Category: General Tech Info

Most, if not all of the videos distributed on this site are made using free tools Made by Microsoft and included with windows operating systems.  Right now, I use windows 10 and have ended use of the Windows Movie Maker that came with Windows XP.  For the time, it was good, but when you have a powerhouse, you can do 3D and blue screen effects better with modern GPU’s and software.  Using newer, yet free and included software reduces production costs and time involved, making home movie production more accessible.

Here’s what the included Windows 10 Video Editor can do for you:

• Create text additions in a few fun styles
• 3d effects with animations and sounds.
• Included music with beat matching, or the ability to add you own stuff
• Clip trimming and storyboard editing modes
• 3d effects anchoring to video or still shots
• Export to various file formats
• Export to cloud or local disk
• Export to social media in 1 click or to email
• Free with windows 10 and very stable
• Use of standard windows shortcuts as usual

In recent years AT&T and Verizon, the nation’s two largest home Internet providers have eliminated their affordable offerings for slow speed internet, except at the very slowest levels. Each company now charges essentially identical monthly prices – $63-$65 a month after first year discounts have ended – for home wired connections at almost any speed up to 100/100 Mbps fiber service.

This policy of upward “tier flattening” raises the cost of Internet access for urban and rural AT&T and Verizon customers who only have access to the oldest, slowest legacy infrastructure, like DSL or worse.

Affordability is the greatest barrier to increased home broadband. In the United States, broadband is becoming faster for some households and more expensive for others.

Denser communities often get newer tech for connecting faster, and are able to choose from more providers.  Thus ISP’s must innovate or lose customers to better competition.  This leaves small communities reliant on cellular or satellite connections for the home, which can be expensive, have data limits, and be very slow at times.

Vote with your wallet, and choose a company if at all possible that cares more about service than shareholders.  Buy from a smaller, local ISP, or help others by sharing this article.

Siefer, A. (2018, July 31). White Paper – Tier Flattening. Retrieved August 5, 2018, from https://www.digitalinclusion.org/blog/2018/07/31/tier-flattening/

Epic Games has changed the game of mobile gaming by announcing it’s not going through the official Google Play Store to distribute it’s popular game Fortnite

On the surface, it seems like purely monetary decision.  But it’s more about end user experience and product control.

As a trade-off, Epic Games won’t be able to rely on the built-in features of Google Play for things like receiving payments or parental controls. These are problems that also exist in the PC version of the game, but Epic Games seems to address them well.

“First of all, no payments are possible unless you define a payment method for your Fortnite account,” Tim Sweeney explained. “Then we support one-time payments so that a permanent payment method isn’t remembered for the account. We’ll be working on more features along these lines over the coming months, applicable to all platforms where Epic accepts payments directly.”

Just remember that tech isn’t perfect, and dev work and features take time.  Computer professionals aren’t God and don’t have all the answers instantly.  It will be interesting to see how Fortnite develops on mobile.

Kuchera, B. (2018, August 06). Fortnite on Android: Epic’s Tim Sweeney discusses clones, payment systems and timing. Retrieved August 6, 2018, from https://www.polygon.com/fortnite/2018/8/6/17655888/fortnite-android-google-play-store-epic-games

1. Before June 23rd, 1969, software and hardware were sold together.  The operating system, the computer, and the programs were all bundled.
2. IBM decided to, “un-bundle” so that way they could generate revenues from their software, and not just complete systems sales.
3. This led to the rise of third party developers, whose software had lower production costs and thus higher margins.
4. Needless to say, IBM isn’t the biggest computing firm anymore, and not as much of a household name as Apple or Microsoft.
5. Un-bundling allows Bendy Computers to exist and make software for sale.

Modern computers work using the parallel computing style, where a single task or process is broken down a bit before it’s worked on.  A process like explorer.exe is broken into instructions done in functional units.  Several partially completed instructions are worked on at a time, and merged in an assembly line fashion into a single data stream, aka a process.  Until the mid 2000’s this was only seen in supercomputers and business grade mainframe type machines, but the IBM Stretch in 1962 is when pipeline computing took parallel computing to the next level, and lead to chips from the intel Core 2 series in the mid 2000’s, to modern single die intel i9 with 18 cores and 36 threads.

1. TCP verifies all datagrams.
2. TCP has acknowledgments.
3. TCP has more overhead.
4. TCP is less error prone, but less efficient.

1. UDP has a simple checksum at the end.
2. UDP has no acknowledgments.
3. UDP has almost no overhead.
4. UDP is error prone, but has less latency.

• TCP and UDP are transport layer protocols.
• TCP and UDP both do datagram packetizing.
• IP is the network layer protocol responsible for routing TCP and UDP traffic.

Facebook announced this week that it would introduce time management tools for it’s iOS and Android apps.  These tools will be built into a special dashboard for the Facebook and Instagram mobile apps, allowing users to track and self impose limits and reminders for healthy social media usage.

These tools are not mandatory, and limits are set by individual users.  Facebook will have charts in both apps accessible from settings to allow users to see their use over time and shut off push notifications so they can help themselves take a break.