War on Piracy is hurting the legitimate consumer

This post started life as a rant towards Samsung for breaking my blu-ray player with a firmware update in Jan-2012. But this one event has made me realise how damaging the war against piracy is on the innocent legitimate and paying consumers. I will interject my tale with other examples.

Win your privacy back... with TOR, DuckDuckGo and others

When you are watching a spy movie and the agent is trying to track someone on the Internet. Only to be foiled by the Nemesis' protecting his anonymity by bouncing his traffic around the world, making it impossible to trace. This is not just the thing of fiction. Its called Tor. Its real, free and open source...

This blog post will cover why you should use services like Tor, Duck Duck Go or others to protect your privacy and hopefully discover that it isn't wrong to want to keep some of your life private and not feel like a criminal.

Top Andoid apps that a power user would use

Here are the Android apps I use and roughly how I configure them...

Disclaimer: My phone is a rooted HTC Sensation  with a ICS rom called Revolution HD and all prices quoted are at time of posting.

Why get a tablet when you have a laptop and smart phone?

I was inspired by this post by Joe Wilcox and conversations with fellow IT colleagues at work.

New York New York

After my 6 day trip to New York, I have had a few people ask me to write down the things which I learnt that may help future trips to this amazing city. However this is my first hand experience in June 2011 and other experiences may differ.

Top apps not installed on Ubuntu by default

There are hundreds if not thousands of these "Top 10 linux apps" and "Apps you must have following Ubuntu installation" type blog entries but in my opinion these are useless unless you can identify with the author. To help you identify with me:

• Been using Ubuntu for home use (DVDs, photos, internet) for over 5 years.
• Mainly use open source applications but not exclusively.
• Prefer to pay nothing for the software.
• It should just work "out the box", no command line or extensive "how to" required.
• Could be said I am a Google fan boy

At last Working Ubuntu

• 4 Attempts to try and convert to linux (Once a year!)
• A few sleepless nights (This time not anything to do with Wireless)
• Lots of coffee
• 4 reformats
  
• A a couple of crashes later (Two of which was in attempt to login to blogger)

I have converted to Ubuntu... I am now an official Linux Geek!