Posts by CompuGuide

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

"Thanks for the laptop, Dad, but do you think you could stretch to a Desk? My back's killing me!

How many mobile apps collect data on users? Oh ... nearly all of them

A good place to start ...

.. is to install F-Secure's "App Permissions" app. It won't let you control the permissions, but it will show and rank your apps by permissions.

So, for example at one extreme, you can see that an app that grants total remote control of your device, like Webkey, requires permissions for just about everything (125 permissions), whereas "App Permissions", at the other extreme, requires zero permissions.

[I am in no way connected with this app]

GIMP flees SourceForge over dodgy ads and installer

Don't get distracted when downloading or installing software

Sourceforge is not the only offender, CNET [Download.com] is also a prime culprit in this respect.

I provide support for many residential customers and really have to keep my wits about me when installing something - especially while maintaining a polite conversation with the customer about their problems with their vet, dentist, school etc.

Drone owners told: stay out of bushfire skies

Let's be realistic here ...

While I'm not defending the numpties, just how much damage is a styrofoam quadcopter going to inflict on a helicopter? At a guess far less than a copter/bird collision, the likelihood of which must be much greater in a firestorm.

Wrist SLAP: Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch hands-on

Wrong on so many levels...

1. Appalling battery life.

2. Appalling in sunlight.

3. Tied to Samsung = proprietary.

4. A camera on a watch - Yikes!

5. Way too big.

6. It has to be turned on each time you want to use it.

Psssst: If you wanna be rich, make the next privacy Robocop app

Detailed Control of Smartphone app permissions is seriously needed

Where this really makes sense in on smart phones. Many Android apps require a list of permissions, that if abused could easily reveal personal information. Facebook, for eg activates your GPS. Now, I, for one would love to be able to disable this!

DIAL M for... mobile: New Wii app pipes mobe vid to big tellies

XBMC + Yatse app has been doing this for a while ...

... as well as acting as a remote control, displaying posters and metadata from all your movie, music & videos, and a lot more.

Check it out - a brilliant app

Downside is you have to setup XBMC on a netapp box and connect that to your TV.

Meet the stealthiest UK startup's app Swiftkey - and its psychic* keyboard

WTF?! "This App is not compatible with Nexus 7

I've been using Swiftkey 3 Tablet for ages on my Nexus 7. Now it seems that it's no longer available in the Play store for this tablet?

What Gives?

5.6TB helium disks could balloon, lift WD onto enterprise throne

Leakage?

Ever seen those foil balloons? There is a reason they're not made out of rubber. Helium molecules are so small they pass easily through rubber. Even the foil balloons can't retain the helium indefinitely. So it would be interesting to hear how they solve this problem with these drives. The cynic in me says sees "planned Obsolescence.

Third of iPad owners want smaller slabs

Hmm, not sure about this.

I predict that the 7" format will be a huge success (Android or Apple).

While the iPad is a superb machine, it's just not portable enough and the Nexus 7's popularity shows that when the tablet is of high enough quality then it will catch on..

Microsoft's new retro-flavoured logo channels Channel 4

Austerity

I think the new flat, sharp, plain look is synonymous with the current era of austerity.

Let's hope it doesn't portend the same for MS.

Speaking in Tech: NASA dumps OpenStack... for Amazon cloud

Inane banter

I'm sorry, but I persevered with the first 17 minutes and then gave up - just too much inane banter

AMD palms PCs with LiveBox miniature desktop

Ubuntu, Mythtv & XBMC

Looks great! - I'm looking to upgrade from my ageing Acer Revo 3600.

Hope they supply a cheap version, without Windows, so that I can load it up with Ubuntu, Mythtv & XBMC

Princeton solar researchers take leaf from plants’ book

Is Creationism creeping into science?

Should we trust anything written in "Photonics" when they say :

... leaves' surface structures are “designed to bend and control ....

Surely that should be HAVE EVOLVED TO...

Tweet dreams: Goldilocks, porridge AND the money dance

WTF?

What the F... Hell was that all about?

Spam crashes to historic low as malware explodes on mobiles

Not what I have observed

Strange, I would have said, from my experiences that spam seems to be on the rise over the past couple of months...

Mobe anti-virus biz Lookout eyes Euro telcos

Their "Locate" and "Scream" functions no longer work

I've been using this app for about 7 months. It's hard to say if it has protected me as it has never found an infected file but gives me a warm feeling of security ... until now. Every couple of months I do a "locate" check and it has always found my phone, but no longer - it's just stopped working.

Perhaps it's time to jump ship

My Council Services

Response from My Council Services

I posted the following message to their Support site:-

FYI this app fails to install on my phone with this message “Your device is not compatible with this item”

I have the HTC Desire and suspect this is because I have rooted the phone, replacing HTC Sense with the MIUI ROM which allows apps to be run from the SD card so as to free up internal RAM. You may want to consider modifying the app to facilitate this, thus allowing you to reach a larger technically literate audience. Thanks

... and got the following response:-

Thank you for your email. We cannot allow the app to be run from the SD card as it means anyone can have access to our control scripts which define how the program should look for each council.

Not compatible with HTC Desire running MIUI ROM with data-to-ext-partition.

Paper Camera

Camera360 Lite

Similar to Camera360 (the Lite version is free)

News of the World TO CLOSE

One Down, One to Go - Fox News Next?

"I want all journalism at News International to be beyond reproach."

Take a look at Glen Beck of Fox News and tell me that he represents the above!

Dolphin Browser HD

"User Experience Analytics"

I could find no way to disable the above. The agreement seems to imply that it is a take it or leave it option:-

"By participating user experience analytics, you allow an agent running in the background. It will collect the user experience data to help our future improvements"

FOSS maven says $29 'Freedom Box' will kill Facebook

I really like this idea

While I do it, I am not comfortable storing my backups in the cloud.

I’m entirely dependent upon the goodwill of the service provider and I have to trust them with my data.

To mitigate this problem I currently compress and and encrypt my critical backups to a single file which I then upload to the service provider. This means that the data should be useless to them – but it does make for a rather inefficient upload.

However the concept of a cloud of peer-to-peer devices capable of storing portions of my encrypted data – something like bittorrent – is facinating.

The only thing is; do we really need a dedicated device – surely this could be done (or is perhaps is already being done?) via our existing machines.