Yesterday myself and industry expert, Dario Talmesio, Principal Analyst & Practice Leader at Omdia spoke to James Hazell on BBC Radio Suffolk about the COVID-19 / 5G Conspiracy Theory.
You can listen to the stream above or read on to find out more.
5G has been under attack by conspiracy theorists for as long as it has existed. Every conceivable disease, illness or cancer has been blamed on the technology. It has been open-season for several years.
During this time, every single theory has been repeatedly debunked by teams of scientists and experts throughout the world, but still, it prevails.
Enter Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), the highly infectious disease caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) first discovered in December 2019 Wuhan, China.
At the time of publication, COVID-19 has infected more than 1.36 million people in 184 countries. Sadly, resulting in the death of an excess of 76000 people. This virus has become a global killer on a scale not seen since the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918.
Dario Talmesio Principal Analyst & Practice Leader Country UK – Image Credit OMDIA
At a time when our highly advanced telecommunications networks are one of the saving graces of the crisis, the last thing we need to hear is that people are beginning to try and link COVID-19 to the building of the 5G network. Worse, there are now acts of vandalism being enacted upon the newly installed equipment, damaging expensive equipment and putting peoples lives at risk.
This damage and continued encouragement from high profile celebrities have resulted in the UK providers issuing a joint letter to customers asking for the damage to stop.
Frankly, I continue to be exasperated by the need for every single thing that happens on our planet to be blamed on technology, government or secret societies! The sooner we knuckle down and work together to defeat this appalling virus in every way we can, the better!
Stay at Home, Protect the NHS and Save Lives
Open Letter to Customers from EE, O2, 3 and Vodafone
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This week’s Podcast / Vlog-cast comes from the second floor of Gadget Towers! In this episode, I talk to James Hazell at BBC Radio Suffolk about Apple’s class action settlement regarding the perceived slowing down of older iPhone models.
Running a website with an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt? Check that you don’t need to request a new one as there has been issues with a large number over the past couple of days.
Boston Dynamics are at it again, this time they have their ever advance automation working in warehouses. Watch the videos after the Vlog to find out more.
This morning was the first of my Mix Tape tracks played by James Hazell on BBC Radio Suffolk. I’ve attached the YouTube playlist below which will play the interview followed by the track.
The transcript of the interview follows below.
Gadget Man Mix Tape – Part 1
James Hazell: The mixed tape all this week features the gadget man himself, Matt Porter of Matt Porter web design, our regular guide. You man. Now choosing tunes for us. Matt, great to see you
Matt Porter: Great to see you as well.
James Hazell: How are you?
Matt Porter: I’m alright, I’m good, very good. Thank you.
James Hazell: Now you’re a man. Of course. We know now is very much involved in the latest technology and all of that. You regularly report for us on the latest by way of gadgetry and all that. Have you always been that “guy”?
Matt Porter: for technology, I suppose I have. Actually, when I was at school, I had a Commodore VIC-20. That was interesting because the budget for that present was the Commodore VIC-20 on its own without the tape drive.
So, I would spend a lot of time programming and writing programs to do things. Either leaving the VIC-20 switched on because if you switched it off, it’s gone forever. So, it was a good way of learning to program because you kind of had to memorize a lot of what you did or write it down.
So, when you wanted to do it again, you had to re-type it all in. It was a painful thing. But, we’re not talking about writing a copy of Microsoft Word, there was a very limited amount of memory in a VIC-20, so the programs were never that long, but it was still a good start.
James Hazell: So, what was it, 10 PRINT “HELLO”, 20 GOTO 10?
Matt Porter: With Commodores, it was POKE 36879,22 or something like that!
James Hazell: Yeah. We’ll talk more about this as the week goes by, but we want to find out more about the man himself. So, Matt Porter, who are you? Are you a local? I get the sense you’re not Suffolk born, are you?
Matt Porter: I was born in Hitchin in Hertfordshire. I lived in that area for around 33 years and then I met a young lady on an online dating site called Udate, which is long gone. I met her on Udate and we got to know each other and fell in love.
I then sold my house in Bedfordshire at the time and moved to Ipswich to be with her. We got married and we had two children and we’re still together.
James Hazell: It’s good to hear of an online success story because they can be frowned upon in use by some people,
Matt Porter: Certainly and as usual, I have to jump into something right at the beginning, it was good.
James Hazell: You were one of the first, I reckon, cause I had no doubt.
Matt Porter: Yeah, it was 2002 or 2003
James Hazell: That’s got to be early days. It’s got to be pioneering!
Matt Porter: So there you go, that’s what brought me here.
James Hazell: So your Missus must’ve been on it as well, so I suspect she’s a bit of a tech-head as well?
Matt Porter: She’s not actually, she’s not massively, almost certainly she’s not a tech head. She’s not as enthusiastic as I am, but we run Matt Porter Web Design together.
James Hazell: She won’t go out and buy a gadget just because it’s just been released by somebody.
Matt Porter: Absolutely not. No, she’s not interested. Her smartphone battery will last for days because she doesn’t use it that much.
James Hazell: When you moved to Suffolk, was there a concern with your technology minds that you’re moving to a place it’s not, shall we say, renowned for technology. It wasn’t at the forefront, I guess?
Matt Porter: I guess not. Yeah, it turns out I ended up having an office on, on the BT campus for a number of years, and it’s a super place, not many people know what a vibrant technology community is there.
But when I came here, actually, I handed my notice in for my full-time job in Hertfordshire and sold my house. I came here and started Matt Porter Web Design when I arrived, which was madness. I didn’t know anybody personally or in business.
James Hazell: So, you’ve come here this week to choose some songs for us. You’re going to start with Satellite by The Beloved.
Matt Porter: This track came out in 1996 and at that time I was house-sitting for somebody in Stevenage. During the time of the housesitting was Euro 96, which was England played absolutely amazingly! It was one of the most fantastic tournaments with classic players.
James Hazell: We were supposed to win that one!
Matt Porter: It was an amazing tournament. But I was house sitting there. So obviously I remember, watching the games and every time we scored, I think we played The Netherlands winning 4–1.
Every time we scored, I kept ringing my mate up and screaming down the phone. At that time, they also had satellite TV with MTV, and I was watching that and hadn’t really watched it before. This particular video for Satellite by The Beloved came on and it’s quite memorable. If you ever watch it on YouTube, it’s quite a memorable video, quite groundbreaking I guess, and the song’s fantastic as well. I actually have contact vaguely with Jon Marsh, who’s the singer with The Beloved by being a member of The Beloved Facebook Group. He regularly posts on there. It’s quite geeky, I guess.
I’ve been very lax in uploading the last three Podcast episodes which feature me chatting to James Hazell on BBC Radio Suffolk. I will upload these as audio episodes to keep the Podcast in order.
During this time, I have been experimenting by recording the interviews on video and in some cases, adding additional links within the videos.
This is incredibly time-consuming as the audio from James is lost if using the sound from the cameras and is lower quality. Thus in some cases, I have used a mix of both the BBC stream and camera and when I’m recording at home, I can also use a recording from a Blue Snowball Microphone.
For those interested, I’m using a Sony Xperia 1 stabilised by a DJI Osmo 3 Mobile. In the case of the third video, I also recorded the interview on a second static camera using a Sony Xperia XZ Premium.
The first two videos are 1080p using the Xperia 1 front-facing camera and the third uses both phones rear-facing cameras and thus is rendered in 4k.
I hope the video recording add value to the interviews, I would be very interested to hear your views?
Apparently using your Laptop in a Cafe at the weekend is no longer a ‘thing’. According to the Daily Mail, a cafe owner in Belsize Park has placed a ban on the use of laptops during weekend hours because it takes up valuable space during busy periods.
The ban has caused a regular customer to accuse the owner of bullying. Francesca Specter said, “the ban amounts to bullying of those who want to spend time alone”, she continues ‘I live by myself and part of my weekend routine is I go and get some headspace and enjoy breakfast and brunch by myself at one of the local cafes. The owner took one look at the iPad I was reading my paper on and said you can’t do that in here. I thought it was a situation where I was being bullied and I was by myself so I was in this minority. I had to leave and haven’t been back since.’
The owner, Mojgan Mohajer said ‘My cafe is quite small,’ she explained. ‘I received a lot of complaints from customers during the weekend that lots of people were coming with a laptop and sitting and they couldn’t have a table.’
Let’s all go to the Cafe and moan about our civil liberties being breached because we aren’t allowed to use a laptop while we share 1/2 a cup of coffee between us!
Computers and tablets are used widely, in fact anywhere you can find somewhere to sit, be it train, bus, park bench or cafe, you will find staring at a smartphone, tablet or laptop.
Personally, I’m siding with Mojgan. She does have a small cafe and although during the week she would like to attract people to her establishment at quieter times, the weekends will be much busier and she, of course, would like to maximise her income on the busiest day.
With regard to the bullying accusation, I’m speechless.
You can listen in to my chat with Mark Murphy on BBC Radio Suffolk where we talk about using devices on public WiFi hotspots.
Welcome to Episode 149 – It’s all go again with the mobile phone market in the UK, the confusion surrounding Mobile Virtual Network Operators and actual network operators becomes confusing again! Virgin Mobile is currently carried by EE which in turn is owned by arch-rival BT, so now Virgin is moving to Vodafone. It shouldn’t affect your service, but you should check your coverage as EE and Vodafone may differ!
Britbox has now launched in the UK, although it was launched in the USA some time ago. Britbox offers BBC and ITV material and will also offer Channel 4 and Channel 5 stuff to in time. It becomes confusing when much of the material is still offered on BBC iPlayer, ITV Hub, All4 and My5, you can even pay for some of these services to remove the adverts with ITV Hub+, 4+. I’ve signed up to check it out, so more on this later. I’m not terribly sure it has room to operate alongside global players such as Netflix, Amazon and Apple TV. Time will tell.
UK Drone registration is now compulsory for anyone flying an aircraft over 250g. Operators have until the end of the month to register their drones. It requires the payment of a £9 annual fee and you must affix your Operator ID to any drones you choose to fly.
In the final episode of my Retro Gadget of the Week, I bring you the Nintendo Game Boy.
This is an exclusive episode which was never broadcast. I’d like to be able to say it was too hot for broadcast, but in reality, it never made it because of time constraints on BBC Radio Suffolk. But here it is in all its glory, exclusively available to your pleasure!
Nintendo Game Boy in front of Assorted Games Cartridges
Nintendo Game Boy
The Game Boy was an 8-bit portable games console designed and built by Nintendo, it was released in Japan in 1989 and then 12 months later made it to the USA and Europe.
The console featured a green, greyscale screen, but excelled in battery life against its arch-rivals, the Sega Game Gear and Atari Lynx. Along with an extremely durable case, both these features went towards beating it’s technically more advanced rivals.
The Game Boy came with the puzzle game, Tetris with later bundles including the legendary Super Mario Land, both were excellent games with fabulous soundtracks which didn’t become irritating.
The original Game Boy was a smash hit with gamers and went on to sell almost 65 million units. Nintendo kept gamers attention by releasing backwardly compatible upgraded units such as the Game Boy Color, Game Boy Light and Game Boy Advance.
As will other format wars, the gadget you least expect to win on paper is the victor and the Game Boy was certainly that, a truly great retro gadget which deserves to round off this series.
If you haven’t already, listen in to the stream as it contains 6 minutes of discussion about the Game Boy and its rivals and a little bit of history behind them.
Thanks to Matt Marvell at BBC Radio Suffolk for hosting my segment for the last 12 weeks and for producing this final one.
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In our penultimate episode of Retro Gadget of the Week, we take a look at one the most revolutionary moments in computer history, where an explosion of homegrown talent changed the very face of the personal computer marketplace and faced up directly the power of Silicon Valley with low-cost home computers designed in the UK
Commodore VIC20 Personal Computer, my first computer in all it’s 3.5k glory and 22 columns display
I was very lucky to receive a Commodore VIC20 personal computer for one of my birthdays in the 80s and proceeded to embrace coding head-on! Unlike other home computers, the VIC20 only supported it’s own tape drive, so instead of using our portable cassette play like my mates with Sinclair ZX Spectrums, I had to wait until I save enough money to buy my own Commodore Datasette. This meant that every single program I wrote on the Vic was lost when the power was switched off, I either needed to write down my code or memorise it!
Alongside the American VIC20, a slew of other devices was released by UK based companies. The most famous was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and ZX81. However, other notable UK made systems included the BBC Model B (built by Acorn), Dragon 32, Amstrad CPC464, Apricot F1, Camputers Lynx, Gundy Newbrain, Jupiter Ace, Memotech MTX, Tangerine Oric 1 and many others.
The Dragon 32 used the Motorola 6809 CPU
Almost all home computers of the era were based on the Zilog Z80 or MOS 6502 microprocessors with a small number going with the Motorola 6809 (which was more advanced that the Zilog and MOS processors).
The computers were generally self-contained devices, combining keyboards and computers as one with connectivity with colour or black and white TV’s which the user was generally expected to supply. Other peripherals were available such as tape drives, floppy disk drives, printers, joysticks and light-pens. Some models also supported plug-in cartridges which generally allowed the owner to play pre-programmed games.
The Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K was the darling of the 80s market due to it’s price and range of games
The first to the market came with minute amounts of programmable RAM in the region of 1K to 5K, later entrants from the UK market settings with 16K or 32K with some stretching even further. If I compare this to my Sony Xperia 1 mobile that I use today, this comes with 6 Gigabytes of RAM which is roughly 1,700,000 times more than my Commodore VIC!
The higher-end Commodore 64 Personal Computer with its sprite graphics, outstanding sound and award-winning games had a longer stay than most in the marketAn example of Commodore BASIC Code – Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
Almost every computer came preloaded the BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language which allowed a new breed of programmers to begin crafting their own code. Although the basics of each version of BASIC remained similar, that’s where it ended, different hardware and firmware made each machine incompatible with the other. Having a market saturated with different devices which didn’t speak the same dialect was the architect of their demise.
The BBC Micro Model B, built by Acorn as a joint venture with BBC. It found it’s way into schools as the staple computer for education.
After 3 to 4 years, the majority of these computers had become obsolete and fell out of use leaving the BBC Model B surviving through use in UK schools, colleges and universities and the Commodore 64 which had become a glorified games console rather than a way for young people to gain computer experience.
The IBM_PC_AT and it’s lower cost clones swooped in and stole the market
Along came affordable IBM PC clones from Dell, Compaq, AST and Gateway which WERE compatible with each other. Users began migrating across to these PC compatibles and the market was replaced at home and office. It was the end of an era.
Without the likes of Commodore or Acorn, my life would have been very different, so I have to tip my hat to the 80s Home Computer!.
Listen in to the podcast above to find out more and don’t forget to LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, SHARE and COMMENT!!!
See you next time
Matt
The Gadget Man (Former Programmer of CBM Basic, BBC Basic, DataGeneral Basic, Testpoint Basix and Visual Basic)
All intelligent science is informing us that it is now past the time to start thinking about our planet and how we should be treating it before we reach its tipping point, the time when we can no longer begin to undo the damage that the human race has inflicted upon it.
Our oceans are strewn with millions of tons of plastic, so it is good to read that the big car manufacturers are stepping up to the plate and looking for alternative materials and techniques which avoid the continues use of non-biodegradable plastics which have been the go-to material for decades!.
Image Credit: By Siyuwj – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0
In this podcast, I chat to James Hazell from BBC Radio Suffolk about bio-plastics and their growing use in the manufacture of car interiors.
It’s interesting listening, so don’t forget to tune in and Like, Subscribe and Comment.
Artificial Intelligence, Technology, News and Gadget Reviews on air, online, in print and in person
