Gear
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Bothering with Brother
That’s the UI for the Brother HL-L2305w laser printer, which you can get for $140 right now at OfficeMax (or Office Depot, same thing). It’s a good deal. It also took me a whole day to set up. See, it comes with instructions that say to use the UI above to make CONNECTING WLAN happen.… Continue reading
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What’s up with @TMobile in North Carolina?
Check this out: I took that screen shot at the excellent Oakleaf restaurant in Pittsboro, NC a few days ago. Note the zero bars (or dots) of telephone service, and the very respectable (tested!) data service. To confirm what the hollow dots said, I tried to make a call. Didn’t work. This seems to be… Continue reading
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We can all make TV. Now what?
Look where Meerkat and Periscope point. I mean, historically. They vector toward a future where anybody anywhere can send live video out to the glowing rectangles of the world. If you’ve looked at the output of either, several things become clear about their inevitable evolutionary path: Mobile phone/data systems will get their gears stripped, in both… Continue reading
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The best travel accessory, ever
Monster’s Outlets To Go power strip is the most useful many-purpose accessory I’ve ever thrown into a bag and plugged into a wall. Or a floor. It’s a light and compact four-outlet power strip with a short cord that wraps around it and plugs into one of the four outlets. It’s smaller than most remote… Continue reading
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The most important Kickstarter ever
Fuse is more than a device and a smartphone app to go with it. The world is full of those already. Fuse is the first product in the digital age that can blow up every one of the silos built to trap personal data and limit personal independence. Fuse does that by putting you — literally… Continue reading
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Re-birthing Radio
Radio’s 1.x era is coming to an end. Signs and portents abound. The rise and decline of AM radio just ran in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, hometown paper for KDKA, the granddaddy of AM radio in the U.S. In AM/FM Radio Is Already Over, And No One Will Miss It, Adam Singer writes, Radio advertisements are… Continue reading
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TV 3.0
We’re not watching any less TV. In fact, we’re watching more of it, on more different kinds of screens. Does this mean that TV absorbs the Net, or vice versa? Or neither? That’s what I’m exploring here. By “explore” I mean I’m not close to finished, and never will be. I’m just vetting some ideas… Continue reading
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Android as a life management platform
Nearly all smartphones today are optimized to do three things for you: Run apps Speak to other people Make you dependent on a phone company The first two are features. The third is a bug. In time that bug will be exterminated. Meanwhile it helps to look forward to what will happen with #1 and… Continue reading
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Should Apple buy Nokia?
Mobile maps matter, and Apple now has the worst mapping you can get on a phone. The best, one would think (given the Apple vs. Google coverage) is Google’s. But maybe not, because Nokia has NAVTEQ, which rocks. Or so says Alexis Madrigal in the Atlantic, in a fascinating piece that visits just some of what NAVTEQ has… Continue reading
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A question about Apple vs. Google maps
Having both iPhone and Android devices in the household, I’ve been struck for some time by the absence of two Google Maps features on the iPhone that appear on the Android. One is adaptive turn-by-turn directions (the “recalculating” thing that good GPSes, like those of Garmin, Magellan and Tom-Tom, have always done) when you go… Continue reading
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Browsers should have been cars. Instead they’re shopping carts.
Back in 1995, one of my wife’s sisters became one of the first executives at a hot new startup called Netscape. We wore Netscape t-shirts, used Netscape’s browser, and paid close attention to what was happening in Netscape’s space, which was the entire Web. One of the first things to happen on that Web was… Continue reading
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How Apple will turn the Net’s top into TV’s bottom
Apple TV (whatever it ends up being called) will kill cable. It will also give TV new life in a new form. It won’t kill the cable companies, which will still carry data to your house, and which will still get a cut of the content action, somehow. But the division between cable content and other forms… Continue reading
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Hard drivings
The hard drive is crapping out on my main laptop. I’m backed up, so that much is cool. Installing a Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB drive later today. We’ll see how it goes. [Later…] Lot of dependencies and such to clean up, but performance-wise, it’s like a new computer. Continue reading
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Lessons
When our kid started using a computer in the seventh grade, I got him a copy of Mavis Beacon so he’d learn how to touch-type. I didn’t see him using the program, but I did see him typing. So I asked him what was up with that. He said “I looked at it a couple of… Continue reading
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The death rattles of AM, then FM
Check the Arbitron radio listening ratings for Washington DC. You have to go waaaay down the list before you find a single AM station that isn’t also simulcast on FM. But then, if you go to the bottom of the list, you’ll also find a clump of Internet streams of local radio stations. You’ll see the… Continue reading
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What happens when Google buys Sprint too?
@ChunkaMui just put up a great post in Forbes: Motorola + Sprint = Google’s AT&T, Verizon and Comcast Killer. Easy to imagine. Now that Google has “gone hardware” and “gone vertical” with the Motorola deal, why not do the same in the mobile operator space? It makes sense. According to Chunka, this new deal, and the apps… Continue reading
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Bomb sights
Last week I flew back and forth from Boston to Reno by way of Phoenix. Both PHX-RNO legs took me past parts of Nevada I hadn’t had a good look at before. One item stood out: a dry lake that looked, literally, like a town had been built on it and blown up. In fact,… Continue reading
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Padding a category
This graphic, of Apple’s revenues per quarter, broken down by products, tells several stories at once. One is that the iPhone remains huge. (I was amazed by how many I saw in the UK and France.) Another is that the iPod may be getting a bit stale. But the big one is the sudden size… Continue reading
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The TV in the Snake of Time
There’s only one way to justify Internet data speeds as lopsided as the one to the left. Television. It’s an easy conclusion to draw here at our borrowed Parisian apartment, where the Ethernet cable serving the laptop comes from a TV set top box. As you see, the supplier is FreeSAS, or just http://free.fr. I… Continue reading