Entries Tagged 'Technology' ↓

I saw an article the other day on one of Science Fiction writer John Scalzi’s blogs about how the world almost ended 24 years ago. What happened was that an officer stationed at a secret bunker outside Moscow that monitored the Soviet Union’s early-warning satellite system was monitoring things when an alarm sounded. One of the satellites he was monitoring was signaling the United States had launched five ballistic missiles at Russia.

The officer, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, luckily and correctly decided the alarm was a mistake (it was later found that the satellite in question had picked up the sun’s reflection off the cloud tops and somehow interpreted that as a missile launch) and did not escalate matters.

It’s just so amazing that a system error could have led to a war the likes the planet has never seen (and probably wouldn’t survive). We are all lucky there was a human being there with enough sense to think things through before acting. Technology has improved our lives in so many ways, but we can’t forget that just like humans, technology is not infallible.

I watched the Prison Break season premier live on regular commercial filled TV the other day.  Over the last couple months, I watched the first two seasons on DVD since I got a very late start on the show.

We have a baby due on October 19th, so I know there is a good chance that I will miss an episode of Prison Break in the next few weeks.  I don’t have Tivo and I refuse to miss the birth of our daughter because I’m too busy watching TV.

So, I decided to see what my options were for catching up on missed episodes.  Fox offers a free version from their site, but as far as I can tell it is going to have commercials which is fine.  I tried to watch the first episode but it looked like it wanted to install some kind of software for the player and when I tried to click on the link using Firefox, it wouldn’t let me click.  Plus the thought of DRM and commercials just makes me cringe.

I fired up iTunes and noticed they were giving away the first episode as kind of a free trial.  I started downloading.  The download took about an hour but I was busy doing other stuff.  The picture quality even on full screen was at least as good as my analog cable.  And there were no commercials.  Not bad.

If the videos came DRM free, it would be a viable option for me for the whole season at $1.99 an episode.  Since I already have the first two seasons on DVD, I would like a permanent copy of season 3.  DRM can never be a permanent copy because what do we do when Apple decides to go bankrupt or something else causes them to no longer support iTunes.

Still, if I end up missing an episode or two along the way, a download of an individual episode that I can watch commercial free whenever I want during the week is a nice back up plan.

Technorati Tags: iTunes, Prison Break, DRM

In addition to my love of technology and love of things for free, I also have a love for books. Today I found a site that in a way combines all three (link via the excellent entertainment blog Pop Candy). The site is called Wowio, and they offer free legal book downloads (.pdf format). These books include ones that aren’t in public domain.

For example, several of author Kurt Vonnegut’s novels are available on Wowio. In fact, I signed up for the site today and downloaded his book Slaugherhouse Five, which I’m enjoying already.

You may be wondering how they can offer books for free on the site. I was. According to the site, “WOWIO is a new kind of online bookstore that enables readers to download ebooks for free, using commercial sponsorships to compensate authors and publishers”. In other words, advertising.

Signing up for the site is pretty simple, though you do have to give them some information. You can either give them a non-anonymous email address, a credit card, or a scan of an ID (driver’s license or whatever). I opted for the email address option, though I couldn’t use my gmail address. It had to be a non-anonymous email address.

Once registered, you simply add the books you want to your queue and download them. There is a limit of three book downloads per day, but that isn’t a big deal for me. I can’t envision myself reading more than three novels in one day.

This really makes me wish there were an affordable e-book reader available. A pda is an option, but the screen size is just to small. Reading on a laptop isn’t too bad, but not the same as reading a paperback in bed. The Sony Reader seems pretty cool, but at $299 it has a little too much proprietary crap going on for my tastes. Supposedly Amazon is planning an e-book reader, but those are supposedly going to be in the $300-400 range. I guess I’ll have to live with reading on the laptop for now.

Anyhow, if you want some good, free, reading check out Wowio. It’s a pretty cool idea.

Countless words have already been written about the new iPod, but I thought I’d take some time off from writing about Microsoft (boo, hiss) and SQL Server (yay, what it’s a Microsoft product? I mean boo!) to regale you with my take on Apple’s new iPod Touch.

I’ll admit I haven’t really gotten what would posses someone to buy the iPhone, other than a sexy interface. I just couldn’t justify spending $600 (plus $50 or so a month) on a device whose primary function is to make phone calls and which locks you into a single phone company for two years. I’m happy enough with my MOTOKRZR, even though it doesn’t have any hip commercials devoted to it. Knocking $200 off the price doesn’t change anything for me.

The iPod Touch is different. Though it’s still expensive by my budgetary standards, $299 doesn’t seem excessive to me. After all you’re getting 8 gb of storage, Wi-Fi, and the sexy interface, all in a pretty cool piece of technology. Plus, you have no monthly fee. It doesn’t make phone calls, but I already have a phone for that.

I’m interested in what iPhone owners think about this. Would you rather have this than your iPhone? For the record, I’m glad Apple has decided to give iPhone early adopters $100 Apple Store credit, though that really just goes back to Apple.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am a subscriber to Popular Science Magazine. One of my favorite parts of the magazine, and the section I turn to first, is the How 2.0 Section. How 2.0 is basically a section of the magazine filled with D.I.Y. projects. They usually have an insane but cool project, a medium difficulty project, and one I could do and afford.

I’ve come to find that they have the How 2.0 Section on the web, which is nice because you can click on the links in the articles to buy parts, etc., something that obviously isn’t possible in the print version.

Anyhow, I’m lacking any ideas to write about today, I thought I’d share the link. I hope you find something there you like.

Apparently 2GB of storage space is about to fade away like measuring hard drive space in megabytes. Microsoft is going to up the ante by providing Hotmail uses with 5GB of space.

I decided to check out how close I am to running out of space in my Gmail accounts. My oldest account is 3 years old. It gets a fair amount of emails and decent sized attachments. I rarely delete anything. I am currently using 241MB (8%) of my 2888MB.

At this rate it will take me over 30 years to fill up my account. Even more since Google is very slowly increasing their storage amount every day.

Do we really need 5GB of storage space for email? Is that something that would make you switch?

I switched from Hotmail to the Yahoo! e-mail several years ago because I got tired of spam and I was just interested in trying something new. I switched from Yahoo! to Gmail because I liked the concept of the threaded emails, quick load times, and using Google’s search abilities to find my emails. And those are the same reasons I still use them.

I did read a couple tech news items though that did seem like something worthwhile to pay attention to.

The nerds at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have a working prototype of a lightweight, flexible, paper-thin battery. Now that is cool and nanotubilicious. Check out this mind stretching quotation:

The paper could also be molded into different shapes, such as a car door, which would enable important new engineering innovations.

That is raising the stakes.

I would even be willing to bet that more people will be interested to know that you can now buy John Lennon’s catalog of music on iTunes in both the DRM and DRM-free versions. Break out your credit cards all of you Baby Boomer nerds.

The current issue of Popular Science contained an article about a 3D printer, a device that is able to “print” 3-dimensional objects from blueprint files, such as CAD files. This isn’t a new idea. However, the device talked about in the article, The Desktop Factory 3D printer, only costs $5,000 and according to the article the company hopes to eventually sell the device for under $1,000. I honestly never thought such a device would be available to the general public in my lifetime, but I guess I was wrong. For only $400 more than the cost of an iPhone you can theoretically print and object you can imagine? Sign me up.

According to the company, they are saving the amount of money it costs to produce the device by using a halogen lamp for a light source rather than lasers. There is a pretty informative video on their site called Turning Ideas Into 3-D Products, which from what I gather originally aired on CNN. Toys, gaming avatars, and replacement parts for devices at home are some of the objects they think people would want to “print”.

There are a few potential problems that I can forsee with the device. First of all, I wonder how much it costs for replacement printer cartridges. Maybe they won’t be too expensive. I don’t know. Secondly, this thing produces plastic objects. If it really catches on, that means there will be more plastic out there in the world. I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Maybe you will be able to recycle you mistakes.

Anyhow, this seems like an amazing piece of technology that may be available to us everyday folks not too long from now. Who would’ve thought that even 10 years ago?

I’m tired of the same telemarketers and bill collectors (for a previous owner of our house number) and politicians constantly calling my house. I would like to have an easy way to mark numbers as spam so that when they called, the system would automatically hang up on them.

I’d also like to be able to block any number that comes across as 000-000-0000 or Unrecognized. Sorry, if you are not willing to share your real number with me, than I don’t want to talk to you.

It would also be pretty nice to have a whitelist of numbers that you allow to call you. Anybody else goes directly to voicemail unless they are on the spam list.

Once we move to electronic voting machines, I want to be able to flag any politician that calls me for “Do Not Vote For” and when I go out on election day, everybody on the “Do Not Vote For” list in ineligible to receive my vote.

By now you have probably heard about the One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s goal of mass producing a affordable laptop (their initial goal was $100, but it will probably be $150) especially for children of the developing world.

The more I hear about these laptops, the more I want one. It’s designed to be durable, very efficient (supposedly it will have a 12 hour battery life), and will come with at least two of three options: a crank, a pedal, or a pull-cord. In other words it’s just a cool piece of technology. It turns out I may be able to get one of these after all. According to this article I saw yesterday on Boing Boing, the XO laptop may launch at $350 by Christmas. The article also states that the laptop may sell for as much as $550.

If this does indeed go on sale for $350, I would buy one immediately. I’m not so sure about the $550. There is something about buying a device that costs $150 to produce for $550 that just doesn’t sit right with me. On the plus side, any profits from the sales would be put towards the goal of providing these machines to people in developing countries.

Here are the specs for the XO.

So, what is you opinion. Would you be interested in buying one of these laptops?

I saw Transformers over the weekend. It was a fun movie. While watching the amazing CGI blending in with the real actors, I realized that I was watching something even more amazing.

Not the plot or script or acting.

The movie theater was the first digital projection movie theater that I have been to. And it was pretty groovy.

There were no cracks, tears, or pops from the worn out film on the screen. The picture was centered 100% perfectly on the screen filling it entirely without overflowing.

I was impressed.

The movie theater is in a small town that is doing some decent growing. There might be 20,000 people in the city. I live about thirty minutes away in a city of over 100,000 with many similarly sized cities all around.

We do not have any digital movie theaters around here. You would think that with the rates they are changing for both admission and concessions combined with the competition from the many movie theaters in the area, that some of them would have tried going digital just to differentiate themselves.

But then again, most of America seems to be behind the technology bell curve. Look at how bad the US companies do at providing broadband.