I freely admit I’m one of ‘those people’.

I’d rather not have coffee than suffer a bad cup. I will search for, try, and pour out countless cups in search of something great.

Buying beans is a carefully considered adventure that often takes me to wooden-floored, brick-walled roasting houses full of people with beards and thick rimmed glasses to find exactly the right bean for the job.

If I’m going to expend that much effort finding the right roaster with the right beans, I have to have a better than average grinder. Every bean is different, every roast has its own setting which needs to be ground meticulously and deliberately to the right coarseness. Next is the process of precise weighing.

You need the right amount of ground coffee to make the perfect cup. Which means you need a scale that’s accurate to the gram, just like a drug dealer!

Once you have the right bean, grind and...

There’s been a heap of chatter recently about what Apple’s new iThing might be, the noise around this has gotten even louder since Apple started inviting people to a typically mysterious press event.

Naturally my inner fanboi is gunning for iPhone+some new iThing, but if that iThing actually ends up being an iWatch the question in my mind is: How is that useful?

It’s probably a mistake to categorize whatever the new thing is as a watch. It might actually end up being called iWatch but just like the iPhone, I really believe the name is just a label.

In the case of the iPhone, what’s become clearer and clearer over time is while it’s sold as a smartphone the iPhone’s primary reason to exist is that it’s a pocket sized, Internet connected computer you can take pretty much anywhere. ‘Phone’ is an app, a feature. The iPod functionally was renamed ‘Music’, a feature. Each app...

The day the iPod HiFi was released I was totally convinced Apple had solved a problem that had plagued all of my previous non-traditional-hifi purchases: crap quality.

I admit I couldn’t see the point of batteries - It’s heavy and not really portable, so why bother with batteries or precious keynote seconds talking about portability? I believe this set the wrong tone for a product that really lived up to the other half of the marketing story: room filling sound.

iPod HiFi is loud. Really loud. Not only loud, but a speaker designed specificlly for playing compressed music. Honest reproduction of what turned out to be the main form of music we listen to today (not that you would have believed it then). There is something warm and pleasing, even at relatively low volume, about the HiFi’s speakers that makes it suitable for most kinds if music. Even as an everyday TV/Movie/Video game...

Close to home for us network types: Honest Networker

…you didn’t see that coming.

I don’t know you and you don’t know me. That’s ok, all relationships start this way.

It’ll start off super friendly and interesting as we learn about each other and slowly, over time, it will become more familiar. You’ll know me, I’ll know you.
Who knows, maybe we’ll even end up being friends.

But that’s all in the future.

What is this about? What are you even doing here? I don’t know. I can say that hopefully this will be equal parts entertaining, interesting and perhaps a little bit educational.

That sounded a bit too serious…better fix that: