Computers, personal electronics and all other tech items
In version 2.3 WordPress addedtagging to their blogging software. I finally have updated my custom template to support this new feature. So now you can search my blog by tag. I’ve been slowly going back through old posts and tagging them. You can see the tag clod right there oever on the left side of this page. 🙂
Back “in the old days” when you were lost you’d stop at a gas station and ask the attendant for directions. Here in New Jersey we still have the luxury of having an attendant come to our car when we pull in, but in the rest of the states where they have self-serve gas, you’d be hard pressed to find an attendant. You swipe your card, pump your gas and go.
Luckily, getting lost isn’t much of a problem now that we have GPS, cell phones and Google Maps. But now things have gone full circle. If you leave home and forget to map your route first, you can pull into a gas station and ask the pump for directions thanks to an internet connection and Google Maps.
read more on Engadget | digg story
My little website reached another milestone today. I received my one-hundred thousandth piece of comment spam.
Spam is a problem on the Internet. I’ll give you a minute while you recover from that shocking revelation. If you think spam in your inbox is annoying, you should try dealing with comment spam on a blog. I get thousands of them per day. It is debilitating because you can’t possibly find any real message in the pile of crap. Thanks to Akismet spam filtering software, it’s more of an amusement than an annoyance.
What I wonder is why they bother. This blog isn’t exactly the most popular on the web and no comments get posted without moderation. So of the 100,256 comments that have been caught so far, ZERO have been seen by any human being. Oh well, if it gives them something to do instead of e-mailing me viagra ads and bank scams, then maybe it’s a good thing.
And in case you’re wondering, 44 more pieces of spam were caught in the time it took me to write this. 🙂
Back when I first starting using computers in third grade it was on an Apple IIc. There were two keys on each side of the space bar. One was the open apple key and one was the closed apple key. The closed apple key long ago went the way of 5.25 inch floppy drives and monochrome monitors. The open apple key has however, lived on for a few more decades on the command key.
Then on Tuesday Steve Jobs unveiled the newest Apple keyboards. The little cloverleaf symbol is still on the command key, but the open apple was replaced with the word “command.” It’s the end of an era. It’s kind of sad.
Yesterday the guy who got me interested in technology passed away. Mr. Wizard, whose real name was actually Don Herbert, created and starred in a show in the 1950’s called Watch Mr. Wizard. That show went off the air more than a decade before I was born.
If you grew up in the 1980’s, you more than likely grew up with your eyes glued to the only TV channel for kids, Nickelodeon. Most people loved Nickelodeon for You Can’t Do That on Television. However, I was way more excited when 1983 rolled around and Mr. Wizard returned to TV on Mr. Wizard’s World. Sure it was kind of campy and those kids were just a little too excited about helping out Mr. Wizard with his experiments, but at the the time, I would have given ANYTHING to be one of those kids!
Mr. Wizard had a way of making science make sense by using everyday household items with the random really cool items thrown in like a Jacob’s Ladder, a Van de Graaf generator or even a computer with a black and green screen that ran BASIC!
You can learn much more about the man who inspired so many kids at his website www.mrwizardstudios.com. You can even purchase DVD’s of his shows on the website. I’m tempted to order them all.
Yesterday the guy who got me interested in technology passed away. Mr. Wizard, whose real name was actually Don Herbert, created and starred in a show in the 1950’s called Watch Mr. Wizard. That show went off the air more than a decade before I was born.
If you grew up in the 1980’s, you more than likely grew up with your eyes glued to the only TV channel for kids, Nickelodeon. Most people loved Nickelodeon for You Can’t Do That on Television. However, I was way more excited when 1983 rolled around and Mr. Wizard returned to TV on Mr. Wizard’s World. Sure it was kind of campy and those kids were just a little too excited about helping out Mr. Wizard with his experiments, but at the the time, I would have given ANYTHING to be one of those kids!
Mr. Wizard had a way of making science make sense by using everyday household items with the random really cool items thrown in like a Jacob’s Ladder, a Van de Graaf generator or even a computer with a black and green screen that ran BASIC!
You can learn much more about the man who inspired so many kids at his website www.mrwizardstudios.com. You can even purchase DVD’s of his shows on the website. I’m tempted to order them all.
There’s a lot of video out there, but who wants to sit in front of their computer and watch it. If you have a video iPod, you can convert almost any video to an iPod compatible format.
After wasting a lot of time on this in the past, I found an easy and simple way to do it. iSquint converts the video It has some options for more advanced users, but you can also just drag, drop and convert! It runs pretty quick on my Intel 2GHz MacBook.
Believe it or not even some podcasts aren’t in iPod format!!! This saves me from them. Download it at iSquint.com.
David Pogue is a tech journalist for the New York Times. But in another life he was also a Broadway arranger. His latest tech song is a commentary on the RIAA. We all know that the RIAA will eventually destroy the music industry, but it seems even more obvious when it’s set to music! 🙂
I agree with the others who have commented on the post, I want an mp3 of it!
Check it in Pogue’s Posts.
David Pogue is a tech journalist for the New York Times. But in another life he was also a Broadway arranger. His latest tech song is a commentary on the RIAA. We all know that the RIAA will eventually destroy the music industry, but it seems even more obvious when it’s set to music! 🙂
I agree with the others who have commented on the post, I want an mp3 of it!
Check it in Pogue’s Posts.
You probably already know that I was a huge fan of the long gone cable channel ZDTV/TechTV. One of the people who contributed to that channel’s success was James Kim. Last weekend he and his family disappeared while on their way home from Thanksgiving at a friend’s house in Oregon. After being lost in the snow for over a week his wife and children were found. James, however, had left them to find help 2 days earlier.
After an extensive search by land and air James’ body was found earlier today. It appears he was leaving a trail of clothing to help searchers track him, but they got there too late.
Besides losing a great technology journalist what strikes me is that this could happen to anyone. They missed a turnoff and looked at map and found another route to take. It was a National Forest Service road that, unkown to them, is not plowed in the winter. They became stuck and wound up staying in their car for a week with little or no food.
I’ve seen a lot of people who were critical of James’ decision to leave the family and car. But I can’t imagine how desparate he must’ve been at that point. They ran the car heater until it ran out of gas. They then burned the tires for warmth. Seriously, how bad does a situation have to be to push you to the point where burning your tires is the best option. After a week of being stranded, he had to think that they’d never be rescued unless he went for help.
Like I said, what is so scary is that this could happen to anyone. I mean I don’t expect that you could get quite that lost in the this part of the country, but there are is still plenty of wilderness in places like Oregon. It’s definately making be reconsider what I carry in my trunk.
You can donate to the family at the site set up by a friend while the family was missing at www.jamesandkati.com.
You can also view a tribute from his coworkers at C|NET.