Merry Christmas all! This year my kids unpacked an Anki Overdrive: Fast and the Furious race track and associated parts – all anticipated of course. What is Anki Overdrive? Anki: Supported Devices We celebrated the day at our new “offsite” location (holiday home) in a part of New South Wales […]
Personal and Hobbies
Hi All, It’s been a while since I last posted – mainly distracted by the events of life.. and starting a new job. I’ll have some more content up soon, particularly a focus on completing the Enterprise Integration series. There will also be some more cloud computing coverage. R
Status Update

Yesterday I visited the new Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The overwhelming size and engineering excellence demanded an article by itself. Henceforth, I’m continuing to write about my visit to the “classic” Facebook buildings. When we left off, we were waiting for the Gold Shuttle to take us across […]
A visit to Facebook Headquarters – Part 2

Continuing on from my seminal visit to Google and the Computer History Museum yesterday, my tour of Silicon Valley today has taken me to the headquarters of yet another Internet behemoth, Facebook. Facebook is located at Menlo Park, a bit further north from Mountain View, not far south of San […]
A visit to Facebook Headquarters – Part 1

Today I had the opportunity to undertake a tour of parts of Silicon Valley and the Google campus in Mountain View, California. It’s been a strong desire of mine to travel through the famous heart of the US tech sector, so today’s activities were quite awe inspiring for me, personally. […]
Silicon Valley and the Google Campus
It’s that time of the year once again! As everyone winds down the year, it’s a time to reflect, rejoice and prepare for yet another year. It’s been a somewhat turbulent time for me and although there have been struggles, life continues. 2016 brings new challenges with new possibilities, and […]
Happy Holidays 2015

Reliability or luck? That’s a good question to ask. I’ve been buying Dell laptops almost exclusively for over a decade, and this is why. As of September, 2015 I own four working Dell laptops which span over a decade and a half in age, i.e. 1999-2015. Only one has a […]
A history of Dell Laptops

Over the weekend I discovered a power pack which had gone missing to an old Dell Latitude CPt notebook which dates to the pre-Y2K era. Back then, I used to work for an anti-virus start up called vCIS which operated out of the basement of the Software Spectrum building […]
A step back in time, today – Windows 2000

Intro Windows 10 was officially released last week. In the wake of the release, concerns have surfaced about privacy and control issues which are enabled by default in all popular versions of the new Windows – including Enterprise edition. We’ll take a look at what reasonable steps you could (or […]
Privacy in Windows 10

In recent years, we’ve seen some outstanding developments in mobile telephony. One such innovation has been the introduction of Qi (inductive power standard) wireless charging. For the most part, the majority of modern mobile handsets (except iPhones!) now include Qi wireless charging as standard. For most others there are phone […]
Review: Olixar Qi-Tone Alarm Clock Bluetooth Qi Charging Speaker
There’s a post up on Labor leader Bill Shorten’s site addressing Labor’s position in regards to the draft mandatory metadata retention legislation and specifically to recommendations included in the Parliamentary Joint Committee report, released late Friday. Honestly, it’s not very encouraging. I really think Labor should be outright blocking the […]
Key issues with the proposed mandatory data retention law

It doesn’t seem to be discussed too much, but I think there’s great value in establishing a quiet, comfortable space in your home environment where you can work and focus. As a developer or architect your environment has a large impact on your creativity, your thinking and ability to concentrate. […]
Home Office – Personal Development Space

Introducing the LifeProof Fre iPhone Waterproof case Earlier last month I happened to be in the market for a new mobile phone after I managed to destroy my old phone whilst on holidays in New Zealand. As it turned out, I elected to update to the latest iPhone (the iPhone […]
Review: LifeProof Fre iPhone 6 Waterproof Case

You might be unlucky enough to occasionally run into issues with a hard drive which has issues, and Windows will attempt to warn you via the System Log. However, as the issues are logged from a low level (below the UI level), the disk identifier can be a bit cryptic. […]
Bad disk – but which one?

This week at work, I’ve spent a fair amount of time working in the infrastructure space as we conducted a review of SQL Server and the underlying network infrastructure. As always, it inspired me to take a look at my home configuration – and do some tinkering. NIC Teaming The […]