“Change is the only constant” said someone-or-other. And he or she was right.
(I’ve just checked – according to the internet it was Heraclitus.)
Somehow I doubt he was talking about technology at the time. Or at least not the kind of technology we have.
But if he was, he’d have been right there, too.
And just this week gone I’ve been studying not one, not two, but three new updates.
First, Google have brought out a new version of Google Chrome. You might well have had it on your phone, tablet or PC. If you thought the box at the top, where you type in what web-page you want to go to, looked different, don’t worry that you’re imagining it – you’re right.
They’ve made a lot of the boxes look more “bubbly” – all rounded edges. I can’t say I like it particularly but there you go – they didn’t ask me!
They’ve changed one or two other things as well – including the first screen I get when I start up Chrome on my PC – instead of 8 little pictures of the websites I use most I now get little symbols to represent them.
But there don’t seem to be any huge changes.
Oh, and it might ask you to log into your Google account (if you have one) the first time you start it. I got an error message when I tried, but when I closed Chrome and opened it again, it worked fine, without even asking me.
(Maybe the one other constant is that closing something down and restarting it often solves technical problems. Heraclitus didn’t mention that one, as far as I know…)
Then there’s also news about the new update coming for Microsoft Windows. It’ll still be called Windows 10 but this “September update” will have a few cosmetic changes.
I wouldn’t worry about this update too much, though. There are a few small changes to how some things look, but the significant changes are all in fairly obscure things that you probably weren’t using anyway. It’s just worth knowing that your computer might need to do a big update and downloading it (and installing it afterwards) could take quite a while – even a few hours. Just leave your PC to it while it sorts itself out.
Oh, and this “September Update” will come to most people in October. The other, other constant seems to be that Microsoft still haven’t got the hang of sensible naming of things… Actually, that’s not completely fair – it turns out they’ve now started calling it the October update instead, so I suppose they are getting the hang of it.
Thirdly, if you have an Apple iPad or iPhone, then it’ll probably shortly get a new version of iOS (the system that runs it). If yours is one of the older ones it might not get it – but if it was already running on the most recent version (11), it’ll get this new version 12.
There are a few changes but probably the most important is they’ve made it more stable (ie it doesn’t crash as much), it uses less battery charge (good news for everyone – so your battery won’t run out quite as quickly) and it runs a little faster. More on this shortly…
A website I found out about the other day
The other day I was reading something on the web and discovered that Gresham College now put their series of lectures on their website for anyone to watch.
Gresham college has been giving free lectures in London to anyone who’s interested for centuries – but now you don’t have to go to London to watch them.
Their website’s here. I had a quick look and thought the one on Merchants’ houses in London looked interesting… and they have some less usual topics, like “6000 years of bread”… so I thought I’d mention it in case anyone else fancies having a browse through the different things they’ve had talks on.