Is It Time To Give Second Life A Second Chance?

As online communities go, it’s hard to get more ambitious or, frankly, bizarre than Second Life. Isn’t it all a bit passé, though? Sarah Dobbs looks into the state of the virtual world…

Remember Second Life? Sure you do. When the online virtual world was launched by Linden Lab back in 2003, it was meant to be revolutionary. Not quite a game, not quite a chatroom, Second Life was supposed to represent, well, a second life. It was a forum for users to reinvent themselves, to create avatars that represented themselves – physically accurate or not – and meet other people. It caused any number of headlines; couples met in Second Life and got married, fraudsters found victims in Second Life and ripped them off, psychologists debated whether or not spending time in Second Life was healthy.

Code With AI2. Timer (Part 2)

Build a useful Android timer app with David Briddock

Last time we created a simple yet useful timer app with AppInventor 2 (AI2). This week we’ll extend this app by adding more components and additional coding blocks. Remember, all you need to play along is a Windows/Mac/Linux PC, web browser and Google account. Ideally you’ll also have an Android smartphone or tablet, but even this isn’t essential.

Oh No, Lenovo

The world’s top computer builder has been caught leaving its devices potentially vulnerable twice in the space of a year. Will it ever learn?

It’s been little more than six months since Lenovo, the world’s largest shipper of PC technology – with nearly 20% of the market in 2014 – pledged to end the installation of third-party software on its machines. The announcement (which can be seen at tinyurl.com/ktzcprj) came in the wake of a furore surrounding a piece of software called Superfish, which had the capability to intercept and look at encrypted traffic in order to display adverts.

Can An App Make You More Productive?

There are countless so-called ‘productivity apps’ on the market, all claiming that they can force you out of procrastination and into a state of unbridled target-accomplishing bliss. Rob Leane asks: do any of them actually work?

The term ‘productivity app’ may seem like a misnomer, seeing as most apps available these days tend to have the opposite effect. Between this writer’s phone and his laptop, there’s enough downloaded content to stop me from ever doing any actual work. My phone tends to be filled with the likes of Candy Crush, Words With Friends and an ever-growing myriad of social media platforms. These regularly combine into a super-effective distraction device, more than anything else.

How To Get The Best From A Multi-GPU Setup

Multi-GPU setups provide the best graphical performance, and here’s how to get the best from the tech

Most people may be content with a single graphics card; some are even happy with onboard video. However, as PCs have evolved, and games have become more and more complex and visually accomplished, the need for power has grown. Graphics cards have become more and more powerful as a result, allowing developers scope to produce the best graphics they can, in fact, the more powerful graphics cards can even help the main CPU with its own workload, boosting your PC’s capabilities.

Does Alphabet Spell A New Dawn?

Google is reorganising itself as Alphabet, but why? How will it work, and what difference will it make to us? David Crookes looks at what comes next

In 2001, the Royal Mail made a risky decision that would prove to be a short-lived disaster. In a bid to show that it did more than just deliver the post, the company ditched a well-recognised name, which perfectly described what the firm ultimately did, and rebranded as ‘Consignia’, a name that the bosses admitted did not mean anything. After much eyebrow raising, and a refusal by many workers to comply, the firm changed to the more reasonable Royal Mail Group. Consignia barely lasted a year, and ultimately went down as one of the biggest – and most expensive – corporate mistakes of all time.