Interesting Engineering: How transistors are made
How transistor chips are made Via Interesting Engineering, on Facebook: Microchips are in nearly everything, and they power much of what makes the modern world possible. Here’s how they’re made
Category: Computing
Information technology, computing and related
BSOD: when experts get it wrong
Intro BSOD (Blue Screen of Death), the infamous sight of windows crashing, perhaps taking your work with it, perhaps taking everything with it, as the crash corrupts the file allocation tables beyond repair! (This is why we do back-ups, people!) The problem with the BSOD, and Microsoft’s cryptic messages, is...
Making sense of Unity PPU and compression
Unity and Pixels per unit No, I don’t have the answer – yet – but I will. I’m still new to Unity and trying to get my head round this one aspect, the rest is simple, in comparison. PPU is not straight forward, at all. I wouldn’t say it’s complicated,...
Developing a game from scratch, 2020
Clarification While I have – on and off – played with programming for decades, have worked on Circle MUD based MMOs and have designed board games, I am not a ‘developer’, I am, as far as you are concerned, a complete and utterly clueless noob. This is not a “How...
Contact form spam
A friend received the following, below, so I deconstructed it for her, advising that it was “dodgy as heck, do not follow the link”. This is a mass spam to get unwary people to click on the link, which will almost certainly install malware or the like on your computer....
Who owns data on you?
I’ll tell you a little story first. True as it happens. Many years ago – decades actually! – I used to hang around IRC-based chat rooms talking to other techies and MUD gamers. One evening we got a troll, some annoying kid that believed the anonymity of the Internet allowed...
To Infinity and beyond. The joys of changing Internet providers
As a long-time Internet user, the first question in my mind when considering moving house isn’t access to public transport, shops, crime rates, parks, it’s: “What’s the broadband access like there?” For our new address, BT quoted June the following year for fibre. By the time we moved this was...
Book Review : Worm, the first digital world war
WORM, the first digital world war, by Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down. Blurb The Conficker worm infected its first computer in November 2008 and within a month had infiltrated 1.5 million machines in 195 countries. Banks, telecommunications companies and critical government networks – including the British Parliament and...
War hero Alan Turning gets royal pardon for his crimes
. High on the news trends today is the subject of the royal pardon for codebreaker Dr Alan Turing. You know what – I don’t think he cares given it’s some 60 years after his death (or murder!) And what a death, eh… He helped save countless lives and sped...