The Matias Quiet keyboard that I have been using for a couple of years recently gave up the ghost. The Enter key broke off and it seemed kind of unreliable in the USB department too – sometimes not activating when attached to a laptop, and sometimes just disappearing. I had got complaints about it being a little noisy still, despite being a lot quieter than a standard ALPS-style Matias keyboard. The replacement I got was a Corsair Strafe RGB Silent. I am rather fond of Corsair keyboards and mice, and this variant sounded promising.
Continue reading “Corsair RGB Strafe Silent – Another not-so-noisy Keyboard”
The USB standard has spawned quite a few connector variants over the year. Apart from the basic “A” connector (the one that you put in one way, then the other way, and finally the right way), there have been quite a few mini and micro variants of the “B” connector. Now, with “C” we seen to be approaching, finally, a reduction in the number. But it seems to me that there is a need for another variant…
I am an avid podcast listener, using podcasts as the main source of entertainment on my commute, when I go to gym, go shopping, cook at home, et cetera. In the past, I have used a long line of iPod nano devices to serve my listening needs (
After updating my Sony Xperia Z5 Premium from 2016 to Android 7.1, I noticed the settings for screen scaling (known as 
I am a big fan of proper real decent mechanical tactile clickety-clack keyboards. Writing is my means of communication, creation, and commercial contribution to the world. I write a lot of text – both code and normal language, and I feel that I type faster, more accurately, and produce better text when using a tactile keyboard. I cannot understand how anyone cannot love them once they have their fingers on them. However, mechanical keyboards have a bad reputation for being NOISY. The rest of my family thinks my 
When mobile phones first appeared, they were powered by very simple cores like the venerable ARM7 and later the ARM9. Low clock frequencies, zero microarchitectural sophistication, sufficient for the job. In recent years, as smartphones have come into their own as the most important computing device for most people, the processor performance of mobile phones have increased tremendously. Today, cutting-edge phones and tablets contain four or eight cores, running at clock frequencies well above 2 gigahertz. The performance race for most of the market (more about that in a moment) was mostly about pushing higher clock frequencies and more cores, even while microarchitecture was left comparatively simple. Mobile meant “fairly simple”, and IPC was nowhere near what you would get with a typical Intel processor for a laptop or desktop.
Last week, my iPod Nano (6th generation) stopped working since its power button got stuck and failed to do anything to activate the machine. I rushed out, and got myself a replacement player in the form of an Apple iPod Nano 7th generation. I must admit that I have not found any alternative to an iPod paired with iTunes when it comes to a plain stand-alone audio player. After the utter disappointment that the 6th gen nano was, the 7th gen turned out to be surprisingly good and might even be almost up to the standards of the near-perfect 3rd generation.
It is quite interesting to see how Qualcomm has emerged as a major player in the “processor market” and is trying to build themselves into a serious consumer brand. I used to think of them as a company doing modems and other chips that made phones talk wirelessly, known to insiders in the business but not anything a user cared about. Today, however, they are working hard on building themselves into a brand to rival Intel and AMD. At the center of this is their own line of ARM-based application processors, the Snapdragon. I can see some thinking quite similar to the old “Intel Inside” classic, and I would not be surprised to see the box or even body of a phone carrying a Snapdragon logo at some point in the future. A part of this branding exercise is the 
