01923 555048|info@chno.co.uk

What? Easter already?

Coming up to Easter weekend I thought it was best I wrote a blog post, as it seems to have been a little while…..

What’s been going on these past few months? Well, quite a lot as it happens.

We’re still working hard in the background on our new Web site, as well as finalising details for a new support service aimed at creative individuals like designers and photographers. More on that soon; I’ve been aiming to get it launched since January but several things have conspired to slow me down – won’t be long now though.

There’s been a couple of long-running projects with corporate clients as well; one of which was a large rollout of Mac clients via a software distribution tool called Casper. That was great experience, being able to roll out a new version of an application to unlimited Macs, without visiting each and every one of them is a huge improvement to a techie’s daily life. Hopefully I’ll be getting involved in some more of these projects in the future for a change of pace from my usual client base of creative people and home users.

I’ve also just finished helping move one of my medium sized clients, a creative agency from North London, from one office to another. Obviously there was decommissioning their old networking environment and setting up the new place, but I also took responsibility for moving their phones. As you probably realise, moving a BT line isn’t cheap, or easy to arrange for when you want it, so the client and I decided that we’d move them to a hosted VoIP (internet telephony) solution, making any future moves much easier, and reducing their monthly phone bill to 40% of […]

By |March 24th, 2016|Broadband Information, Uncategorized|0 Comments
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Internet privacy – how do you feel?

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts recently that have been discussing electronic privacy and security.

What’s struck me is that many of these podcasts are hosted in the US, and it seems that the people involved are more concerned about their own government being knowledgable about their likes, interests, movements and browsing history than they are about companies who profit from that information (Google, Facebook, Amazon, supermarkets etc. etc.).

I’m a little confused by that to be honest. Being idealistic, the government are working on our behalf, for our protection, so any data that they have access to is probably fine with me. I don’t think I give our intelligence agencies or police any reason to need to intercept my traffic, and if I do, I hope it would be only as part of a wider investigation into someone else, in which case, again, I have no problem. With that in mind, don’t send anything electronically that could embarrass you!

From a technical point of view, I think the proposals on electronic privacy that our Prime Minister has being making recently (encrypted data on the internet must be readable by government agencies if required) will be hard to enforce, and I’m reserving judgement on whether I agree until I hear more specific details on how he thinks this can be achieved.

In terms of corporate access to data about me, this is where I do begin to get more concerned (in complete contrast, it seems, to the US podcasters). I’m willing to give up my browsing history to Google, but I don’t want them scanning my emails so they can present more ads to me. Hence why I don’t like Gmail. Unfortunately, this does seem to be […]

By |January 29th, 2015|Uncategorized|0 Comments
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On 3D Printing

Good morning all!

I hope it’s been a good week for you all, and that you have a pleasant weekend planned.

Today I’m reflecting on a trade show I visited yesterday to find out a little more about 3D printing, as well as see some of the latest third party accessories for the Apple market. This particular show normally runs a couple of times a year, and I used to look forward to it as there was usually a whole raft of new iPhone/iPad/Mac toys to look at and play with, but over the past 12-18 months it seems like the innovation is beginning to dry up in this area. For example (and this product wasn’t on show yesterday), one of the recent announcements for iPhone accessories was an alarm clock that emitted a bacon smell to get you out of bed! I’m still not 100% sure this is genuine, but it is good indication that many of new things are very gimmicky with no real benefit to the buyer.

However…….the main reason I went along yesterday was to get a better understanding of 3D printing. And it was a real eye-opener.

Imagine if you will an inkjet printer, that instead of squirting ink onto paper, squirts molten plastic onto a slowly descending platform, allowing you to build layer upon layer of plastic into a 3D model. That’s 3D “printing”. Already used in engineering and medical fields (one man had his face ‘rebuilt’ using parts printed on a 3D printer), I can see a huge future in this market (analysts are expecting the 3D printing market to grow by 70% in 2014, and similar levels the following year), with education, architects and product designers likely to continue growing […]

By |March 21st, 2014|Uncategorized|0 Comments
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WWW Turns 25. Really….just 25?

Apparently, 25 years ago today (March 12th, 1989) Tim Berners-Lee presented a blueprint for what eventually became the world wide web that we all use pretty much daily now. Is it just me that can’t believe it’s so young?

To think that 25 years ago, the idea of reading the news, or watching movies via the Internet was a mere pipe-dream, shows how much we’ve moved along in those times.

I remember having a family discussion some time ago about which decade was the era of most change for the UK, and I recall it getting quite heated with different generations calling for their ‘own era’ to be classed as the most influential. Whilst I concede that the sixties saw some huge cultural changes, I still think that there really isn’t a period that stands out as being ‘the greatest’ because, certainly in my lifetime, the pace of change just continues to escalate. I think I argued the case for the 90’s originally, being the decade when the Internet became mainstream, but if I look back to what we were using the Internet for back in the 90’s, it’s almost seems like a different concept.

The scariest part of all this is that I remember when “the Internet” was only available to people on dial-up modems, and sometimes having to redial for 45 minutes to get a connection (and it had to be after midnight on a Friday because that’s when you stopped paying hourly fees). And when you look at the world of sport and entertainment, many of the personalities that are famous around the world weren’t even born before the world wide web was born. I have to point out that I’m not old though!

What do you use […]

By |March 12th, 2014|Uncategorized|0 Comments
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Monday Catchup 13/1/2014

Morning all

Welcome to 2014! A little late, but we’re back on track now.

I’ve seen so many people recently who don’t back up, and didn’t realise how simple it is to do. It’s much easier to show you how easy the procedure of setting up Time Machine is, so that’s what we’ve done and we’ll be posting that tomorrow.

Later in the week, we’re looking forward to attending the Society of Wedding & Portrait Photographer’s annual event in London where we’ll be in attendance with Jared Platt to represent CRU-Dataport whose storage devices we recommend. For those who may be interested in coming along, there will be some special offers for attendees of Jared’s classes as well as a giveaway. More details on the convention and ticket information can be found here .

As always, I’d like to encourage you to subscribe to our social media streams, the links should be in the top left of the page and please pass on our details to any fellow-minded folks, potential clients or suppliers who may be interested in our musings. And don’t forget about our Flipboard magazine which can be found here.

Thanks for reading, speak tomorrow

Chris

 

 

By |January 13th, 2014|Uncategorized|0 Comments
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