IT Stuff: 2nd May 2013

Broadcast on: 2nd May 2013 18:00 and 3rd May 2013 13:30 BCB 106.6FM The show includes:

• An interview with Fab Lab (by Brian)
• Shi's début behind the scenes 'driving the desk'
• Studio guests - John H and Kriss
• Book reviews, news, and general tech chatter.

It's our first show that we have managed to create produce entirely on our own, so that's a bit of a milestone, and credit to everyone that has put their time and effort in so far! If you have any feedback, we'd love to hear it.  

April 15th 2013 UEFI, JavaScript 1K demos and vector animation

We had a general discussion around installing UEFI secure boot and then looked at a couple of April Fool RFCs: RFC 1149 and RFC 1925.

Coding Freedom review

A review of Gabriella Coleman's book Coding Freedom is available in PDF format.

IT Stuff: 4th April 2013

The bulk of the show is based around an interview Brian did at a RepRap workshop in Hebden Bridge recently. Links from the feature:

• http://reprap.org
• http://www.openscad.org/
• http://tvrrug.org.uk/

The rest is news, and a couple of articles about on-line security, 'cyber' this and that, fake sites and the such like.

• http://www.actionfraud.police.uk/

March 18th 2013 Show and tell

We had an impromptu Show and Tell this month. Alice explained how the classical approach to scaling websites was no longer appropriate for websites serving many pages. The time taken to generate material from a database, render it and despatch it was typically 6-800ms. You could reduce the load where many of the requests were for the same data by adding a cache or squid proxy. But this could create further problems keeping the cache or proxy up-to-date.

Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi was the unexpected success story of 2012. Designed by a team led by Eben Upton, who as a tutor at Cambridge had become concerned about the poor computing skills of university applicants, and including David Braben, a veteran computer game designer, this credit card sized computer aims to put the fun back into computing.

Mobile web strategy

With mobile becoming more and more important in internet-based outreach, it's good to think about your mobile web strategy. You are recommended to build websites capable of display on desktop, tablet and mobile devices; we call this responsive design, a design which responds to the size and capabilities of the screen being used.

IT Stuff: 7th March 2013

In the March 2013 edition of IT Stuff: David C talks briefly about technology and some projects he is involved in. http://cyclebradford.org.uk/ http://www.recordclub.org.uk/ News City Wifi in City Park http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/local/localbrad/10266125.Free_Wi_Fi_is_launched_in_Bradford/ EU fines Microsoft again over Browser Ballot http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21684329 Office 2013 locked to a single PC? Since the recording they have climbed down! Damn them! http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/06/microsoft-office-2013-license-transferable/ Credit: Brian Apple developers afflicted by malware http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/19/us-apple-hackers-idUSBRE91I10920130219 Credit: Brian

February 18th 2013 memtest86+, FabLab, BCB and SUSE

David S introduced memtest86+ which can diagnose faulty RAM which may cause random crashes, the storage of faulty data, incorrect checksums and a range of inconsistent errors.

GIMP: the FOSS Photoshop

GIMP, or the GNU Image Manipulation Program, is the FOSS alternative to Photoshop.