BBC News – Google+ opens social network to everyone.

Which persuaded me to have another look around but it still feels like a ghost town!

If like me you use a NAS box to store photos, videos and the like then this’ll be of interest – if you’ve no idea what I’m talking about – then skip!

Today Livedrive emailed customers the following

If you don’t store your files on your computer – and instead keep them on a network storage device or NAS – then before today you weren’t able to back them up with Livedrive. We’re excited to announce that with the latest version of the Livedrive Desktop Software for Windows, now you can!

This in my book has put Livedrive at the top of online backup solutions – by virtue of the fact that none of its competitors support NAS boxes.

If you’ve a house like mine, solid ground floors, then, FlatWire looks exactly what I need. From Southwire’s Flatwire website:

FlatWire products are so thin; they are nearly imperceptible by sight or feel when installed properly. The wires range from 4/1000 of an inch to 16/1000 of an inch, or about as thin as a business card. Once attached to the wall, the product is painted or wallpapered to become virtually invisible. Before painting, we recommend that installers use a traditional “blending” compound over the wire to blend it into the wall.

No more extension leads trailing around rooms to the few main sockets we have and the expense of chiselling out channels down the walls from the ceiling to floor is no more. Hold it, hold it, sadly their products are currently only available in the US and their mains cable is only rated to 120 volts, so it looks like I’m going to have to wait, however rumours have it the company is about to expand into Europe and is working on a 240 volt cable – fingers crossed.

Hat Tip: Trusted Reviews.

O2 are launching a mobile phone charger that can reduce energy consumption by as much as 70% compared to those supplied by manufacturers. The charger achieves much of the saving by simply reducing the charge sent to the phone once its battery is fully charged.

The charger is undoubtedly a good idea, but at £14.99 I can’t see too many takers, the real question is, why don’t manufactures supply efficient phone chargers in the first place, O2 isn’t doing anything groundbreaking the technology has been used by manufactures of re-chargeable batteries for a long time.

Hat Tip: Trusted Reviews.

If like us, you’ve users who seem to break every mobile phone they’re given then maybe it’s time to get them a Sonim XP3 – which comes with a 3-year unconditional guarantee, is drop proof, water resistant and is certified against salt, fog, humidity, transport and thermal shock. It’s not pretty and it hasn’t a camera, GPS, 3G or Wi-Fi – but it can make and receive calls, sends texts and it’s even got Bluetooth!

Hat Tip: Trusted Reviews.

On Progressive Gold, Martin Wisse has words of warning for those of us who’re customers of Virgin Media, specifically an interview given by Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett.

Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett has attacked the principle of net neutrality, whereby internet service providers do not interfere with or degrade the speed at which content is delivered from websites to consumers, branding it as “bollocks”.

Berkett’s cable operator ranks as the second largest internet service provider in the UK with approximately 3.6m customers.

In an interview with the Royal Television Society’s Television magazine, Berkett said that “this net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks”, and revealed that Virgin is already in talks with unnamed content providers about paying to have their content delivered faster than others.

Feeding into the debate between internet service providers and the BBC over iPlayer, Berkett even warned that public service broadcasters who choose not to pay for faster access to Virgin’s subscriber base would end up in “bus lanes”, effectively having their content delivered to consumers at a lower speed. Taken from Digital Spy.

As Martin says, is this the future of the internet?

I bet like me you thought nothing grows inside your PC, how wrong we are in The Guardian Kurt Jacobsen reports on microscopic growths in your our PCs known as tin whiskers are causing circuit boards to short out and fail.

On April 17 2005, the Millstone nuclear generating plant in Connecticut shut down when a circuit board monitoring a steam pressure line short-circuited. In 2006, a huge batch of Swatch watches, made by the eponymous Swiss company, were recalled at an estimated cost of $1bn (£500m). In both cases, “tin whiskers” – microscopic growths of the metal from soldering points on a circuit board – were blamed for causing the problems.

It’s not the first time these mysterious growths have been blamed for electronics failures. In 1998 the Galaxy IV communications satellite sputtered out after just five years; engineers diagnosed its failure as due to “whiskers”.

The US military blamed them for malfunctioning F-15 radar systems and misguided Phoenix and Patriot missiles. In 1986, the US Food and Drug Administration recalled a number of pacemakers because of these same whiskers. In fact, they’ve been known about since the 1940s, and happen with cadmium and zinc, too: during the Second World War, similar whiskers would short the cadmium tuning capacitors in aircraft radios. A decade later, tin-based relays in AT&T telephone switching centres were found to cause shorts.

The solution to “whiskering”? Mix lead into the solder, as was done from the 1950s. Colin Hughes, a physicist who worked on the first British nuclear bomb, told me that the whiskering problem never came up during his career.

But now the lead is gone, by legal mandate, and whiskers are back – causing potential problems for us all.

Since 2006, lead has been banned from solder in the European Union under the 2003 Reduction of Hazardous Substance (RoHS) directive, which gave manufacturers three years to phase out lead.
The logic seemed reasonable. Removing lead from petrol (where it was used to prevent engine mistiming) brought clear environmental and health benefits, taking a harmful chemical that can affect intelligence out of the atmosphere. Removing lead from solder, the 37% lead, 63% tin alloy used to join metal objects in everything from plumbing to circuit boards, was an obvious next step to prevent it leaching into ground water from dumped items in landfills.

But without lead to tame it, tin behaves oddly on circuit boards. Left alone, tin plating, like cadmium and zinc, spontaneously generates microscopic shreds of metal – about one to five microns in diameter, or less than one-tenth as wide as a human hair – which push up from the base. If they grow far enough to touch another current-carrying location, they’ll cause a short that can wreck the equipment while leaving barely any trace.

The only response we can have I guess is get the longest warranty possible on anything we purchase.

If like me your phone is also your diary, then it was an absolute pain when the company I worked for outlawed the use of personal phones as part of its compliance with the ISO 27001 Security Management Standard. I’m too lowly an employee to qualify for a laptop or for that matter a company phone.

So, until I discovered GooSync I was at a loss. Now, however, I can synchronise my phone calendar with Google calendar. Which perhaps doesn’t sound much until you realise you can automatically synchronise Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook. Which for me is job done. My work calendar on Outlook and Google automatically synchronise and I synchronise my phone with Google Calendar when I like. Did that make sense? It did to me at least. Thanks to davblog for pointing me in the direction of GooSync. And before anyone asks, I’m only using the free version of GooSync.

Yesterday I expressed concern regarding the internet advertising company Phorm. Today Privacy campaign group Privacy International director Simon Davies says

“We were impressed with the effort that had been put into minimising the collection of personal information.”

“Phorm does advance the whole sector of protecting personal information by two to three steps.

“The problem is that may not be good enough for consumers.”

“Behavioural advertising is a rather spooky concept for many people.” Source: The BBC.

Back to my original thoughts on this – nothing to worry about.