Functional items of technology designed to be worn about the person fall under the umbrella term ‘wearables’. Popular forms of wearable technology include smartwatches such as Apple Watch or Galaxy Gear and health monitoring equipment. A more advanced example would be Google Glass.
A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser) is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI/URL) and may be a web page, image, video or other piece of content.
For Example: Safari, Google Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Netscape
Web scraping is the automated collection of data from websites using an interface designed for human, rather than computer, interaction. It is typically used as a way of extracting unstructured data and importing it into a database for later use. Examples could be reading price or share value information directly from a website or posting queries to an online service and reading the results into an app. Steps are often taken to prevent the scraping of data by machines, so sometimes the most basic approach of copying and pasting by hand as the only solution.
The term “white hat” is Internet slang for an ethical hacker, or a person who discovers security problems without exploiting them for criminal activity and with a view to improving existing security systems. Facebook offers a “Bug Bounty” reward starting at $500 for the responsible reporting of qualifying security bugs.
Windows 8 brought with it a raft of new interface features, one of which is the use of Charms. Usually hidden from view, the charms slide into view when you swipe a finger inwards from the right hand side of the screen, place your mouse pointer in the top-right corner or type Windows-C on the keyboard. This column of monochromatic icons consists of a selection of context-sensitive icons which provide quick access to functions and settings relevant to what you’re currently doing on your PC.
Windows stores information about configuration and settings in a centralised database called the Registry. It’s used extensively by the operating system, while most applications also store information here. Some low-level configuration tweaks involve manually editing the Registry using the Windows application Regedit.
Also known an ‘inductive charging’, wireless charging uses magnetism to charge a battery without a cabled connection between the charger and the device. It works by creating a magnetic field in a coil located in the charger, which them induces a similar field in a coil in the device and is converted into power. A newer technique called ‘resonance charging’ also uses a pair of coils, but can operate over a distance of a few centimetres rather than requiring physical contact.
A device that can extend the range of your wireless router by receiving and re-transmitting its Wi-Fi signal.
Wireless N150 is a subset of the 802.11n Wi-Fi standard. It incorporates most of the improvements introduced by previous versions, but omits the channel-bonding feature. This limits it to a maximum theoretical data rate of 150Mbps, rather than the 300Mbps available to dual-channel equipment.
If you would like to read more about 802.11 standards, check out our IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi standards blog in our News section.
A Windows metafile, usually saved with the file extension .WMF, is a now less often used image format. It can contain bitmap graphics, but has also been popular for storing the vector graphics required for re-sizable clipart.
A popular free open source content management and blog system platform. Based on PHP and MySQL, WordPress enables users to create sophisticated, professional-looking web sites and blogs. WordPress is available under the General Public License (GPL) version 2.0.
WordPress competes in the content management market with other services like Drupal and Joomla, and it currently powers more than 73 million web sites. WordPress also offers users an extensive selection of plug-ins and templates, or themes, to extend the functionality and customizability options of the platform.
Version 3.0 of WordPress introduced a new feature, WordPress Multi-User or WordPress MU, which makes it possible to create multiple blogs with a single installation of WordPress that can be administered from a centralized administration panel.