This looks interesting. Sure, it can’t do much, but not much is necessary in a lot of circumstances.
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Micro-wind power
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007Random miscellany
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007Picked up here and there.
Improve your photos in 60 seconds. I expect to find this useful.
Ten brilliant complete movies online. I’ve only seen three of these in their entirety, but I’ve seen bits and pieces of several more.
The downside of the outboard brain. I know my memory isn’t what I think it ought to be. I’m wondering how much of that is due to having external aids (such as pen and paper), how much is due to the increased pace of modern life compared to prior generations, and how much is because of my tendency to inattentiveness. It’s an interesting thing to ponder, though. I remember a science fiction short story from twenty-or-so years ago, concerning the first people with direct brain-computer interfaces. The actual problem that was brought out in the story was that networking such people was limited by lightspeed, so getting too far from Earth would cause them to lose their “outboard” capabilities.
How to sync two or more Macs? I’m thinking of getting a Mac laptop to replace the laptop I killed a while back. This looks like something that may end up being useful to me.
“… it occurred to me that the world was opening up in waves around me …”
Thursday, July 26th, 2007Chef Mojo at Daily Pundit describes his experiences with hearing aids over the years, and what has changed in the last five. It’s a very moving story.
A little more ambitious than most
Monday, July 16th, 2007Should we call this Type 2 CRS?
Monday, July 16th, 2007We’ve raised a generation who can’t remember without assistance.
I’ve long been interested in memory improvement, and have acquired a number of books on memory improvement techniques. My favorite so far is this one. Still, I find it hard to remember something unless I have a specific need to do so (or enough interest to substitute for a need). I guess the point is that fewer people, particularly young ones, feel the need to remember anything their cellphone can remember for them.
Then again, isn’t that really the whole point behind organizers and planners?
Via Slashdot.
Arrogant SOBs
Saturday, July 7th, 2007Jane Galt has been having trouble with Sony VAIO customer service. I’ll admit that they make some interesting products, but I’ve been staying away from purchasing any of them since they hacked their customers’ computers.
My own customer support nightmare involved a sound card/CD drive combo that I purchased as an add-in to my desktop PC, back when it was a Windows 3.1 486/33 box. One morning, the CD drive spontaneously ejected the tray. Putting the tray back into the tracks would cause it to retract fully, then to be spit out again. It was obviously a hardware problem, most likely a limit switch or photosensor.
By that time, however, I’d installed a beta version of Windows 95 on the thing. Every time I called, I was told that I had to wipe my hard drive and reinstall Windows 3.1 before they would help me. It was obvious that they had a script, and weren’t allowed to deviate from it. Finally, I disconnected the hard drive, installed their driver software on a floppy, and booted from it. After going through the front-line support person and script, I got to a supervisor and explained the situation. He said, “We can work with that.” I thought, “Finally!” His next words, though were that I needed to reattach my hard drive and put Windows 3.1 on it, because they not only didn’t support Windows 95, but had no plans to support it.
I’d had it with them by then, and asked to whom I’d send a complaint. He said that I’d have to send it to him. I couldn’t believe that nobody else got to see complaints about him, and told him so before I hung up. I then looked up the company’s info in Dunn & Bradstreet, and sent a letter addressed to the company’s president, explaining the situation, and my shock that complaints about support personnel would be handled by those same people.
The letter was returned – moved, forwarding order expired.
I bought a different CD drive, and stayed with Windows 95. I kept the returned letter for several years, for various reasons. I may still have it, tucked away in a box somewhere, but I’m not certain.
I suspect this is a misprint
Tuesday, June 26th, 2007I like shiny tech toys as much as the next geek, but there may be a problem with the 1TB drives described here:
Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 and Barracuda ES.2 feature 7,200-rpm spin speeds, up to 32MB cache, average seek times of 8.5 milliseconds, and a 1.2-hour mean time before failure (MBTF) rating, according to Seagate officials.
A 1.2 hour MTBF? Really?
Remind me not to buy one, then.
Things have changed
Thursday, June 7th, 2007And you can find visible evidence with respect to video games here, where they’ve done a tear-down of the Atari 2600, and compared it with the current crop of video game systems.
Very nice, but a bit out of my price range
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007The Optimus Maximus keyboard – every key has an OLED display for the ultimate in reconfigurable keyboards.
Worrisome for Mac owners
Monday, May 7th, 2007Via Bifurcated Rivets.