Author Archives: feeling entropy

Today marked day one of three, for the 9th annual Connections Conference. Parks Associates and CEA have pulled together to host this fine event. The Digital Home Conference and Showcase promised a few exciting things to me this evening. We are looking forward to streaming lots of information from a central location of the house, using the existing power sockets to control devices in your household, viewing your home surveillance camera via your mobile phone, and networking all of your home computers without hours and hours of headaches. All of these great new tools plan to be delivered in the near future.

The conference spans Wed to Fri with speakers from companies such as Intel, Motorola, Cisco, and Yahoo! to name a few (and to name drop). I’ll be there, and not so square. Stay tuned for the next four or five days while LIVEdigitally brings you the new technology that just may end up in your home.

be happy =)

After a quick listen in on Leo Laporte’s podcast of TWIT (This Week In Tech, which is the new name for Return of The Screen Savers) I heard about and visited a site which put a quick smile on my face. BoxedThoughts.com is just that, thoughts in a box. You register a name (numbers only) and post away! The filter takes out all url adds, screen names, email addresses, and all other internet space junk.

The range of emotions people generate yet are not able to fully express is captured right here on this nook on the net. It also is a nice monotony breaker for the cubicle ridden 9-to-5er’s

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we are giving away (yes giving) iPod Mini cases from Slappa. That’s right, take your glasses off, clean them with your shirt, and reread that last line. Slappa and LIVEdigitally will be giving away thirteen Slappa Shockshell iPod Mini cases. Your response: “How do I get one!?!”

Each week we (LIVEdigitally) will post between one and four “contest posts”. Your mission should you choose to accept: find the “contest post” of the week (there may be more than one) and leave a comment. As long as your comment has a valid email address, that you have access to, then you are an eligible candidate for the hot, sleek, protective, Shockshell case.

The content of your comment is not required to contain anything specifically iPod, Slappa, LIVEdigitally related. A haiku written strictly about how good looking I am is just as eligible as a paragraph explaining how your ex-girlfriend now dates your exbest-friend.

Winners will be chose at random, and contacted via email.

There are two posts that have gone up today which qualify as “contest posts” so keep your eyes peeled and your browsers open, LIVEdigitally is going to hook you up!!

Sony’s PSP has been spanning the internet since its release date of 12:00am March 24, 2005. Numerous hacks have been made so far: web browsing, RSS reading, irc client, running code, and now extracting the ISO image of PSP games onto a memory stick. Where is this all going? This gadget freak projects 30 days maximum for a PSP game to be played via memory stick. If you can currently play TiVo shows on your PSP then I don’t see how “copying” games to your memory stick and playing them can be avoided. It’s taken over a month for us to get this far, what will we have the PSP doing in six months, placing VoIP calls from your PSP while powering it by means of a solar power adapter?

Many people have just one OS (Operating System) on their computers these days. Hardcore geekazoids like myself, may have more than one, but only one can be run at the same time. Switching from Windows XP Pro to Windows 2000, and then to Red Hat Linux 9.0 prove to be a bit of a pain. The pro to multiple operating systems in my opinion are the applications. My AutoCad release runs on Win 2000, Red Hat Linux has tons of free software, and Windows XP keeps me up to date with the rest of the world.

XenSource makes a product called the Xen hypervisor, which allows a computer to run more than one OS at a time. It supposedly is “a very thin layer of software that essentially presents to the operating system an idealized hardware abstraction”. I’d love to get my greasy little hands on this hypervisor! Expected due dates are set somewhere along the lines of 2010.

And the winner, with 744 points, coming in a total of 7 points above the second place: Teeee Mooooobiiilleeee.

T-mobile (I have no idea what the T stands for) has come out on top according to J.D. Power and Associates. We’re talking billing, promotions, customer service, and cost, are just that much nicer on the T side of things. Cingular raked in 711, Sprint PCS a 709 and Nextel dropped in with 704 overall points. This is all good news to yours truly considering I have been with Sprint and Nextel, the two losers of today’s competition results. It’s good to know that my sidekick is a winner this time!

I ‘ve had the Sirius Sportster Satellite Radio for about 2 weeks now. In this time I have installed, listened, and enjoyed. The first week of Sirius radio entertainment was channeled to my audio amplifier via a line-in stereo jack which plugs into the rear of my car stereo. Since this feature is not available on every car stereo, Sirius has built in an FM transmitter. For the second week of my Sirius experience I restricted myself to the FM transmitter of the Sirius Sportster.

The handset transmits an FM signal, chosen by the user, and fed through a wire antenna, in hopes of your car stereo picking up the signal. My limited iPod experiences with Monster Cable and Griffin FM modulators have not been satisfactory. Therefore, I did not expect much from Sirius.

Upon FM setup, I dialed into 88.7 both on the Sportster and my car FM radio. The sound came through with no interruptions, and the sound quality was higher than my initial low expectation. I wasn’t impressed just yet, could the Sportster maintain a nice strong signal throughout a day of San Francisco driving?

The FM transmitter has a very broad range of frequencies, opposed to some modulators which are limited to the low 80’s or 90’s. I found the best frequency to be 90.9 FM for city driving.

I drove the ups and downs of the city of San Francisco for half of the day listening to Jazz, news, weather in New York, Bjork, Jack Johnson, and Ludacris. After a few hours of jammin’ FM style I switched over to the original set up of the Siruis line-out to aux input. There was a very noticeable difference in sound quality. The FM transmission seems to lose the richness of the low frequency sound.

Here’s a quick video of me cruising the streets of San Francisco with the Sirius Sportster blasting.

Results:
Using the FM modulator works well, but not as solid as the aux input.
The Sirius radio is a definite plus for any driving experience.

The laser was invented in 1958, but CD players, laser pointers, and hair removal took a few decades before the laser was implemented into these world changing inventions. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is not on the exact same timeline, but there are global impacting inventions popping up with the RFID technology.
Continue reading →

Technology such as this can be implemented in just about any scenario I can think of, so I asked Monahan to think of some ideas for me.

I think the transmitters will continue to get smaller, so the number of uses
and applications can be expanded. I think there is a market for traffic
control, service businesses (such as automobile) so they can greet their
Customers, and track when and how long a car was in for service. I also
think the Hospital Market has huge potential for tracking assets.

We already have interest from companies to track employees and have
integrated access control with RFID to protect laptops from being removed
from property unless it is with a properly tagged owner. Mustering is
another great application where in the event of an emergency, employees must
evacuate to a safe area and log in. RFID is perfect for performing a “head
count”.

I was curious, how fool proof is this system. If I were to damage a RFID transmitter, how would the system respond? “Each RFID tag has a Tamper Switch built in that when violated can be programmed to transmit alarm bursts and then render the tag inoperative.”

The units are accessible over the internet or a local network, if deactivation or reprogramming is needed remotely.

I personally don’t have kids, a garage, or a want for internetrestriction, but I have a huge need for a system like this integrated into my life. First thing I’d do is RFID my car and program an alarm sound so I don’t get caught parking in the way of the weekly street sweeper. The RFID system would have paid for itself on that single implementation!

I just washed my clothes and am waiting for the dryer to finish up. While doing so I came across an invention that makes single people like me feed dating sites like match.com and eharmony.com. A single bachelor like myself couldn’t even do his daily chores without a lovely young lady, no seriously.

Your Turn is a finger print recognition clothes washing machine. It does not let the same person wash two times in a row. Such a machine was marketed for ‘Father’s Day’ when I feel that this would be more of a ‘Mother’s Day’ present. I’m neither a father nor a mother so make sure not to get me one of these things or I’ll take my business to the local laundromat.