Nuclear Terrorism

The book I read to research this post was Nuclear Terrorism by Graham Allison which is an excellent book which I bought from a local bookstore. This book is about the possibilities of nuclear attacks by terrorist organizations which in theory could put even the attacks on the World Trade Center in the shade. According to this book it is more a question of when than if. In Chechnya Soviet forces found a so called dirty bomb before it could be detonated and that is currently the closest we have come to a nuclear terrorist attack. A dirty bomb is any kind of nuclear waste that is in a container along with an explosive that helps spread it around. With a dirty bomb there wouldn’t be many immediate deaths although years later people would succumb to things like cancer as a result. It would cost a lost a lot of money to clear up the nuclear waste and render the area safe though. There is a much greater chance of terrorists building a dirty bomb than using a nuclear warhead as many sites like hospitals house radio-active material that could potentially be used. When the Soviet Union disintegrated many nuclear weapons went missing and almost certainly some of these must either be in terrorist hands or countries with terrorist connections. It’s interesting that not a single nuclear weapon that disappeared in this way has been recovered. A 10 megaton nuclear weapon set off in central New York would probably result in 1 million deaths not counting those who would die of things like cancer much later. There have been cases where terrorists have demanded a ransom in exchange for not setting off a nuclear weapon and these have been hoaxes luckily. There are countries like North Korea & Iran who have nuclear power stations and have a nuclear weapons capability. Most of the information on how to build a nuclear power station is freely accessible and anyone with the money can probably develop a nuclear capability in 5-10 years. This book is very disturbing but is on a brilliant subject and is really well written and is a reasonable length at around 240 pages.

 

Marketing On Facebook

The book I read to research this post was Mining The Gold On Facebook by Kimberly Dubbeld-Deas which is a very good book which I bought on kindle. Kimberly has done a series of these books that includes Linkedin & Twitter as well as this book. They break down the process of marketing your company into simple steps that anyone can follow. She also tells you about apps and websites that can help in this process with many of them being free. I own all 3 of these guides and may re-read them so I can market my blogs more effectively. Anyway to market on Facebook you need a business and a personal page and the latter will mostly have interesting information about you and maybe a little about your company but not too much. Your business page can run apps like a social media calender or a like button which a personal page can’t do. You need to define your target market which is based on various demographics like age, sex, location etc. One part of your marketing is sending ads to these potential clients and you must work how much you can reasonably afford in seeking out these clients. With many the best you can hope for is they will click the like button on your page and maybe give you some referrals. There is an app called google calendar that will work with smartphones and let you plan your day. At http://quantcast.com they are specialists at defining the demographics of your potential customers for a fee. If you go to http://hootsuite.com they have an app that schedules your posts so they are being posted at different times to maximize exposure. At http://facebook.grader.com you can see stats for visitors to your facebook pages. At http://namechk.com you can check if your page name or business name is available on a variety of social media sites. At http://involver.com they have apps for your business page quite a lot of which are free. You need to define keywords for your business page so people can find you and check your competitors pages to see what keywords they use. Your business page needs 25 likes for you to own that domain. Facebook gives you a generic numbered domain until then. I found this book quite inspirational and very interesting.

Amazon Kindle Fire HDX

The book I read to research this post was Kindle Fire HDX For Dummies by Nancy C Muir which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is designed to be a shortcut to learning the more complex features of the Fire HDX and the author says it took her a week to find all of them so I think this book is pretty good. This is the 3rd generation of the Kindle Fire and has an Amazon OS 3.0 operating system & a Silk browser for going on the internet. There is a 4G LTE version that lets you have an internet and data call contract but most people use a wireless network and the wireless version. There are 8.9 inch & 7 inch screen options. There is a much publicized mayday button that you may have seen on the TV adverts for this that lets you see an Amazon Advisor and works pretty much like a technical support call but but they can highlight buttons you need to press for a certain and some cases can gain access to your machine to sort out a particular problem. You can also move the video of the advisor around the screen if it gets in the way. Amazon sells a huge amount of online content like audio books, e-books, video, music & apps for this device. Much of this content is free and they give you 20 GB of cloud storage with Amazon free. An additional 20 GB of storage starts at $9.99 per year and goes up to 1,000 GB for $500 per year. I think the main selling point for this gadget is the huge amount of Amazon content it is compatible with and there is a feature called X-Ray that displays the lyrics to audio books as they are being read and displays information about music or video that is about to be played. Amazon owns the IMDB or Internet Movie Database website that this is compatible and is the biggest website of its type in the world. It comes with a calendar and office apps, can print stuff on a wireless printer and you can even display video on a compatible television. It comes with a micro USB lead so you can upload stuff via your computer. It is seen by many as a major competitor to the iPad Air. I did really enjoy this book which is very informative.

 

Hudl

The book I read to research this post was Hudl For Dummies by Rosemary Hattersley which is an excellent book which I bought on kindle. The Hudl is a low priced android tablet sold exclusively by the supermarket chain Tesco in Britain and it has things like your location and time settings set automatically due to it only being sold in Britain. It has a 3MP camera on the rear and a 2MP one on the front. It has to be connected to a wireless network in order to work. It does stream television via several free apps and via the wireless network. It ues wi-fi direct and Android 4.0 which most recent Android tablets do. There is things like BBC iplayer which is free and lets you catch up on tv programmes and Sky Go which is free to Sky subscribers. If you don’t have a Sky subscription you have to pay individually to download programmes, I think the Hudl retail for £49.95 so is one of the cheapest tablets and also comes with various services offered by tesco. You can use an internet cafe to get on the internet with it. It has 16 GB of storage and will work with a micro SD card up to 32 GB for additional storage and has a quad-core processor. You can password protect data on the Hudl but not on the micro SD card so must copy anything important onto your Hudl. It is a good idea to set up a Google account if you haven’t got one as you can store additional stuff in Google Drive as you can on a Windows computer. I really enjoyed reading this book and I think it is a great shame the Hudl is only available in Britain. It has also got a scratchproof glass screen and many owners buy a bluetooth speaker to go with it especially if they play video and audio on it. There are also protective cases available and there are various music and video streaming services like Spotify and Blinkbox you can use with it.

Marketing On Linkedin

The book I read to research this post was Mining The Gold From Linkedin by Kimberly Dubbeld-Deas which is a very good book which I bought on Kindle. This is only a short book that presents in step by step form how you should be promoting your small business on Linkedin. This author has written similar books in the same series on Facebook & Twitter as well. Linkedin is the best B2B marketing opportunity on the planet and a must for a business to promote itself. Linkedin do let you advertise on their site with adverts starting at $10 each and there are 2 programs, one for businesses with a marketing budget of less than $25,000 and the other is more than that amount. When you join Linkedin there is a free basic option which is probably no good if you are promoting anything and business and pro accounts which you pay for but let you network easier with other people. Don’t forget on Linkedin if you contact anyone especially to do business you normally get another party to introduce and recommend you. There are groups on Linkedin and some are specifically for small business like Business Matters Magazine which is one of the bigger ones. There are also networker groups in general like Leading International Open Networkers or LIONS. You can write articles and answer questions to show off your expertise and become an expert in your field and win business. There are also 3rd party sites like http://lions500.com which are for linkedin networkers and charge a subscription. It is a good idea to start your own group when you get quite a lot of contacts. An interesting thing is often business pages with in Linkedin are ranked higher in Google than a companies website. This is an interesting book that I enjoyed reading and I think it is useful to anyone with a small business.

 

Google Chromecast

The book I read to research this post was The Google Chromecast User Guide by Steve Weber which is a very good book which I downloaded from kindle. This book was number 1 on the computing free book chart on kindle. I have also done another blog post on the chromecast at http://scratbag.me which might be of interest. The chromecast basically is a video streaming device priced at $35 that streams video and audio from your router to your television and utilizes the HDMI port. It differs from a lot of similar devices because most of the processing is done by the router freeing up your computer or television. It works with a lot of different services like Netflix & Amazon Prime some officially and some unofficially with various hacks. There is a free software called plex that lets you stream your film and audio especially dvds from your computer to the chromecast. There is another service called crackle that lets you stream free movies from their website but with adverts but there is a paid option as with a lot of these types of service without adverts. There is a service called called vuvo where you pay for individual films priced at from $2-$6. Netflix also does a dvd postal rental service where there is a much wider selection of films for rent and often newer films are included in this. Many studios don’t give permission for there films to be screened so it is probably worthwhile subscribing to this priced at $7.99 a mont for one dvd posted at a time but unlimited how many you can watch. There are additional charges if you have more than one dvd posted at a time. Note the chromecast works with HD & 1080p and also 3d. I did quite enjoy this book and the chromecast clearly is a must have and very fashionable item to have at the moment. Also if you can get this book free you have nothing to loose.

 

Mobile Fusion

The book I read to research this post was Mobile Fusion by Haji S Sillah which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book looks at mobile devices like tablets and smartphones and their associated technologies. Some of it is quite surprising like that many mobile networks use legacy hardware and if you have a 4G mobile phone on one of these it won’t go any faster. Also at the time of publication none of the mobile networks was a true 4G network. Tablets have become popular since the introduction of the iPad and devices like this are a serious threat to the monopoly held by windows computers which in the future may have to concentrate on niche markets like offices. Apple which is worth more than the combined value of Microsoft & Google is focusing on mobile devices like the ipod, iphone & ipad. Apple has a combined retail trade bigger than the US GDP. It is the largest technology firm in the world. In the future landlines will be replaced by wireless technology like WiMAX. Also devices are set to get even smaller and there will be more power crammed into less space and at a lower price. Integration with things like social media and online payments is set to increase and wireless broadband is set to be seen as a service like electricity and gas. Already with the increase in popularity of e-books bricks and mortar stores like Barnes & Noble are cutting back in that regard and focusing more on online sales. Something that is mentioned in the book is at http://udacity.edu there is a free education courses site which has come from Stanford University offering there lectures online but you can even do online exams and it is free.  Another interesting thing is the rise of mobile apps vs mobile websites and apparently the latter is regarded as better for things like price comparison and browsing. Apple only sell apps for their products at the iTunes store although with other platforms like Android Google don’t exercise the same level of control. You can’t find all the Android apps in any one place and many are on company websites so you haven’t even got to an app store. I did quite enjoy reading this book and have barely scratched the surface of what is in it.  It’s well worth reading.

Commercial Aircraft

The book I read to research this post was Commercial Aircraft by Michael J Taylor which is a very good book which I bought from a car boot sale. This book was published in 1983 so is quite dated but is good as a round up of the various fields that comprise commercial aircraft. When this book was published the idea of budget airlines flying to lesser airports and having it subsidized by them and passing it on to the passengers as cheap airfares hadn’t been conceived. Boeing’s offerings had only reached the 767 and air transport worldwide was in decline. Small short and medium range aircraft operating for small airlines were very popular and these companies had loads of orders which is probably still the same. Aircraft like the islander were an example of this aircraft that did very well. The first jet airliner was the De Havilland Comet that even did routes like London to Johannesburg and often reduced the flying time by about 60%. Some of these Comets did have crashes so they were withdrawn and by the time the problems were sorted out the Boeing 707 was released and sold over 900 aircraft which is a huge amount. They only sold 112 Comets by comparison. Another type of aircraft is cargo aircraft and with these it is less important how fast the plane travels. In fact in many cases cargo aircraft are retired passenger aircraft that have been modified. You can have combined passenger and cargo aircraft which are frequently small and you often see this in poorer countries or routes that don’t get many passengers like island routes. Another type of airplane is agricultural aircraft and there is even one with a turbofan although with these speed is usually unimportant and more important factors are rate of climb and manouvreability.  The first airlines were operated in Germany by airships around the turn of the 20th century and of course there was a big accident with the Hindenburg in America when the Hydrogen that made it fly caught alight. The first airlines operated by aircraft were in America and after World War 1 in around 1919 there was a wave of airlines because they were lots of ex airforce pilots looking for work and lots of surplus military aircraft. These aircraft had a very limited passenger capacity but the price of an air ticket gradually got reduced.

iOS 7

The book I read to research this post was The Complete iOS 7 User Guide by Peter Hills which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. iOS 7 is the latest operating system released by Apple in 2013 for devices such as the iPod touch, iPad & iPhone although there software can often be updated it only works on the more recent models. It requires a certain amount of hardware to work but you can download it on a computer and install it on these. Some of the more popular new features are the icons for a start are clearer and there is a new version of iTunes which includes a radio service which streams music and while it is free with adverts, there is a paid option without ads. Another feature is facetime audio which is similar to skype but only with the apple devices. Facetime of course lets you make video calls. Siri is retained and lets you enter voice commands in your device as well as having a search facility where you can ask it questions. A new feature is your device will work with other devices whether that be transferring files or streaming stuff. It also has upgraded security where it can analyze your fingerprint in order to work as part of this and also uses passcode and password as security. By default if it is inactive for 48 hours you must enter the password and passcode to make it work which is designed to prevent theft. They have tried to put all your settings in one place. I did really enjoy this book and it is maybe a little but is quite interesting.