Computer Shopper October 2020

Summer is looking very different this year. Instead of the normal roster of festivals, outdoor theatre or holidays to exotic destinations, we’re faced with social distancing, masks, and limited numbers for beaches, swimming pools and outdoor cafes, with many of us opting for staycations instead. If you’re going to be at home with time on your hands, we’ve got a raft of Raspberry Pi projects to try out (p86). Whether you want to track some wildlife with the kids, stop the barrage of online adverts every time you open up a web page or learn how to use the new High Quality Camera (p114), these should prove a worthy way of spending some time at home. Better still, none of them will break the bank, with some just requiring a Pi…

EasyasPi @ Thank you for Clive Webster’s Advanced Projects (‘Make a Media Server’, Shopper 391) I have a long history with computers, am a very enthusiastic user of Arduinos, but the Pi had until an hour ago repeatedly defeated me. I’m now happily listening to music from my server as I type this. Don’t imagine that the device is limited to serving music and videos. It is a general NAS box. And don’t underestimate USB 3.0/Wi-Fi. I only have a basic router, but I backed up 925 files in 77 folders (970MB) from my main PC to a folder on the Pi media NAS, using nothing more than File Explorer, just as if I were backing up to a USB hard drive plugged directly into the PC the files were coming from. It took…

letters@computershopper.co.uk Parishcounsel @ I am an avid reader of Computer Shopper and have been a subscriber for many years. I wonder if you might give me some pointers. I am treasurer of my local parish church and we would like to install BT Business Broadband to provide Wi-Fi in certain areas of the church to support our new cashlessgiving initiatives and to provide broadband for users of our community area. My question is: how would you approach the provision of Wi-Fi in a large, internal open space, but where the router is situated in the vestry at one end of church and the community area, as the area of largest usage, is at the other end? We need to try to avoid any structural alterations, so would a mesh system be sufficient, or…

Smartphones We put the latest and best smartphones to the test to see which is worth an upgrade, and also outline how to integrate your mobile with your PC so you can move seamlessly between the two In search of reality From vision to sound and touch to smell, we explore the technologies that make our computing experience ever more like the real world Pay up In the second in our series of articles on how to sell online, we take a look at the payment options available and how to get them working for your business Master PowerPoint Digital presentation skills have never been more important, so we show you how to master PowerPoint COMPUTER SHOPPER ISSUE 393 ON SALE IN NEWSAGENTS FROM 10th SEPTEMBER…

Tech pioneer and all-round good egg letters@computershopper.co.uk I WAS A young man living in Stockholm. It was the summer of 1969 and I was broke. I had the clothes I stood up in, a diploma in architecture and a kazoo. I was too shy to be a busker, so I invented pay-on-demand, live-streamed entertainment. I became a human jukebox. I commandeered an abandoned cardboard box, which was just about big enough to hide inside, and I cut a slot near the top for my media input/output. Below the slot, I punched eight holes to act as the graphic user interface. There were eight holes because I only knew eight songs, and I scrawled the song title next to each hole. The idea was for passers-by to provide me with digital input commands by…

Software guru and Shopper legend letters@computershopper.co.uk THIS MONTH’S COLUMN is dedicated to downright rudeness on the part of software companies (OK, mainly Microsoft) that seem to think they can decide what you ought to be doing and what software you ought to be running, along with a couple of hints on how to fight back. One thing that really irritates me is when the writers of software take liberties with your (or rather my) computer. You know the sort of thing: you install a new application or an update, and it automatically adds a shortcut icon to your desktop, and adds itself to the taskbar, even though you have no icons on your desktop because you prefer a clean screen, and will decide for yourself if you want to clutter up your taskbar. You…