sxa's Technical Musings

[Short link to this article if you need it - http://goo.gl/DQfz3 - or retweet me] My previous post on Facebook may have seemed too harsh on some of it's users. To rebalance that I'm going to go into a bit more about what's REALLY wrong with the site to give those people some real things to complain about. Facebook has got a lot of stick over privacy concerns and other such things over time. In my opinion they've almost always responded and improved their security model to the point where I happen to believe it's now pretty good - they've got many things right, and that's why it's the only social site where I'm comfortable with not posting things publicly. The exception list for posts is something that isn't on any of the other major networks (e.g. share with "All friends except my children list") But it's far from perfect, and recently it's finally started to irate me to the point where I have to wonder whether it really is

[Short link to this article if you need it -  http://goo.gl/bbvPi  - or retweet me] This may become a multi-part post about facebook and social media as I've got quite a lot to write. This part is about setting the record straight on some of the fact-free nonsense that's regularly seen on the site and what you can do to avoid spreading what is little more than spam on the site. I'd like to think that everyone on facebook could read this and think twice when they see anything like this in the future. In various forums I've already commented about how many people don't seem to understand about online security and privacy generally. And I've also mentioned how many people are willing to spread misinformation based on apparently not bothering to check and fully understand the facts. Or "crying wolf" by spreading false information risks, which has the negative effect of desensitising people to the real issues, which can only make it harder to explain r

[Short link to this article if you need it - http://goo.gl/YAUV4 - or retweet me ] An introduction for those not familiar with the Pi ... Yesterday Eben Upton (the guy behind the Raspberry Pi foundation) took time out of his very busy schedule to give a talk in Hursley. For those who are not familiar with it, the Raspberry Pi ( here is the FAQ ) is basically a small credit-card sized computer circuit board with a Broadcom BCM2835 chipset and a 700MHz ARM CPU powered via a microUSB socket, HDMI+composite video output, stereo audio output, ethernet port, 2 USB ports, an SD slot used for booting the device, and another proprietary expansion port, and a high performance graphics subsystem that can decode video at full HD resolution with h.264 ( MPEG-2 available at extra cost ) hardware playback support in XBMC/OpenElec - all for $35 for the "model B" version. They were initially built in China, but much of the manufacturing is now in the UK and is therefore supporting the U