David's interest in technology extends back to his teen years with science fairs and amateur radio. He is fascinated with hardware, but his real interest is how people use technology. David's goal in providing technological solutions has always been to listen to the end users.

BIRTH OF THE MOUSE -PART 1

The Graphic User Interface, commonly called the GUI, has revolutionized the way people and computers communicate. It is hard to think of computers without mice, icons, menus, and hyperlinks. Many people believe the first GUI computer was the Apple Macintosh that was released with great fanfare in 1984. But, in truth, the origins of the mouse and the GUI precede the Macintosh by several decades.

BIRTH OF THE MOUSE -PART 2

In Part I of The Birth of the Mouse, we met Dr. Douglas Engelbart and his team from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Palo Alto , California who created the graphic user interface (GUI) that allows people and computers to interact directly. They first demonstrated their work on December 9, 1968 at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco . The capabilities were crude compared to Windows or MAC OS X, but it had many of the elements that later went into both those interfaces, including the mouse, menus, windows, networking, and hyperlinks.

The eBook Revolution

A new generation of electronic readers and an invention called Electronic Paper Displays, or EPD. Created by E Ink Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it uses an amazing technology called electronic ink.

Farewell Odysseus

There have been many writers who have had a profound impact upon my career. The great science fiction author, Sir Arthur C. Clark, was one of the giants. On the 19 th March, at the age of 90, Sir Arthur died in his home in Sri Lanka , a place he called Serindip.

Buying That New Computer: Part I - Why am I doing this?

Getting what you need without breaking the bank is a matter of evaluating your needs and comparing them to a computer's essential capabilities.

Buying That New Computer: Part II -The Essentials

When purchasing a hard disk, there are two things to consider.

1.The capacity. How much data can the disk hold?
2. The average seek time. How fast does the disk find the data?

Buying The New Computer: Part III- Not So Optional Options

Once you settle on the essentials of a new computer, you should consider some options.

Did You Really Delete That File?

You've created a sensitive spreadsheet at work. The project is over and you need to remove all traces of the file, so you delete it. You are donating your old home computer to a school and don't want your personal finance data to be seen, so you delete the files. Think you're protected? Think again. Because of the way that computer hard disks work, just deleting data does not actually get rid of it.

HP Photosmart A826 Home Photo Center

Even though you can send digital photographs in an email, post them on a web site, or present them in slide shows on any television, many people still want a physical print to share or display. Whereas the colours on most inkjet prints fade after a few years and smear if exposed to water, the new HP Photosmart A826 Home Photo Center allows you to make brilliant, sharp and waterproof prints that will resist fading for over a century.

Email Etiquette

Electronic mail, or email, has become engrained in our lives to such a degree that people have a hard time understanding how they ever lived without it. Indeed, many younger people have known it their entire lives.

Snap of a Twig

When I was young, my science teachers told me that evolution was a slow process that took thousands, if not millions of years to see a change occur. This was a very comforting 19 th century sensibility that gave the world order and consistency. Things just weren't meant to change quickly, at least not in that world view.