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Monthly Archives: August 2008

Little Known Facts about Sarah Palin: a fun day of Tweeting

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I’ve spent a good part of the last 6 hours chuckling following the “Little Known Facts” meme about Sarah Palin. It appears to have started by a Twitter user named Michael Turk who Tweeted:

Little known fact: Sarah Palin used to wrestle kodiak bears in Alaskan bare knuckles fight clubs.

Since then, over 1000 (1092 at the time of writing) other entries have appeared. In fact, 60 more were written while I write this blog post.

Some are LOL funny. Some are not. But it’s just made my day, and if you want to read more, enjoy them here (including mine). There’s even palinfacts.com already in place with some highlights.

Thank you Internet (and especially Michael Turk), for making today an especially fun one.

How Verizon Could Improve Their Mobile Gaming

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As a long-time Verizon Wireless customer (originally back with GE!), I must say I’m generally quite happy with my service. My bill is a tad high, but then again we have 2 phones with lots of minutes, a Family plan and full access in the US and Canada, thus offsetting our home phone bill (~$10/mo for a landline). During my daily busride, I like to play games on my phone (Samsung SCH-U740 – awesome). I think Verizon may have created one of the best platform potentials but laden it with one of the worst user experiences I’ve ever seen.

In my phone menu, going to Games, then Get New App gives me a fairly easy set of options. I can instantly buy one of their top 2 games/promotions, or browse through categories to find what I want. The categories are pretty self-explanatory, and that’s about where the usability ends.

Picking a game brings you to a screen with three options: Subscription price, Unlimited price, and Info. On a rare occasion there’s also the option for a Free Trial, but we’ll ignore that for now. Let’s presume that I pick an interestingly named title, for example “Stranded: A Game of Survival” ($2.99 Sub, $7.99 Unl). Clicking “info” shows me the following text:

You awake Stranded on a mysterious island with other survivors. You discover that not everyone can be trusted. Will you escape? Without a price plan that includes an unlimited data feature, you will incur either (depending on your plan) airtime charges at applicable overage rates if you exceed your minutes bundle or megabyte (“MB”) charges of $1.99/MB for downloading the application. Some applications may result in additional charges for sending/receiving data during use. [Size:479KB]

First of all, I don’t know anything about the game! This category (strategy games) includes things ranging from Command and Conquer to Triple Scoop Twist, so there’s no information about gameplay. Is it a RTS? An RPG? A puzzle? Etc. Interestingly the website has nice screenshots and much more text describing the game itself. Why isn’t this available in the game page on the phone when I’m considering a purchase?  Even the website descriptions are lacking the specifics I’d want to know to make a decision.

Second, the data usage warning is terrible. I get that they want to warn me about a potential charge, but how is the text they use going to help? I don’t know if the app actually uses airtime/minutes to play, or if that’s just for the download itself! I understand it is a lot of extra work to figure out a user’s plan in real-time (well, no, I don’t *really* understand it, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt), but a simple clarification of the English would be swell.

Finally, I think a lot more free trials would sell me a lot more applications. I’ve downloaded several of the ones that give me a free level to play, or a few minutes of playtime, and have actually purchased one game as a result. I am a big believer in putting some bait on the hook, as opposed to just throwing a hook in the water and saying “here fishie fishie fishie!”  Especially considering Verizon’s Get-It-Now system is a complete walled garden, I don’t think there’s a way to “steal” a game even if I wanted to!

For the record, I’ve purchased the following games: Sudoku (good version too), Diner Dash (fun, but a bit repetitive), Call of Duty 4 (I’m such a sucker, though it was simple and fun), Transformers (not much more than meets the eye), and Townsmen 3 (meh).  I’d really like to have a very simple Ultima-style RPG (think Ultima 2 or 4) that can be played in short, bite-sized amounts of time.  It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to figure it out even if I find one, but one can always hope…

Why the Technology Stances of Our Politicians Are Meaningless

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I don’t much care about a politician’s stance on technological issues. Do you?

Joe Biden.Sure you do. The net? Gotta keep it neutral! Excessive penalties for minor copyright infringement? Joe Biden’s proposed legislation that would force electronics makers to ensure that the government could have access to any encrypted communications? Take my key and shove it, komrade Biden!

John McCain is against net neutrality legislation (not the idea of net neutrality, mind you, just the idea of legislating it. He’s super free-market, despite the fact that the free market can’t thrive where there’s no competition. How many broadband providers can you choose from, again?) Barack Obama, the geek’s stalwart, is all hat, no cattle, when it comes to punishing the evil telecoms and protecting you from warrantless wiretaps (I don’t worry too much, I just set my Twitter account to “Private” and don’t add “US Government” or “NSA” as a friend on Facebook. Plus, I totally jailbreak my iPhone That should solve it, right?)

All of this stuff is really important. Right? That’s what we say… until we get in that voting booth. Then, our pragmatic side finds that little things like national security and the economy are just a wee bit more important. It’s a natural reaction – in the grand scheme of our lives, having a sound economy and taking out the bad guys du jour are always going to trump our need access ESPN.com in 30 milliseconds instead of 90 milliseconds, or our fear about whether or not we’ll be ponying up a couple of grand because we swiped a copy of Bring it On 2: Bring it More On off of the Pirate Bay. It’s easy to support net neutrality, it’s another to shrug off short term worries in order to support it, especially when your candidate of choice may not be on the right side of the issue.

It’s a shame, (and here comes the pessimism) because net neutrality will be one of those topics that we look back and ten years from now and say “if only we had held lawmakers responsible back then, we would have something other to do on the net than tune to the Sports Portal (sponsored by ESPN), the New-o-Tron (CNNBCFOX), and LOL Cats Central.” But it also means that, when CNET publishes a story on McCain’s VP pick that’s as brutal as the story they published on Biden, you won’t have to fret too much if you’re a McCain supporter, because a bad tech record isn’t going to mean anything when you close the curtain to vote November 4.

Update: Ziff-Davis’s Larry Dignan covered this as well.

Fun Weekend at #Gnomedex

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JT at gnomedexAll I knew about Gnomedex in the past was that it had something to do with new media, open source/tech, and if you are invited to get on stage and speak about your company there is a chance that doing so will cause uproar in the audience. When I was invited to speak on behalf of Bug Labs, I decided to hold off on creating a presentation until I was a few hours into watching others do the same.

Some of the presentations were eye-opening, such as Danny Sullivan demonstrating the power of search and the challenges of privacy. I learned a lot of useful camera tips from Vancouver photographer Kris Krug (go Canada!). I was inspired by the power of the crowd when the attendees + audience raised over $3000 during Beth Kanter‘s presentation. I also paid a lot of attention to the backlash on Twitter during the Magnolia presentation and the debate over Sarah Lacy’s keynote (which was unquestionably NOT the focal point of the show for those who only read CNET’s coverage).

After watching a few and following the feedback on the live video stream as well as on Twitter, I started making my deck (a.k.a. powerpoint presentation). I decided to (1) keep the “Bug Labs company/products pitch” extremely short (2/53 slides), (2) keep the “Bug Labs vision pitch” as the centerpoint of the show, (3) keep it moving fast, (4) inject humor, and (5) make a point.

All was well until the guy before me gets up and starts showing off stuff I couldn’t possibly “compete” with. Robots and spaceships. Yep, it was Scott Maxwell from JPL, the guy who drives the Mars Rover! Come on! Seriously though, fascinating content, with a highlight of a picture showing the planet Earth from the surface of Mars – the first such picture ever taken. Scott received a standing ovation for his show. Next up, JT…

Video streaming by Ustream

I had a great time making the slides as well as during the presentation itself (few more thoughts here). Thanks to the audience for your support and positive energy, it was a lot of fun. To those of you who couldn’t be there, just do a twitter search for #gnomedex, you’ll see a lot of action.

Review of Suunto Core Wristop Computer

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I bought a Suunto Core watch, in orange. I like climbing, and being in the mountains, so a watch with an altimeter makes at least some sense, which helps me justify the purchase of this rather expensive watch wristop computer.

Suunto is probably best known for their dive computers, both wristop computers, and the kind that attach to a SCUBA diver’s regulator. However, they also make several lines of outdoor / mountain oriented wristop computers. And they have a long history of excellence in manufacturing compasses.

An outdoor, mountain-oriented watch / wristop computer should include a couple of important features:

  1. It should tell time
  2. Effective alarm(s)
  3. Luminescence (push button, generally) for night time use
  4. Altimeter (this tells your elevation)
  5. Barometer (for monitoring changes in air pressure, a good signal of impending stormy weather)
  6. Compass
  7. And a bunch of other things like difference measurements, logbooks, “start from zero,” depth measurements (for when you go under water), rotating bezel, button lock, etc.

There’s a cool video that shows a bunch of the neater features. Check it out.

Truthfully, what initially caught my eye was the look and style of this watch. Many would call it garish. I call it me. I love the color orange, and I think the palette and style of the face itself is magnificent. My affection for the rubbery orange band ebbs and flows, but that’s easy to change. There’s a high-quality double hinge on both the top and bottom bands, which is an incredibly strong mechanism, and a good sign of quality.

If you’re not as into orange as I am, Suunto sells this watch in a number of different guises, both plainer and more grandiose than my selection. (See choices to the left.)

Aside from the aesthetics, this watch packs a lot of impressive features into a small package. Aside from telling time, my favorite feature is the altimeter. It’s necessary to calibrate it correctly; this can be accomplished either by knowing your current elevation and setting it accordingly, or by a trickier method involving the calibration of the barometer function (which is also very cool.) Truthfully, the manual on this sucker is extensive, and I have not quite waded through all of it yet. However, the watch, alarm, calendar, stopwatch, light, button lock, and basic altimeter have all fallen before my wily charms. I also had some help from my wife who is usually cleverer than me when it comes to gadgets, buttons, sequences, and other things requiring both patience and logic. Those are not my strong suits.

It’s fairly large compared to an average wrist watch, though not excessively so. It’s very comfortable, and not overly heavy in spite of its bulk. Sometimes if it slides forward and when I bend my wrist it gets in the way. Also, if I’m resting my hands on the edge of my laptop to type, the band can interfere with my personal ergonomics. Small price to pay for fortune and glory, but it’s an issue nonetheless. It’s also waterproof to 30 meters, which is not diving depth, but certainly has you covered for showers, swimming, or even most snorkeling. For more extensive water activities (like SCUBA) you might look at some of their other products.

This device is not cheap. The retail on the orange model is around $350. The least expensive Core model is $250 (in black and yellow.) You can purchase it through any number of online retailers, including Backountry.com. If you want to see one in person, REI carries them, and many high-end, well stocked outdoor retailers will also probably carry them.

If you’re looking for a distinctive looking and expensive wrist watch, or for an extremely feature-rich, mountain-focused wristop computer, this is an outstanding purchase. I highly reccomend, and if I were forced to give it a numeric rating I’d call it an 8 out of 10. I will update this review after my next big outdoor trip.

Here’s a video review of the Suunto Core in twelve seconds:

Suunto Core Wristop Computer on 12seconds.tv

This review is also posted on 1to10reviews.


Review: The Nextar T30 Portable Media Player Demands a "Saved By The Bell" Analogy

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Saved By The Bell CastNote: If you’re not familiar with Saved By the Bell, I suggest you open up your wallet, clear a couple of days, and catch up. Then, return for the review.

The Nextar T30 is the Jessie Spano of the Portable Media Player world. The sub-$100 player has its upsides – it’s attractive, has a decent feature set, and the price for picking one up isn’t nearly as daunting as the cost of its more popular competition. But, much like AC Slater discovered when he started courting Jessie, the Nextar T30 features just enough potential deal-killers that you’ll wish that you had either made the effort to get your hands on the more attractive competition, or settled for something just as middling, but not quite as frustrating.

The Superficial

The T30, like Jessie, is a smart-looking piece of hardware with a slim profile. Its face is dominated by a 3.5 inch QVGA (320 x 240 resolution) screen, which Nextar claims supports over 260,000 colors (I didn’t count). The body, which is just under half an inch thick, sports a cheery orange accent. Tiny buttons for playback and navigation run the top and right edges. At 4″ x 3″, the whole package is light, easily pocketable, and garners the coveted “wow, that’s a big screen! Cool!” reaction from the easily impressed.

Nextar with Jessie SpanoNextar T30 ports

Nextar T30 Nav buttonsNextar T30 Play, Volume Buttons

In any range of conditions, I had no problem with the screen’s brightness – even in full sunlight, the picture wasn’t washed out. The picture quality is passable, but not great – even with well-encoded video or 320×240 images, there was still noticeable pixelation.

Sound quality was adequate via the built in speaker, better using headphones.

Smarts (It’s What’s on the Inside That Counts, Right?)

Jessie Spano, a geek’s girl before there was an even a concept of a geek’s girl, knew it all. History, math, science, she could handle it all. The T30’s functionality is almost as impressive, with qualifiers – it plays music, plays video, displays photos, and serves as an “ebook” reader. 4GB of internal storage come built in, and an SD port allows for up to an additional 2GB. If you roll analog, you can calm your Top 40 craving with a built-in FM tuner that also allows you to record the audio directly to the T30’s storage. I was able to manage my media with Windows Media Player with no problem, and the brave can simply create folders and drag files in Windows Explorer.

I’m So Excited! I’m So Scared!

So how can you resist? Let’s reserve a table at The Max, get on the Zack Morris phone, and take this little mama to the prom!

Not so fast, bucko.

Hands-on, the Nextar T30 has some issues that could, for some users, prove more worrisome than our beloved Jessie’s skeleton-laden closet (most worrisome first):

  • The Caffeine-Pill Addiction (the deal breaker): Just like Jessie’s lust for caffeine-fueled all-night study sessions almost destroyed her, the Nextar T30’s downfall is the device’s interface. It’s maddeningly slow and the button layout forces you to operate it with two hands. New media is listed seemingly by the day it was added, and there’s no way to adjust the display. Since you can’t sort your data (by album, song name, artist, etc), finding any piece of individual media when you’ve uploaded a full 6 GB will be an extensive, frustrating click-fest.
  • The Bad-Boy Brother: Media management, like Jessie’s rebellious half-sibling Eric, is aggressively irritating. Quick example: I own Wang Chung’s Greatest Hits (who doesn’t?), and I want the option to be able to listen to the album as a whole, or to listen to “Everybody Have Fun” on my “All Time Greatest Hits” playlist. To do this, I had to create two folders (one for each playlist), and then copy the song into each folder. Having to load the same media onto the same device twice is about as bad as trying to cheat Screech out of his valedictorian spot because you want to get into Stamford University.
  • The Know-it-all Attitude: You can play any type of video, as long as it’s an avi (video conversion software comes in the box, but doesn’t convert Quicktime files). You can read any ebook, as long as it’s a .txt file. You can listen to any type of music, as long as its an mp3 or wma file. Blech. I know format lock-ins aren’t unique to Nextar, but it’s still frustrating.

The Kelly Factor

Kelly Kapowski. Must... Not... Be... Gratuitous...Like Jessie, the Nextar T30 is in a field laden with tough competitors. Jessie Spano always seemed to find herself shown up in one way or another. The Nextar finds itself similarly outcompeted:

  • The Creative Zen 4 GB, the Stacey Carosi of the bunch. Not much prettier, but a lot more pluck – for the same price point, provides a more vivid (but smaller) screen, better media management, and basic contact info/calendar management.
  • The iPod Nano 4GB, for $50 more, is the Lisa Turtle – richer, and more polished. It’s an iPod. The screen’s smaller, but if you’re reading this site, you don’t need a rundown on how the iPod works.
  • The Archos 605 and iPod Touch are the lust-worthy Kelly Kapowskis. Both sport similar sized, more vivid screens, and are heads and shoulders above the Nextar in every category. I know the comparison is completely unfair, as these devices are targeted at entirely different markets, but the men of Bayside High and the Malibu Sands Beach Club had to make their choices as well. Is it worth a couple hundred extra bucks to have everything you always wanted, or do you want to settle for the issues-laden, unmanageable cheapie? The choice is yours.

The Report Card

Poor Jessie, despite all of her surface appeal, never came out on top. Time after time, her beauty and smarts were subsumed by her haughty whining, costing her friends, boyfriends, and audience love. The same holds true for the Nextar T30, a portable media player that manages to disappoint despite its attractive price point, appealing design, and huge screen. You may need to shell out a couple of extra bucks to pick up a better option, but the trifle of a few bucks is worth not having to deal with the T30’s maddening interface and media management issues. This little mama is going to detention – turn your sights elsewhere.

Explaining the "Digital Transition" and Review of the RCA ANT1500 Antenna

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I recently had a phone interview with Lou Lenzi, Sr. Vice President, Product Management with Audiovox Accessories and he gave me the statistic that 13 million homes in the US currently use an antenna to receive television signal to their main TV. Then there is another 6 million that use and antenna to receive signal to one or more of their extra TVs. Lenzi explained that people have TVs in the spare bedroom, basement, or out in the garage, all fall into this category. That means that come February 17, 2009, there will be about 13-16 million TVs that will stop working unless some actions are taken. Some of you are saying 13 million plus 6 million is 19 million, but there are some small markets that are not required to kill their analog signal.

For those of you that want answers to every digital TV questions, here are some resources. DTVanswers.com, DTVtransition.org, and here is a video created by CEA that explains everything. For everyone else, here are the basics.

There are 2 different OTA (over the air) TV broadcasts. NTSC (National Television System Committe) and ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee). There is no such thing as a HD antenna, all antennas can pick up the ATSC signal, or the NTSC for that matter, it is just that the rabbit ear antennas aren’t able to pick up a strong enough digital signal. Each of the signals need a tuner to correctly interpret the signal for the television.

Everyone that has an older TV with a rabbit ears antenna, will have a couple options. The first is to pony up the money and pay for cable or satellite service on the TV. If you want to keep on receiving free television, your next option is to purchase a newer TV that comes equip with a digital (ATSC) tuner. If you want to keep your old TV, you will need to purchase a converter box that has a digital tuner. With both of these free TV options you will also need to purchase an antenna that is built for the ATSC signal, and is strong enough to receive the signal in your location.

For all of the options above there are some pros and cons. First of all, anytime an antenna is used there is the possibility of what is called “drop off”. Meaning, if the signal drops too low for the tuner to display the TV picture, the picture freezes or skips. There is no fuzzy picture that happens, which is the case when the analog (NTSC) signal is not strong enough. If you don’t have the correct antenna for your location, this problem may occur many times during a show or game, and become very annoying. The big bonus of using an antenna for HDTV is that the OTA signal is uncompressed. So if you receive a clean signal with no drop offs, you will have the potential for the absolute best picture possible, pending your TV display. If you decide to go with cable or satelitte, you will receive a 100% uninterupted signal (unless you have Comcast, but thats another issue all together), but the picture could be highly compressed. You will also be paying a monthly fee, where as with the antenna, HDTV and/or converter box, you will just be paying a one time fee. Finally, most of the indoor antennas are bulky and pretty much the eye sore of you entertainment center. Enter the RCA ANT1500.

RCA ANT1500 Photo 1 RCA ANT1500 Photo 2
Front view of the RCA ANT1500

 Front view of the RCA ANT1500
with DVD case for size reference
RCA ANT1500 Photo 3 RCA ANT1500 Photo 4
Top view of the RCA ANT1500
with DVD case for size reference		 Back view of the RCA ANT1500
with DVD case for size reference

This new antenna from RCA is a compact, multi-directional, HD optimized antenna. With its small, form factor, you can lay it flat on top of entertainment center, hang it flat on the wall behind your TV, or in theory, stand it upright on a shelf.

Before anyone goes out and purchases an antenna to use with their digital tuner, they should check out AntennaWeb.org. Here you can type in your address to see what channels should be broadcasted in your area, and what type of antenna you should be able to use to receive them. After you find out what antenna you should be able to use, I would purchase one at a retailer with a good return policy, in case the antenna doesn’t work quite as well as you’d like.

I live in an apartment near O’Hare airport creating 2 factors that are big downsides for digital reception. AntennaWeb.org says that I should use a powered multi-directional antenna. I tested this ANT1500 with my ATI HD Wonder card in my PC, and a 24 in widescreen monitor. I loved how small and compact the antenna was, I was able to shove it in the corner, out of the way of all of my A/V gear. I just wish I could have kept the antenna in the corner out of the way, all of the time. In fact, I had to move the antenna between 2 different locations depending on the channel that I wanted to watch. I think if the antenna wasn’t hard wired with a 6 ft. coax cable, I would have been able to attach a longer cable, and find a single location farther than 6 ft away from my tuner, that would be able to receive all of the channels successfully. With the antenna in the correct location in order to get a good signal, I would still have “drop off” about 3-4 times in a 30 min program.

RCA ANT1500 Back Stand
RCA ANT1500 Back Stand

Besides having a hardwired coax cable, the only other design flaw is the “stand” that comes with the antenna. As you can see, there is a C shaped metal attachment that goes into 2 holes at the bottom of back of the antenna. The only thing is that, the cable comes out of the bottom as well. There is no notch or anything for the antenna to safely avoid bending at an awkward angle, making the antenna look like it is ready to fall over. I think the stand should have been thought about better, or just removed from the package altogether.

After reporting my not so awesome reception to AudioVox, they went ahead and sent me a Zenith converter box, saying it should work better than my HD Wonder card. Using the converter box was super easy, I connected the antenna to the box, and RCA cables from the box to my video and audio. The box automatically scanned for channels and was able to display programming details. Again, I had the exact same problems, needing to move the antenna between the 2 different locations, and 3-4 “drop offs” per 30 min program. My apartment might be one of the worst scenarios when it comes to digital reception.

If you live in a location where a non-powered multi-directional antenna will receive most of your channels, I highly recommend this antenna. Its small form factor is a huge plus in the world of antennas, because most of them are so darn ugly, and HUGE. Example A, B, C, D and E. Again, I would recommend trying the antenna out in your setup before you throw away your receipt.

I know some of you might be saying, with all this hassle of signal, and “drop off” why would I even want to bother with this whole HD antenna deal? As mentioned before, the two positives are no monthly payments, and uncompressed HD quality. But the real question is, whether or not either of those two are worth it, if your signal drops out every so often, especially during the big game. If you can receive a 100% free, crystal clear signal, with limited “drop offs”, I would say it is, for sure worth it. This digital transition, can be as costly or as not so costly as you want it to be. Hopefully this information can help you make the best decisions.

14 Ways to use Gadgets More Sustainably

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I had a great “off-the-grid” weekend camping and was reflecting on living life a little less tech-y, thought it would be a good idea to put together thoughts on using technology more greenly (is that a word? doubtful). Over the past year I’ve spent a chunk of time looking into how to change my habits to use less energy, be less wasteful, and I’m a big believer that we can all cut back or think about our impact a little more. So in easy-to-read-everybody-loves-a-list format…

  1. Don’t Need? Don’t Buy! There’s no easier way to live sustainably than to consume less goods. The process of creating a product takes so much energy and resources that this is your #1 way to help the world. An alternate suggestion here is buying used/recycled/refurbished products (you’ll save a lot of money this way as well). As my colleague Pip Coburn says, there’s a lot more “wanting” in life than there is “needing”.
  2. Unplug them at night. Ever notice how your power transformers (the big black bricks) are warm, even if your device is off? Everything uses a trickle amount of power just by being plugged in. It might take you a few extra seconds here and there, but try unplugging your gadgets, or switching off your power strips at night.
  3. Print in draft mode. Not only are printer cartridges pricey, the materials used are very costly in terms of resources. Unless you are printing a “keeper”, you should be printing in draft/low-quality mode (virtually all printers have this setting).
  4. Turn off your displays! While LCDs and plasmas have the earthly benefit of using less materials to produce relative to CRT screens, they also seem to stay on a lot more. Unfortunately, displays use more power than virtually anything else in your home, and the more you can leave them off, the better. This has a second benefit in that it’ll extend the lifespan of your display, which brings us back to point #1 above.
  5. Remove batteries from infrequently used devices. Got a remote control you never use? Take the battery out, as they’ll basically self-destruct after time. Yank the batteries out, tape them to the remote, and you’ll be all set.
  6. Buy rechargeable stuff. Even better than #5 above, try to avoid buying things that don’t have built-in rechargeable batteries. Or, buy rechargeable batteries and stop buying one-time use options. I use Eneloops from Sanyo myself.
  7. Shut down PCs! If you’re on Windows, both Standby and Hibernate are better than leaving a PC on overnight, even if it adds 1-5 minutes to your morning (shameless plug: unless you use a Splashtop-powered computer). If you are on a Mac, there’s simply no excuse for leaving it on overnight.
  8. Lower brightness settings. As I’ve mentioned earlier, screens (TV, laptop, etc) use more power than almost any other gadget/technology you’ll own.  Lowered brightness settings mean less power used mean longer life mean overall less consumption of resources.
  9. Turn down the volume. This is the audio version of lowered brightness.  In comparison, this is a small blip compared to the screens, but more juice is more juice.  Also, you’ll probably annoy less neighbors and keep your ears working properly a bit longer in life.
  10. TV or Laptop, not both. The stats are showing that along with the ~8.5 hours a TV is on during the day, about ~40% of that time is spent with members of the household using a computer.  While watching TV.  Now maybe it’s just my eyes, but I can’t see both screens simultaneously.  Not only that, focusing on one activity at a time will probably be a fairly calming experience anyway, so do yourself (and the world) a favor by turning off the screen you aren’t really paying attention to.
  11. Charge only when needed. I can say with a lot of certainty that you don’t own a single product which truly requires an overnight charge.  Not only will you save some power, you’ll probably extend the life of your battery, as many devices still tend to overcharge, and drain the longevity of use.
  12. Check power consumption prior to buying. Philips won the overall Best of CES award this past year with their eco-friendly plasma, and while it’s still a big power-hog, it’s less of a power-hog than the rest.  If you are ultimately indifferent to the gadget you are getting, do a quick power consumption check (clearly labeled on all packaging) before buying.
  13. Monitor your use. Nothing feels better about a new project than learning you are doing it right. Check your power bill to get a sense of your current consumption, then start looking for differences.  In a bit of an oxymoronic move, you could buy this gadget to monitor electrical use. Well, maybe you can find it used, right?
  14. Support sustainable brands. REI sells solar-powered chargers. IKEA may start selling solar cells. D-Link has a “green” router. There are more and more companies jumping on the “green” bandwagon (hence the watchdog site) and much of it is just marketing hype. But some of it is real, and you should buy products from companies that use better production technologies, ship less goods across the country/world, and use sustainable/recycled materials in their products. Your checkbook is the best possible way to voice your opinion!

As always, this isn’t the “complete list” and I’d love to see some suggestions in the comments to enhance it.  Also, check out the “green gadgets” column at Inhabitat for more tracking of the topic. Or, for funsies, you can read this post from The Onion.

Liberal Media Deals In Lies: NYT Rewrites iPhone History

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The NYT feeds the Android/T-Mobile hype machine with a fairly tepid press-release-dressed-up-as-an-article, but this utterly craptastic piece of “analysis” cannot go unchallenged:

Apple’s iPhone has shaken the cellphone industry, partly because of its design, but mostly because AT&T and Apple have allowed owners to download any number of applications to their phones. That freedom to individualize a phone’s functions has helped increase the popularity of the iPhone.

Ummm, NO! Sure, the iPhone shook the celphone industry despite warnings (like this one from Palm CEO Ed Colligan) that making phones is hard and “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” But the iPhone launched without extensibility or third-party apps.

The iPhone began life as a closed platform. In January of 2007, Steve Jobs said “You don’t want your phone to be an open platform”. There were always plans to open the platform up, but for the majority of the time iPhones have been on this earth, if you wanted to put new programs on your iPhone, you had to jailbreak it. It wasn’t until recently, after a great deal of fear, uncertainty, and drama, that the iPhone platform was opened to outside development.

To say that the iPhone shakes the industry “mostly” because of its extendibility is demonstrably false. It shakes the industry because its a well-designed, well-integrated product in a market sector that’s gotten away with producing staid, nigh-unusable garbage for way too long. Which is why the article in question is so offensive – there’s plenty of opportunity for Google/Android ahead, and tons of other areas to focus on the notion of customer freedom. Why force-fit this story about the iPhone when it just isn’t needed?

Here’s to hoping that Google’s introduction of the Android platform will provide Apple with a worthy competitor—and push the industry to develop 21st century phones.

Missed Connection: Seat 8B

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The “missed connection” was invented by Craigslist as a way for two people who “met” somewhere, but were unable to actually exchange names, phone numbers, or emails. They tend to go a little something like this:

You were the cute Asian girl with a beer standing by the side of the stage. I wish I had introduced myself because think you were there by yourself. You caught me looking at you and smiled. Hopefully you’ll see this because I’d love to take you out for a drink.

I had an interesting moment last week on a flight, and I thought I’d do my own little “missed connection” despite the fact that I made no effort whatsoever to get any contact information from the individual at hand. But that’ll probably make more sense by the time you get to the end of this. I may even cross-post this on Craigslist, just for funsies.

United Flight xx, Seat 8B

You were the middle aged guy who pulled out your iPhone as we were on final descent. I was the guy sitting next to you who politely asked you to put it away while we landed. You may recall looking at me with disgust and putting your phone away while telling me to mind my own business. I did assert that it was “my business” since you were taking an action that put my life in jeopardy (well, maybe, but I’ll get to that later), and proceeded to loudly say “thank you” over and over at me until I raised my voice above you, and with a menacing glare said “you are welcome.” You turned away, probably realizing you weren’t really too sure about the guy a foot taller than you who looked like he had had enough of your childish behavior.

I was really quite surprised by the incident, especially considering I was polite, and asked you to turn it off while smiling. Since you were in business class with me, and sported the iPhone, I was under the assumption that you, like myself, might be a frequent business traveler. I was also surprised by your retort of “it’s in flight mode”, considering every flight you’ve ever flown has similarly had you turn off all electronic devices upon descent.

Now I think we are probably in the same boat: it seems so ridiculously unlikely that you and your cute little phone could possibly wreak havoc on an airplane. I mean really, how on Earth could that happen? Seems crazy. But yet, they have this annoying rule, and it’s imposed by the FAA, and well, I guess since I don’t work for the FAA and I don’t know all that much about landing planes myself that I’m going to follow that rule. I’ve even gone looking around the Internet for a “fact” to prove the FAA wrong, and, well, bummer, I couldn’t find one (although there’s a lively discussion a Mythbusters fan site and this article is good too). So until someone changes that rule or disproves the FAA, I’m going to keep following it, because, hey, knock on wood – it’s worked for me so far (100% landing rate, FTW)!

Which brings us around full circle to you – did you have an email you were waiting on that you felt was more important that, say, a safe landing? Again, even against infinitesimal odds it seems like there are very few emails that could be worth it, right? And even so, you’ve made it for almost 6 hours already, what could have happened in that last 4 minutes? Really, we were on the ground a mere 4 minutes later!

So I’ll end my letter to you, fine sir, with the request that you consider the world around you a bit more thoughtfully. I know you are clearly a Very Important Person because, after all, you do own an iPhone and sat in business class. You must be extremely busy with work, because you were willing to endanger us all just to see what emails may have arrived on a Friday night after work hours were done on this continent. I cannot stand on solid ground and assert for a fact that your phone would (or would not) cause any interference with the airplane’s landing systems – but then again, you cannot prove the opposite to be true, and all things considered, I’ll take my safety over your email any day of the week.

In short (too late), just stop being such a grade-A moron, the world already has enough of them.
<end of rant>

Blippr tackles micro reviews – micro keeps getting bigger

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On a scale of 1 to 10, I think Blippr is pretty cool.

Blippr is a review service; you write short-form reviews of all kinds of things (books, movies, etc.)  In an oxymoronic set of circumstances that only the Internet can enable, “micro” services are becoming huge.  Twitter started a couple of years ago, and has become a popular (in the Valley, not in Kansas) “micro-blogging” service.  In 140 characters or less you give your followers a status update.  Some people use this for life-casting (i.e. I’m going to get a burrito) and others for starting conversations (i.e. what are the chances that Vista will stop sucking?).  In my opinion, the latter is a much more interesting use for the service.

Twitter is about “micro-blogging” because they have a strict limitation on your content – all posts must be 140 characters or less.  That’s as opposed to say WordPress, which is unlimited blogging (gurgitate to your heart’s content).   12seconds (which we’re involved in directly and which we posted about last month) also imposes a user constraint (twelve seconds, in case that wasn’t obvious.)  Blippr follows suit with a constraint of their own, 160 characters or less.

Erick Schonfeld at Techcrunch wrote an article about Blippr a couple of weeks ago, which offers a fine summary of the product.  I just signed up for an account myself – want to be friends?  So far I’ve reviewed a couple of movies, Dark Knight and 300.  Blippr encourages reviews for all kinds of products, including movies, music, games, books, and more.  The restraints force you to be choosy with your words and even your characters.  (Might want to start liking the ampersand.)

I see lots of opportunities in this product to link out to other products and services, whether amazon book and music purchases, netflix movie rentals, booksfree book rentals, social networks likes Shelfari, Facebook, and more… the list is more or less never-ending.  Some of those deals could include affiliate deals that might even generate revenue, which is always a nice little bonus in an internet company.

I like the UI in Blippr.  When you type out a review, a blue bar below the text window indicates how much space you have left.  Where Twitter uses a numeric counter (which turns red and features a minus sign when you pass 140), I think the visualization of the blue bar is effective and more interesting to watch.

Blippr’s also done a great job of integrating other services; it’s quite easy to link your blips to your Twitter stream, to your FriendFeed, and to a myriad of other services.

There are a number of things I think BLippr could improve upon – doubtless they’ve considered these already, but I’ll voice them anyway.  I think it would be cool if you could embed blips, make a widget out of all my blips, specific genres of blips, etc.  It’d be nice to have the option to embed them directly on my blog, on a profile page, etc.

Also, SMS integration makes a lot of sense.  According to tehir Get Satisfaction page, that’s coming soon.  I can see a great deal of utility to that feature, especially in regards to a spontaneous interaction with something or other (i.e. I just walked out of Indiana Jones 4, and I’m so offended by the refrigerator scene that I want to tell the world RIGHT NOW!)  I get it, they don’t have the money / resources / infrastructure / developers etc.  yet.  But they need to add SMS soon.

I also think this is an appropriate complement to Yelp, and other restaurant / business review services.  I’d like to see them expand their focus (or create a sister service) that is dedicated to that market.   And lastly, outside access seems really important to me.  How can I dip into the Blippr-o-sphere on my mobile handset when I’m in line at the movie theater and the movie I wanted to see is sold out?  Or I am at Green Apple Books (Clement and 6th in San Francisco, check ’em out) and I want someone’s opinion on a book.  A short, to-the-point opinion.

Overall, I think this service shows more promise than most “web 2.0” (god I hate that term) companies.  I’m interested to see where it goes.  To the right I’ve embedded a screenshot of my (considerably) shorter review of Blippr, using Blippr.  Neat.

This is also posted at 1to10reviews.

Home Renovation: What Tech Do I Need?

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My wife and I bought a house a few months ago, and it needs some renovation work (read: holy crap, we’re practically gutting the place, what the heck were we thinking???). One aspect of said work is redoing the entire electrical system, which gives me the opportunity to put in all sorts of cool new tech.

Things I know I want for sure:

  • Sonos as my distributed audio system of choice. We’ll be putting in-ceiling speakers in a few rooms, and they’ll be wired to Sonos units which we’ll have clustered in two locations. I debated putting iPod docks in the walls, but they’re pricey, we don’t currently use iPods, and don’t allow for multi-room distribution.  Plus this’ll give me a chance to check out their new hardware!
  • NETGEAR/Infrant NV NAS to serve media (this replaces my Maxtor Shared Storage Plus which appears to have just died, gah!). In my current apartment I’m a bit leery of the NV as it’s loud and we don’t have a place to hide it away, but this won’t be a problem in the new spot.
  • Current Panasonic plasma + Xbox + Pioneer receiver all move into “JT’s Cool Room (no girls allowed!)”. But the Bose speakers go “buh-bye” and my Definitive towers return! FTW. I’ll probably also hook up a Mac Mini with Boxee on it for photo/Internet streaming. The only other TV in the house will be a smaller (25″-32″) flat-screen in one of the sitting rooms – yes, we’re actually going to make the living room a place where people don’t watch television!

Things I know I don’t want for sure:

  • Central Vacuum. We thought this would be great, but after a little digging in, seems like they are consistently underpowered poorly designed products. Pass.
  • Video Intercom Front Door System. The day I move into my 15,000 square foot mansion I’ll consider it, but until then, I can run down the stairs to see who’s there. Plus I’m going to try to jury-rig something myself with a Bug Labs setup.

Things I am on the fence about:

  • RJ45 (Ethernet) outlets in every room.  Seems like a waste.  When I ask my friends, the overwhelming reason for it is “to stream 1080p video around your house”.  Now that is really just not a good reason in my opinion, but I do like the idea of future-proofing.  Plus I guess it’ll be easier for hooking up printers or other networked devices where wireless is not built-in… ?
  • Insteon (or other) smart lighting systems.  I’m not a fan of home automation systems (wait, for only $50K I can have my lights turn on and off and I don’t even have to get off the couch?  where do I sign up?), but Insteon is fairly inexpensive and the platform is open enough to hack around with.  From what I’ve read, however, I can always add it after-the-fact, so I’ll probably save the $ now, then do some tinkering down the road.

Anyone have any recommendations here, or notice anything I’m missing?  Would love some thoughts ASAP  as wiring starts in ~2 weeks!