Happy Christmas

A happy Christmas to you and yours and my best wishes for the coming year. Off on holidays now, so I'll see you in the new year.
Cheers
Allan

New Year Wishes

New year wishes

By Allan Jackson

Last week I mentioned that I hadn’t started my Christmas shopping and nothing has changed since then.

Instead, I have turned my attention to a wish list of stuff for next year and, being essentially unselfish, I have been wishing for things that will benefit us all.

Achieving peace in our time isn’t at all likely, so I haven’t bothered wishing for that but, instead, have been hoping that something bad happens to Spammers so that they stop jamming up the works and using up our precious bandwidth.

E-mail makes up the vast bulk of Internet traffic and, of that, the majority is unsolicited advertising, or Spam, and scams of one sort or another.

The exact figures vary, depending on which source you read, but Spam could make up around 90% of all e-mail traffic. That figure was about right a couple of months ago but, based on my own recent experiences, I believe it’s increasing.

In the last month or so, the number of Spam messages arriving in my e-mail box has doubled and so, from getting about 3000 a month, I have had over 7000 in the last 30 days. I know this because, even though Gmail filters out most of the Spam, it keeps it for 30 days before deleting it.

E-mail scams and Spam marketing obviously work because the perpetrators keep on doing it. There are lots of people out there buying stuff from people they don’t know, based solely on e-mail that manages to avoid their ISP’s Spam filters and arrive in their in-boxes.

These stupid people are screwing up the works for the rest of us and, as its obviously pointless to try and tell them not respond to Spam messages, I think the underlying structure of the Internet is going to have to be changed to make it too time-consuming to send large numbers of e-mails cheaply.

And talking of the Internet, my second wish is to have fast and reasonably priced broadband connections available to us next year. Our Internet is still slow and expensive by world standards, but there has been some optimism lately.

Neotel, our second national telephone network operator, is set to start offering us its products early next year and there is the hope that we could end up getting more speed for less cash.

I wish I could be as hopeful, but I can’t dismiss the thought that competition in the South African market is often not that at all. We have three mobile operators and I have yet to see one advertise cheaper airtime than the others.

Whatever happens, I don’t think we will be getting anything like the deal I saw advertised by UK firm Carphone Warehouse recently.

For £19 (including line rental) per month, calls in the UK under 70 minutes are free, anytime, you get free international calls to a selection of 28 foreign countries (calls to SA cost five pence a minute) and, get this, you also get a free 8-megabit broadband connection and 40Gb of uploads and downloads each month.

Have a happy time over Christmas and see you in the new year.

Christmas shopping list

The silly season is back again and, judging by the lengthening queues and deteriorating behaviour in shopping centre car parks, I’m not the only one with rising stress levels.

To take a break from thinking about what to get for my nearest and dearest, and to delay the inevitable shopping trip a little bit more, I turned my attention to compiling a list of my own needs and wants.

At the top of my gift list, as usual, is Meg Ryan; would she be a stocking filler if I bought her a pair of nylons? But, then again, this is a technology column, so enough of Meg, and on to the electronics.

I have been shooting a digital SLR camera for a couple of years but I’ve been thinking for a while that it might be a good idea to get a compact digital for the occasions when I don’t want to carry my whole kit.

My first choice would most likely be the Canon PowerShot G7 which has a stabilised lens with a range equivalent to 35-210mm in 35mm terms. It is pretty rare for a compact to have a hot shoe so that you can use large external flashguns and I especially like that about it.

Another alternative for me would be the Canon PowerShot S3 IS which has a stabilised lens (36-432mm equivalent and has received very favourable reviews. My existing kit is all Canon, which is why I would go that way.

If I were advising someone buying their first digital camera, I’d tell them to look at what’s available, paying particular attention to Fuji and Olympus which, in my opinion, produce particularly good pictures. I’d also advise them not to make their choice based on the number of megapixels a particular camera has; but on how good the pictures it produces are.

One item which I would love this Christmas is an LCD flat screen for my computer. They are coming down rapidly in price and I see that you can now get a 17-inch one for R1500 or even less. I recently saw the Apple 20-inch wide-screen monitor and it is absolutely gorgeous; it would be a bit more than R1500, however.

Looking at a local retailer’s website I see that they have pink PlayStation consoles! How cool is that? Even if you never played the thing, it would still be just the job to lift your lounge area up into another level of style and taste.

I forget where I saw this but it seems that Nokia has an Internet tablet which has a large screen and connects to the Internet via Bluetooth and the mobile phone in your pocket. You can then Internet anywhere you like, without relying on the phone's small screen, and that would be cool.

So would one of those Bluetooth hands-free car kits which clip onto the visor in your car and which allows you to answer your mobile without taking it out of your pocket. I’ve seen them around town for R500-R600.