From the lack of posts lately you’ve probably gathered that writing about gadgets isn’t actually my day-job; that, unfortunately, is working for a large corporate in a considerably less exciting area.

One thing we do have though is a staff canteen (and rather good it is too). I arrive early and head up there for a daily peanut butter bagel and cup of tea; sets me up nicely for the day.

This leads me to my pet hate, the commercial toaster. You know the ones, stainless steel boxes that you put the bread in one end, that then travels on a conveyor between two heating elements and drops out the bottom perfectly toasted – well that’s the theory.

Actually my pet hate isn’t the toaster itself but rather the users of said device. Why-oh-why is it so complicated for people to understand? Here are a some salient points:

• The slower the conveyor the longer the bread will be between the elements and so the darker the resultant toast will be.
• If an element is on it will glow red (these don’t used advanced tech for toasting).
• There are two elements, top and bottom, that toast both sides of the bread simultaneously.

I’m sure you’ll agree that none of this is rocket science so why:

• don’t you check that both elements are on and glowing red before inserting your bread and then staring at it mystified when only one side is toasted?
• don’t you adjust the conveyor speed to something sensible? I mean, you’ve just seen the last lot of toast come out white so clearly something’s wrong!

I hope this information is useful – happy toasting!

Poppa G

I read this recent story on the BBC website about a new web ‘brain’ for robots going live.

Initially, I thought that this is a very sensible idea and of all the benefits it will bring. For example, having a standardised view of the world ensures all connected devices operate consistently and offloading the processing to the ‘cloud’ reduces the complexity in local devices; the current iPhone’s Siri voice assistant works like this, it takes your voice command and sends it for remote processing.

However, then I changed my thinking! What if some clever hackers break into the system and start changing the behaviours? How about instead of reacting to the proximity of a human and a knife with the robot being told to make the human a nice snack, the database is changed to simply insert the knife into a soft, fleshy part of the human and twist? Suddenly, every single connected device with the proper abilities could now embark on a major killing spree!

Beware, Skynet is coming.

Poppa G

Welcome to the world of Poppa G!

Hopefully you’ve read about me and how this blog came into existence so for now there’s not much more to add. Over the next few days I’ll start to add some posts on topics that interest me. I’ll probably start with my favourite gadget and take it from there.

In the meantime, if there is any topic you think Poppa G can help with please contact me via the blog.