordinarily supposed to turn to cold water when it thinks that you are at risk of getting burnt by the water. The solution to this problem came from this handy thread. Apparently, it is caused […]
Talking about public good provision is a staple in pretty much any economics course. Contrary to what intuition might suggest, a public good is not necessarily one provided by the government. Rather, it is defined in terms of two key characteristics: rivalry and excludability. A rival good is something that diminishes once it is consumed. If there are two burgers and I eat one, there will be one left for you. If there was only one burger and I ate […]
The five-star review system you find on most websites today is inherently flawed if you want information about how good something actually is. Famously, on websites like Amazon, there is a ‘J-shaped’ distribution of review scores. That is, there is a small mass of 1-star reviews; relatively few 2-star, 3-star, and 4-star reviews; and a huge mass of 5-star reviews. This, on it’s own, means that most reviews are somewhat useless. But, when you remember that some of these reviews […]
LaTeX is amazing for producing beautifully typeset documents. However, it can also be a bit of a clunky pain in the backside. Granted, much of that pain comes from tables, but there are other niggles here and there that can make your life a bit miserable. Hopefully, a CSS + HTML based solution may take over as a more modern and efficient markup language for typesetting in future. For now though, here are a few LaTeX packages I use frequently. […]
I’ve seen this question asked a fair bit around the internet. Whilst there are many explanations to the reason why this is, I thought I’d offer my own flavour in the hope that it will help a few more people understand the issue. The scenario is this: you’ve just bought some external or internal storage for your computer, whether it be a hard drive, flash storage or an SSD. You check the hard drive on your computer and shock horror […]
As I write this, I am also in the process of ripping all my DVDs to hard drive. They are pretty much the only form of digital media I have remaining in my possession (with the exception of console games) that doesn’t already reside on hard disk space. Most people have already embraced this philosophy with music – indeed even if you don’t exclusively buy digital copies of songs, chances are you’d be ripping your CDs in order to listen […]
I discovered a neat bit of software last week. It’s called IOGraph and you can download it here for Windows, OSX or Linux. If you leave it running in the background, it will trace your mouse movements. It will also put a ‘blob’ where your mouse movement comes to a stop. The bigger the dot, the more time the mouse has been left in that position. Although the intention for it was to be an artistic application, I had a […]