Kevin Boone
Kevin Boone
Kevin Boone
Musing on computing, math, electronics, de-Googling and the small web, from an old warhorse of the IT industry.
Latest Posts
Kagi and DuckDuckGo both provide reasonable alternatives to Google's and Microsoft's search services, without compromising your privacy. How different are they?
What's going on with digital voice assistants? Are they really snooping on us all the time?
If a podcast has an RSS feed, we can download it, parse it, and then download all the content into a single folder, which can then be played by any audio player.
Using a Garmin fitness watch without a smartphone or Garmin's services: how practical is it, and would you want to?
Decorative Christmas lights were better in the past. No, really, they were.
This mostly-forgotten device was the very first commercially-available all-digital music synthesizer. It was also a lot of fun.
We're used to computing devices being electronic. But what can we do with a purely mechanical approach? This article looks at how eclipse prediction might have worked in the Antikythera Mechanism, c.2300 years ago.
Nothing says '80s pop' like a DX7.
Denshi block kits were a unique way to learn about electronics back in the 70s.
These days, there are comparatively few up-to-date smartphones that can run a well-supported, non-vendor firmware. Sony's Xperia range and Google's Pixels are among the better choices.
There are good reasons why these handsets are so popular with de-Googlers, even if we have to grit our teeth and try to ignore the vendor.
Is this a minor irritation, or the end of Android as we know it?
Some guidance, mostly for science and engineering students, on how to write a scientific paper or technical report. I've updated this article slightly since I wrote it thirty years ago, to deal with the rise in web-based publication....
If you can't run an alternative, privacy-sparing firmware on your Android device, you can still assert a measure of control by disabling certain packages. You don't need to root the device to do this, and Canta is an app that sets out to...
If you were worried about tracking cookies, you really don't want to know about browser fingerprinting.