_{Jamie Balfour's}Personal blog

Heriot-Watt University, the university I received a First Class Honours degree from, celebrated it's Royal Charter in 1966, making 2016 the 50th anniversary of this event. I was a graduate of this university at this time.

To add to this, the celebrations in 2016 continued since the Computer Science degree was first launched in 1966 by Alex Balfour (now that's convenient) after a lot of hard work to bring it to Heriot-Watt. This was the first Computer Science degree in Scotland. Quite remarkable that now I'm celebrating this too. 

It seems like almost all of my time at university I've been celebrating some anniversary, first Alan Turing's 100th birthday, then 50 years of James Bond, then the Royal Charter and then the first Computer Science degree in Scotland.

I'm proud to have my degree from this university and to have stuck with it for the four years, despite the number of times I had considered quitting.

I'd like to remind everyone that tomorrow (July 29th 2016) is the final day you will be able to upgrade for absolutely nothing (yes for free!) to Windows 10. This is the last chance you will have to update to the latest version of Windows at absolutely no cost, no quibbles and it's not a trial version.

I certainly believe that Windows 10 is the best Windows to date, and believe that everyone should upgrade and give it a try since it's free and going back the way is easy enough. I also believe that not trying it is a big mistake and that not installing it at all would be silly! 

So give it a try!

Macs are now saving IBM money, according to Mac Rumours.

Also, Apple are releasing a new range of input devices, according to The Verge.

Also updated are the Retina iMacs with both models receiving updates.

I'm rather happy to say that the wonderful company of Indeeo, whose software I have used in the form of iDraw which was used largely to make the icons and graphics for this website, has been taken over by AutoDesk.

iDraw as it was known is now known by the name Graphic.

Yesterday, Google announced a new logo. I noticed it when on the off chance I needed to use Google (I'm a Duck Duck Go user now). 

The new logo is the biggest change the company has made to it's logo in the 16 years of existence. It's quite an amazing change too, the font is no longer a serif font but a new sans-serif font.

What do you think of the new logo?

I just wanted to share this article because I was never a fan of Flash on YouTube:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/30/flash-youtube-nostalgia?CMP=share_btn_tw

I am glad that Flash has finally been ditched in favour of the newer HTML5 standard. My website only uses HTML5 video, there are no Flash videos to be found on my site.

I will say however, this article does remind me of some of my favourite early YouTube videos that I saw all the way back before YouTube even became the monster it is now (in fact before Google owned it). I particularly loved the 'End of the World' video back in the day (although I think I saw it before YouTube existed on StupidVideos.com).

In somewhat sad news, Motorola, one of the largest chip manufacturers in the world, has been bought by Lenovo.

You can read more at Lenovo's blog found here.

It's finally happened and of course I was at the opening of it!

I'm just uploading a couple of images here.

It was also a lovely morning, a bit of a nice breeze but it was far from being cold (although just in case I was wearing my warm fuzzy hat). I've also been in several photos on Twitter.

Panorama taken on my iPhone of the Apple Store

Waiting outside wasn't too bad - the weather was really good, but I came prepared incase it wasn't.

We got free t-shirts as I hoped! :)

A photo taken on one of the Macs in store and emailed home.

And we didn't finish without finally updating my mum's iPad to an iPad Air! (as they are now cheaper than before as well)

It was finally time for my mum to get a new iPad.

Well of course the Apple Special Event tonight has excited me very much because Apple have satisfied my hopes for a new Mac mini!

Not only that, they have really gone out on it and updated it with the new Haswell CPUs, given it Thunderbolt 2 and removed FireWire 800 and replaced it with another Thunderbolt port and kept the RJ-45. They've given it 802.11ac (almost Gigabit WiFi, similar to my MacBook Pro, although I will not be using WiFi as I prefer to use Gigabit Ethernet so that I'm on my wired switch first and foremost).

One thing to note as well by the way is that there appear to only be dual-core versions of the new Mac mini, which may make it a lower performer than the previous models, but we will have to see what Apple does with these.

Of course they also released the iPad Air 2, the iPad mini 3 and the iMac with Retina display as well. They've really gone all out and that's what they should have done on the 30th Anniversary of the Mac.

I'm so happy to see the new Mac mini, but will Apple have gone for a closed system and stopped users changing the RAM as they have with all other Macs?

Tonight at 6pm Apple will live stream information about their latest releases including (probably) a release date for Yosemite, perhaps a new iPad Air and iPad mini, (perhaps) a new Mac Mini, a new Apple TV and more.

Will you be watching it? What excites you most about it?