Yearly Archives: 2005

Where else can one go to purchase a soccer ball, hammer, socks, pet fish, the newest Lego set, and get their eyes examined for a new prescription? Wal-Mart –they have everything.

Wal-Mart has a new system in place for music lovers on the net. It’s Wal-Mart’s version of the iTunes music store. I gave it a whirl and started adding songs to my personal compilation when I came across a Tim McGraw title marked ‘Wal-Mart Exclusive’. I wonder if he recorded it inside an actual Wal-Mart?

The selection is 500,000 songs strong. Out of pocket you pay 4.62 for a CD shipped to your house with three songs on it, $0.88 additional will turn your three song CD into a Four (limit 20 songs: $19.58). Wal-Mart does have everything.

I didn’t believe this when I read it on FutureFeeder, but after tracing it back to the Molecular Media Project and other related sites I have to take it as truth.

Apparently they are using nanotechnology to alter CD’s ever so slightly, changing the sound and giving it more, lets call it richness. Your first thought is: I can grow mold on my CD and do the same thing, right.

Well yes, you can grow mold on your CD (I suggest spilling milk on them), but that would ruin the CD’s. What the Molecular Media Project is doing alters the CD’s at such a small scale the music itself stays in tack, with only slight changes that alter the sound in such a way that you might think you are on drugs. Check out a whole list of MP3’s or images that have been modified at the micro level with fungus spores and other nonmaterial to give them that extra hint of flavor.

The Sirius Sportster comes with a few customizable features. The illumination colors, Amber or green, are available for the screen and buttons independently. Presets can be set with the ease of holding down a button for 2-3 seconds while on the desired station. There’s also a Jump button feature that sends you to a geographically themed weather/traffic station for imperative driving information.

I enjoyed 6 Electronica/Dance (obviously my genre of choice) stations, 4 Hip-Hop selections, 8 different sports channels, and 5 R&B choices for the ladies lucky enough to cruise with me in the Honda.

The two different means of displaying song information tickled my fancy. One mode will display the artist and title of the current track in block letters large enough to read from outside my vehicle. The other mode will show artist and title on two different lines thus viewing both simultaneously

There were a few cons to this audio goodie delivered via satellite. I didn’t like 3 seconds of dead air when changing stations. I’m accustom to FM radio’s instantaneous audio transfer that leaves virtually no dead airtime in my car. Also, once in a while I’d get a 2-3 second pause due to loss of reception. I could live with these flaws, but I wasn’t impressed.

The hand piece itself is humongous. My first gen T-Mobile Sidekick is smaller than the device. At 4 ½” x 3 ¼” with a 1 ¼” thickness, the Sportster wasn’t allowing me to do any sports while holding on to it. I am usually agitated with pocket buldge ie. iPod in a front pocket. The Sidekick however exceeds the acceptable size for a front pocket. Since the Sirius Sportster is larger than the sidekick, it’s just too big to carry comfortably without a bag of some sort.

Along the same lines of mobility, the Sirius Sporster appears to be rather portable. The unit can fit in your car, and in a boombox for out of the car use. With these two great additions to the Sportster nobody ever has to miss any programming. Wrong. I was very disappointed with the lack of an internal battery and headphone jack for on-the-go satellite radio enjoyment. A unit of this size should contain a small battery and headphone line out for personal use. I have seen mobile phones integrated with this type of technology, so I don’t suspect that fitting the extra parts inside was an issue. My assumption is a problem with reception. The car kit required an external antenna to be mounted on the top of the car. A boombox addition comes with a telescopic antenna for receiving signals. The hand held unit must require a clunky antenna in order to receive the signal strong enough for a quality playback signal, thus axing the internal battery and headphone features. Or they left the headphone jack out of the design to keep a low price?

I visited Beverages and More while blasting a jazzy cut by Miles Davis when all of a sudden the music stopped. I then realized that I had driven into an underground parking lot, one floor below the surface, and my signal sunk like the Titanic. I don’t plan on extended listening while in underground areas, so I won’t strike the Sportster negative points on this flag.

Up to date summary:

Sound Quality: superb
Ease of navigation: child’s play
Colors: changeable =)
Display: Large and In Charge
Variety: do-able, wouldn’t mind a few more channels
Reception: good, above ground
Coolness factor: I haven’t gotten any digits yet, but I feel them coming oh so soon.

Back from hiatus!

One of the problems with living digitally is nagging little injuries keyboards and mice can give you– such as RSI, tendonitis or carpal tunnel. Up until recently, if you had one of these types of injuries, your solutions were pills or an injection into the area that was acting uppity. Now, there’s iontophoresis. What is iontophoresis you ask? Well, this website describes it as “the process by which drugs, usually dexamethasone and lidocaine, are introduced into a joint or small body part via electrical current.”

I’ll let them have non-invasive, that’s the point after all, but effective? This website indicates it is only about 57% effective. I always wonder why we have treatments with success rates like these available. Roughly one out of two is not the best odds I’ve heard. If someone asked me if I wanted to ride a plane that successfully landed 57% of the time I’d turn it down! I reckon this treatment is available and in use because they don’t tell you the effectiveness of it, they just stress that you don’t have to have an injection (which sounds good to someone like me, I am not a fan of needles).

I guess overall, if you’re afraid of injections, you should give iontophoresis a try. If you’re a fan of monster movies, might I also recommend you try iontophoresis. There’s nothing like electrical current carrying medicine into your carpal tunnel to make you feel just a little bit closer to Frankenstein’s monster.

Video games aren’t just for kids anymore. They are a serious moneymaker, and they know how to shake it. The gaming industry has pretty much caught up with the box-office and while the two will probably battle for entertainment money the next year or so, I suspect the gaming industry will knock out Hollywood like so many Mike Tyson’s Punch Out battles. Sorry movies, you just aren’t digital enough. This quarter alone the gaming industry’s revenue shot up 23 percent.

Extreme sports have really come to the public’s attention in the past few years. Surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, rock climbing, and anything that goes into the X-Games. Us technology literate [geeks] people don’t let stuff like this just pass by without putting our own spin on things. Geeks can be extreme too!

I’m not talking about sitting on your computer for 12 solid hours playing Counter Strike while your girlfriend feeds you to avoid a pause in playing. Real extreme requires danger, adrenaline, excitement, and Nintendo DS. That’s right, a group of four played Nintendo DS while skydiving to prove… something. I for one think that these guys are awesome and would have done the same thing had I been given the resources: airplane, airplane pilot, three other friends, four Nintendo DS’s, and at least one parachute.

Samsung and Microsoft have developed a HHD, hybrid* hard drive. Why didn’t I think of this? Flash memory is fast as lightning (not technically), and rotating disk hard drives forte on the capacity side of storage. When these two combine forces you’re set with a fast hard drive that has a large capacity. The best of both worlds, if you ask me.

This hybrid technology will be used for Microsoft’s new OS Longhorn.

*Note: do not mistake this with a hybrid vehicle, this hard drive does not run on gasoline and electricity.

There’s more talk about integrating mobile phones with just about anything that uses electricity than anything else these days. Dell didn’t want to be outside looking in, so they have resurfaced rumors of their mobile phone. Details aren’t out on the actual handset, but I’d imagine the target market to be stuff shirt suit and tie types. However geeks like me will most likely be the first ones to grease the screen with our dirty little hands.

Previously on LIVE Digitally we covered the ‘Sirius Radio Sportster’ and the ‘Car Docking Station With Car Antenna’ (CDSWCA) car integration. The install for our Sirius Radio went smooth as silk. The external antenna, holster, and wires all settled with no aggravating mishaps.

The first portion of the post-install review will take all data points with the mindset that the Sirius radio is connected to the car stereo via the Aux input. This seamless connection assures that the highest possible quality audio signal is being transferred to the car stereo amplifier.

What better means to test out a car stereo than to drive around the city?! That’s exactly what I did. I drove. I listened.

While driving, I noticed a very crisp and clean signal from the Sirius stereo. Every different channel I surfed blasted through my stock Honda deck and Pioneer aftermarket speakers with confidence. I usually jam along in the car with a CD or my 3G iPod (which explains why I have the aux input for the stock stereo). The Sirius sound was just as crisp and clear as a CD or the iPod.

I enjoyed Jazz, Classical, News, Hip-Hop, and Dance music with a very easy navigation interface. I was not given an instruction manual with the Sirius Sportster hand piece, but understanding the controls was no problem at all. Each station is given a 3 digit number, use the knob to scan each station in numerical order. For example the Electronica/Dance stations are given the prefix 06, thus 061, 062, 064, etc are all Electronica/Dance themed stations. Using the ‘category’ button I was able to jump genres with ease. Tap it once and the display shows your current standing without changing the station, tap again and you move entire genres.

I even set a reminder for 50 Cent’s song ‘Candy Shop’. As the song was playing, I quickly hit the menu button and maneuvered myself into the notify feature. Setting this made the Sportster notify me with a few beeps that station XXX was playing ‘Candy Shop’. With 1 button press I could jump to the song and rock out to my new favorite song!

More to come on the Sirius auto experience so don’t touch that dial (mouse button).

Combine a GPS unit with a mini computer linked up in your car and you’re a data point! The computer tells a server where you are and how fast you are going, thus painting a traffic flow map. With many different people acting as data points, the up to date information will allow the fastest route to be calculated on the fly. With this technology we can stand to wait a bit longer until Scotty is able to beam us up.

The pope has joined the digital revolution along with the rest of us. Although it’s not really a revolution it’s more of an evolution, our new pope has email! Let me tell you does he have emai. How would you feel if you opened an email account and within 48 hours there were 56,000 emails in your inbox?

I don’t think I’ve had 56,000 emails sent to me in my entire existence. I wonder how many he personally responds to? Can we say auto-reply!

Scientists have made the world’s smallest motor. In fact, the motor is so small a few hundred of them could fit in the period at the end of this sentence. This means you won’t want to install it in your humvee, but maybe you’ll fancy it in future nanotechnology that needs to swim around your body killing viruses and such. You can watch the motor run here.

As for the explanation. I never got past high school physics, so I’ll just have to quote a LiveScience article.

The motor works by shuffling atoms between two molten metal droplets in a carbon nanotube.

One droplet is even smaller than the other. When a small electric current is applied to the droplets, atoms slowly eek off the larger droplet and join the smaller one. The small droplet grows – but never gets as big as the other droplet – and eventually bumps into the large droplet. As they touch, the large droplet rapidly sops up the atoms it had previously sloughed off. This quick shift in energy produces a power stroke.

The technique exploits the fact that surface tension — the tendency of atoms or molecules to resist separating — becomes more important at small scales. Surface tension is the same thing that allows some insects to walk on water.