Sam Talks About...

Welcome to this post on how to replace you PC with a Windows 10 Tablet, a.k.a what I think my parents should do. PC vs laptop vs tablet My parents are in a situation that may sound familiar to many, they have an aging desktop PC that isn't often used but still prefer the traditional desktop set up and 'performance' of a normal PC to using a laptop or tablet when doing work but also like using a tablet for entertainment. My parents have never liked laptops much, so they would be unwilling to shell out for one. They are finally admitting that it's time to update the old PC (mostly because Vista will no longer be updated!) and they want a bigger tablet than the 9.5 inch Amazon Fire they've got at the moment. But buying a new desktop PC and a new tablet is going to end up costing a considerable amount. So, while we were perusing the technology section in John Lewis, I had a bit of a brainwave - why not find a device that can do both? This blog post is the result o...

You may have wondered, why can't humans see in the dark, or could we learn to see radiowaves etc. the short answer to why we don't have these sensory systems is because of the evolutionary cost compared with the very small amount of gain, if any. It would be incredibly energy and time consuming to evolve good enough night vision when we can just go to sleep at night and see during the day. So far our senses have served us well, but what if we could give ourselves new senses with the aid of technology? After all, we can invent new technology much much faster than mother nature can invent X-ray vision eyeballs! Neuronal plasticity is the ability of neurones to change their connectivity with one another in order to gain new functions or to modify existing functions. This neural plasticity is essential for memory and learning and gives us the ability to perceive the world around us. By introducing a new input to the brain, you will trigger the process of neuronal plasticity as ...

A man named Francois Rautenbach has recently become the owner of an Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) from the Apollo missions. The type of computer he has was the first computer that was launched into space as part of the Apollo missions and Rautenbach argues that this was the first computer computer to ever use integrated circuits, or microchips (as opposed to mainframe computers with big paper tapes) and the first computer to have re-programmable software. To be clear the exact computers in the videos below appear to be a test AGC with no memory modules - that may have been used to develop the software that eventually sent man to the Moon - along with the actual memory modules used in the first test flight of the guidance computer system in a rocket, flight AS-202. Both the development computer and the memory modules paved the way for the eventual moon landing in Apollo 11. You'd be forgiven for thinking that something like this would be stored in a museum somewhere; but no, it ...

Now I'm sure a lot of you are probably very sceptical about this, but I'm going to show you how you could turn things you might already be doing into a force for good- at no additional cost to you! Many of these involve slight tweaks to your mobile phone behaviours that, once integrated into your daily life, can turn your phone into a fountain of good!  1-   Unicef Tap Project The Unicef Tap Project is a water aid project in which, for every 10 minutes that you have your phone flat on a surface with this webpage  open on your phone, the sponsor organisation will make a donation to give someone clean water for 1 day who needs it (currently Giorgio Armani), along with a pledge from Unicef to fundraise a day's worth of clean water for every minute that someone goes without picking up their phone . Now this may not sound like a big deal, but I imagine quite a lot of people reading this leave their phones on charge overnight. It would only take 7 of us, averaging...

There's something about solar energy that I just find fascinating. Maybe it's the because it could be our saviour and the key to practically endless free energy, or it could be that it's the mission to mimic one of life's most complex and fundamental biological processes (photosynthesis). Whatever it is, it's got me hooked!  That said, I am no physicist and I do not pretend to be one! What I am, though, is someone who is very interested in watching the technical advances in solar technology and who takes pleasure in telling the story of solar energy.  This article sparked from a conversation with one of my housemates about solar energy. We talked about  how solar energy could power california 5 times over without using up any additional space  and then went onto  the possibility of "paint-on solar power" . Then we got to talking about how cool it would be if we could have transparent solar cells, so you could replace your windows with "solar w...