Wayne Williams

When it’s not crowing about the cutting edge abilities of Windows 1.0, Microsoft is busy working on the next big feature update for Windows 10, due out next year.

Today it rolls out Build 18932 which introduces some eye control improvements, and refined notification settings, among other changes.

The new season of Stranger Things starts on Netflix this Thursday -- July 4th -- and is being described by reviewers as a return to form, great news for anyone who felt a bit let down by season 2.

The new season is set in 1985, a year which gave us the Live Aid concerts, New Coke, Calvin and Hobbes, Back to the Future, and the first version of Microsoft Windows.

When you’re performing live at one of the biggest music festivals in the world, it’s probably not advisable to trust your background visuals to an old laptop running Windows XP.

This is a lesson that Neneh Cherry learned to her cost at this weekend’s Glastonbury when the laptop generating images on the rear video screen decided to reboot unexpectedly during a performance of her hit 7 Seconds.

Business intelligence and analytic projects have traditionally been based on the concept of the enterprise data warehouse, which saw compute and storage combined in a monolithic platform to achieve the performance required for high-performance analytics. More recently, the trend has been toward data lakes, but this was similarly based on the approach of putting all data in a single environment -- initially Hadoop -- for storage and analysis.

We spoke with Justin Borgman, CEO for Starburst Data, on why he believes the separation of storage and compute in the data processing and analytics sector is a trend that will continue to gain momentum.

The latest Windows 10 feature release, the May 2019 Update, is slowly making its way to users, but after the mess that was the October 2018 Update, Microsoft is keeping a close eye on proceedings.

As a result, it means the rollout is happening at an incredibly glacial pace. In fact, it's occurring at roughly the same rate as its predecessor, which isn't good news.

Earlier in the week the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the arrival of the Raspberry Pi 4, a much more powerful version of its barebones credit-card sized computer that’s hugely popular with Kodi users. You can even buy a cool Kodi-themed case for it.

Hot on the heels of a new version of LibreELEC, the lightweight Linux distro that’s perfect for running Kodi on a Pi, the Kodi Foundation releases a new version of its home theatre software.

The Raspberry Pi is understandably very popular with Kodi users, as it makes for a great, portable home theater system. There’s even a dedicated version of Kodi designed purely for the Pi.

Yesterday, the Raspberry Pi Foundation launched the latest, and easily most powerful version of its barebones computer -- the Raspberry Pi 4. The trouble is, it has a different board layout, making it incompatible with existing cases.

The Raspberry Pi was originally designed to provide an ultra-cheap way to encourage kids to code, but the uncased credit card sized computer has found an appreciative audience well outside of the education system, going on to sell over a million Pis in its first year alone. Each new iteration of the Pi has added something new, including a 64-bit processor, dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and Power over Ethernet (PoE) via a HAT.

Today, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announces the Raspberry Pi 4, and it’s a game changer, offering three times the processing power and four times the multimedia performance of its predecessor, the Raspberry Pi 3+. And that’s not all.

Work is progressing well on the next big feature update of Windows 10, due out a year from now.

Some builds offer a lot of new features, others are more about fixing problems and making general improvements. Build 18922 falls into the latter category, although it does have some language settings improvements and Feedback Hub updates.

A month ago, at its Build 2019 developer conference, Microsoft announced Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, an updated version of its compatibility layer which ships with an actual Linux kernel, meaning full system call compatibility.

Last week, the software giant rolled out Windows 10 20H1 Build 18917 with Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2). Here’s how to install it.

Windows left-aligns all of the icons on your taskbar. This looks tidy enough, but if you fancy a change -- or perhaps you wish the taskbar looked more like the Dock in macOS -- you can center the buttons, or make other changes to their positioning.

You can add some cool animations too.

We’ve still got a few months to wait before Apple unveils the follow-up to the iPhone XS, although there have already been a number of leaks and a lot of speculation regarding the next iteration of the iPhone.

It’s believed that Apple will add under-display cameras, allowing for notch-less full screen, introduce reverse-wireless charging -- so users can charge AirPods directly from the handset -- and swap the Lightning connector for USB-C.

Before large screen televisions and 4K content became a thing, I used to enjoy watching films projected onto a white wall at home. I had a Canon projector hooked up to my PC with surround sound, and it was like having a personal cinema.

Technology has moved on quite some way since then, and you can now buy reasonable quality projectors for a fraction of the price. Case in point is Nebra AnyBeam, a Raspberry Pi powered pocket sized projector.

Windows Insiders are currently testing builds from the 20H1 branch due out a year from now.

The latest new flight, Build 18917, introduces download throttling and Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, as well as a whole host of other improvements.

Microsoft has released another big feature update for Windows 10. The May 2019 Update is rolling out to compatible systems now, although you can force the update if required.

Of course, a big update like this requires a big download, and the files that Microsoft places on your system don’t get removed immediately afterwards. In other words, the May 2019 Update -- Windows 10 1903 -- could be responsible for taking up tens of gigabytes on your hard drive. Fortunately it’s easy enough to reclaim this.