Check out this interesting video of silk-worms creating a dome. Researchers at MIT have found a way to control the worm's spinning patterns by changing the environment of the worms. They created a scaffold for the worms and then used a computer program to manipulate heat and light to control the spinning patterns of the worms. 


http://vimeo.com/67177328

Perhaps you have heard from your computer repair technician that the internet is running out of addresses. What does this mean for you here in Sydney? Well, what is happening is that there are a limited number (4.29 billion) of possible IPv4 addresses that can be allocated to networks residing on the internet. IP addresses work in the internet the same way your postal address works for your house. The IP address of your computer is how other computers on the internet locate it and send their data to. A new protocol IPv6 has been developed that allows for many more addresses. 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 in fact. IPv6 will also simply the process of address assignment and includes additional network features.

IPv4 is short for Internet Protocol version 4. When you connect a computer to the internet it is assigned a unique IP address. Because there are a limited number of IP addresses, Network Address Translation (NAT) allows a distinction between a private IP address and a public IP address. All your computers on your network are identified by the same public IP address. NAT, which is built into your router, then directs the packet it has received to the appropriate computer on the network.

As there are so many IPv6 addresses available, this eliminates the need for a private vs public IP distinction. IPv6 performs the same function that ipv4 does. However, IPv6 uses a 128 bit address, while IPv4 uses 32 bit addressing system. An IPv6 address is so large in decimal or binary that it is displayed in hexadecimal notation.IPv4 and IPv6 run as parallel networks. Special gateways and protocols are needed for the two technologies to communicate to each other.

The next section probably won’t mean much to you unless you have some networking experience.IPv6 creates addresses that are equivalent to IPv4 address types and other types of addresses that are unique to IPv6. A node can possess multiple IPv6 addresses, each of which has its own unique function. The IPv6 address space allows for multiple levels of subnets and address allocation between the Internet and individual subnets within LANs and local intranets. The increased address space available lets us to allocate not

one but several unique IPv6 addresses to a network entity, with each address being used for

a different purpose.

The IPv6 128-bit address is separated at 16-bit boundaries, and each 16-bit section is converted

to a 4-digit hexadecimal number.

Global unicast IPv6 addresses are the IPv6 equivalent to IPv4 public unicast addresses. To demonstrate

IPv6 address syntax, lets look at the following IPv6 global unicast address:

24f1:0035:0000:0000:03ad:003f:af37:8d62

IPv6 addresses can be simplified by removing the leading zeros within each 16-bit

block. However, each block must have at least a single digit so you will always have at least a 0 in each block. .

The address representation now becomes:

24fa:35:0:0:3ad:3f:af37:8d62

 

Luckily for us, the transistion to IPv6 is going well and modern routers and operating sytems etc. all support IPv6. These technologies also make use of special translation software to enable communication between IPv4 and IPv6. So in answer to how IPv6 affects computer repair in Sydney. Not much at all. 

 Nerd out. 

Our computer repair customers from all around Sydney often ask us whether they should be using Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom for computer photo editing. Let’s go through some pros and cons of both programs. We realise this has nothing to do with our usual topic of computer repairs but we hope you will forgive us. 

Adobe Lightroom was designed for photographers who want to use comuters for editing. Lightroom has tools to make routine photo fixing tasks easier than using equivalent tools in Photoshop. You  can use both programs side by side. A lot of photographers tends to use Lightroom for a lot of the routine work and save Photoshop for advanced photographic repairs. Lightroom lets you makes global edits to your photos in a non-destructive manner as the changes in the Lightroom images aren’t rendered to the file until your export it. In Lightroom, you can copy changes from your images in one or two keystrokes. In photoshop you would need to open all of your images, makes your changes and then save them or write an action to do the world.