By Dave Wilby

February 25th, 2012

Techy articles easily missed this week

Techy articles easily missed this week

Good ol’ BT did its darnedest this week to stop me catching up on the most interesting tech stories out there. Broken cables “somewhere out in the street” were eventually magically mended by a whizz-kid in India, but not until I’d spent a few days with no interweb and no phone, reduced to sitting in car parks and blagging broadband off of unsuspecting neighbours and friendly pub landlords.

Once hooked up, I discovered that many of my fellow compatriots with unbroken connections were also having a bad time. Based on 1.68 million speed tests, a new study from uSwitch claimed that a third of homes in the UK have broadband speeds well below the national average. After briefly thinking, well, isn’t that how averages work? I commiserated while watching another page download at a poorly hijacked 56Kbps. And I don’t technically even live in a broadband black spot!

So. Things to do while unexpectedly off the grid?
– Turn your smartphone into a DIY Pocket Geiger counter using a bunch of diodes, some tin foil, a sweet packet and 46 bucks
– Guess the winners of the 2011 Engadget Awards (oh and the Oscars too I suppose)
– Draft tweets about Apple buying Chomp with using gobbled, snapped or swallowed up
– Dabble in Open Source eye-tracking (when nobody else is looking)
– Write a 10-year roadmap for a fast moving technology, like Adobe does
– Console yourself with the ‘fact’ that we’re all actually much friendlier away from addictive social media
– Take a short break from the older, crankier ranks of ‘Generation C’
– And hope your boss will be too busy to notice Wales beating England at rugby this weekend…

Here’s to a great rest of the weekend, online and off.