Telepixels - Multimedia meets Gadgetry

2010-06-04T16:38:00.006-05:00

To Evo or to iPhone? – That is the question…

I write this story as the iPad has shipped more than a million units and has become the fastest technology product to gross a billion dollars in sales. The next generation iPhone hardware has been leaked and software details confirm that we will finally receive support for basic multitasking under the 4.0 operating system. Hot on Apple’s heels is the competitive Google Android mobile phone software which is slowly rolling out their latest “Froyo” version 2.2. Most importantly, the brand new Sprint Evo hardware now trumps the unlocked Nexus 1 hardware platform with its next generation 4G radio and 8 Megapixel camera.

The smart phone space has not been this hot since the Palm Treo fought with Microsoft Windows Mobile half a decade ago. To confirm my thought, the NPD group announced that Android handsets are outselling the iPhone – no small surprise as some 60 handsets are available on 50 carriers worldwide. A stark difference from the 5-year exclusive deal that AT&T signed with Apple in 2007 for iPhone distribution in America.

But is the Android software ready for prime time? And is the hardware truly better? The quick answer: Maybe if you are a geek, but read on for the details. First of all, where the iPhone is “visually silent” with notifications, Android phones have a blinking light. Some have two actually; one or two at the top near the speaker as a charge and bluetooth indicator, and the Nexus 1 has a big glowing track ball that changes color upon activity such as email, SMS or applications receiving data. That’s nice if you like visual alerts and keep your phone in silent mode.

Whereas you “buy the capacity you want” on the iPhone, with Android, to expand storage, you can buy a large micro SD card. Their latest version 2.2 operating system will allow you to run applications from this card, rather than require them in system flash memory. This was a feat Palm could not achieve on their platform, but memory interfaces have sped up since those days.

For those who want to use their smart phone without charging throughout a whole day, a second battery is a must. The processors in current smart phones now reach 1GHz, matching that of your laptop from just a few years ago. This plus the wireless communication that receiving a constant barrage of GPS data, email and Twitter feeds from your social network mandate a replaceable “on the go” battery. Android phones have this feature across their multi-vendor lineup. The battery of an iPhone always lives within; although backpacks can be purchased to provide more power. Android cameras are better too, with more megapixels and a flash. The Sprint Evo phone even has a second forward facing camera for video conferencing, plus two LED flashes on the back for extra brightness.

That sounds like some compelling reasons to go with an Android phone, especially if you do not like the AT&T wireless network coverage, cost or new data plan; although most users will have a hard time reaching 2GB of data in a month. In the US T-Mobile offers data only “unlimited plans” and Sprint still allows for 5GB of data use in a month. Most Android phones can act as a modem for your laptop when you travel – but do not expect broadband like speeds anchoring your devices together.

So what’s the bad news on this front? It’s all in the interface and software. Apple has made some amazing evolutions in their user experience. Things like inertia in the menu systems, keyboards that quickly auto prompt and correct your mistakes and a general ease of use are missing from the “half iPhone’s age” Android platform.

After using the iPhone for a few years, I feel that the keyboard is a bit cramped and dictionary not as predictive. Thankfully because of the openness of Android, you can change out its keyboard by installing third party programs, even mimicking an iPhone keyboard, or a new sliding keyboard called Swype.

Android does not have as many downloadable applications as the iPhone does, and Google probably does not have your credit card on file, so buying is a bit more cumbersome. It seems that iTunes sale of 10 billion music tracks at 99-cents sets the stage for you to easily buy applications at $1.99, or increasingly $9.99 for the iPad.

In addition to an ease of use through a near “one-click” purchase, the iPhone changed the way carriers would allow applications on mobile phones, by allowing computer software developers to create mobile programs more akin to those on a computer than a proprietary mobile device without the usual carrier vetting process – albeit one now controlled by a mysterious black box at Apple. An interesting side note is that years ago Apple licensed the Amazon.com “one-click” patent and that play seems like it has paid for itself over the years as Apple sells more digital assets than digital devices.

There are now more than 100,000 iPhone applications from alarm clocks to ones that let you stream media from your home television or hard drive to anywhere in the world. These developers can write a program for any of the near 100 million iPhones and iTouch devices sold, each with identical screen resolutions, or the upcoming iPad which has a 9.3” screen, but is capable of “pixel doubling” to stretch the content. The newest iPhone screen has been examined to have a resolution near that of the iPad, but in the size similar to the prior models of iPhone.

Compare that with Andoid which has several vendors like Motorola, HTC and the like creating handsets which have different resolutions, screen types ranging from LCD to AMOLED, different handset buttons below the screen, and some even with joysticks and full QWERTY keyboards. Some of these older phones run different versions of the Android operating system with no ability to upgrade. This means that next generation applications will not be able to run on those slightly older platforms.

While the Android platform loves Flash, supports hardware acceleration and the ability to play media from nearly ANY website, Netflix and ABC have circumvented the need for Flash support on the iPhone & iPad and have created applications that allow media into the devices.
If you want the “full web” and are willing to put up with some software quirks, then Android is a more open platform, that you may find worth the trouble. I feel that Google will get there eventually as their software is only “half as old” as Apple’s. If you want a device that will anchor with your car, run hundreds of thousands of applications and has an extremely polished Interface, then stick with the iPhone. The next generation hardware is going to be an amazing piece of artwork and technology.

When speaking at Maker Faire 2010, I was asked which mobile devices I carry with me. As a technologist my answer is far too many. I tried an iPad and had to sell it due to its limitations. I prefer a Netbok running OS-X. For my pocket arsenal, I carry an iPhone for appliations and testing on a data-only plan. A Nexus 1 or Evo depending on my country that I am visiting, and my tired and true Blackberry Curve on Sprint. The 3G Blackberry Curve runs several apps, most importantly makes and takes calls, handles email faster via a single inbox than any other device above, and the battery lasts all day long. It’s just not quite as sexy!

2010-04-20T17:03:00.007-05:00

The new iPhone 4th Generation has revealed itself!

Several weeks ago, a version of the iPhone that was "just a bit different" from the 3 prior year products was found at a bar not far from the Apple Cupertino campus. This device was remotely shut down hours after it was lost, but not before the yet unseen 4.0 OS (it is available as a beta now for developers to test) was played with briefly, and the supposed owner was identified through the phone's Facebook application.

The popular gadget blog site Gizmodo purchased the phone for $5000 from its pub crawling finder after they were unable to get Apple corporate to accept it in return, let alone get them to acknowledge that it exists via phone calls to the headquarters. We can only assume the amount of secrecy that Apple takes with products that are developed internally, and call center agents know nothing of new devices existence until the rest of the world does. These agents took the description of what was found to be a Chinese knockoff. This "rogue phone" became a nice find for Gizmodo, as their purchase has lead to massive traffic (6.55 million views as I write this) once they posted a story with full details on the device on Monday April 19th, a full two months before its assumed launch of June 22nd, 2010. With years of unfettered secrecy around prior Apple product launches, this is a huge snafu for their marketing machine. Or was it? Although, it is no secret among the tech elite that a new phone is eminent this summer, and even firmware hints of a flash and other hardware leaks via software - the features of this device were a worst kept secret in the industry. In fact, Apple has launched a new device each summer since the iPhone June 2007 debut. Plus, on their earnings call today, they announced that 8.75 million iPhones were sold this quarter alone. This is a mass market device, and the technology pros will want the newest model, while the masses should be fine with what they have. As such, I do not see this premature announcement hurting the sales of units. In fact, it is getting Apple even more press in a slingshot after tremendous iPad hype.

The new features with this fourth generation iPhone are a slimmer style (even slimmer than the first generation unit) along with a forward facing "video conferencing" camera, and flash on the photo camera on the back. It uses a new micro SIM as was first seen in the iPad 3G and perhaps has a noise canceling microphone on the top of the device. Usability features like battery life, type of processor and speed were not able to be tested, as the unit was remotely software locked by Apple. This version may be the first iPhone with the Apple owned A4 processor inside, which is what runs the speedy iPad with a compelling 12-hour battery life. With larger batteries within, we may be onto a full-day device, I consider the models sold to date to be half-day usage. Remember when your old Nokia "candy bar" phones would go a week between charges?

Below is a link to a news segment with the Los Angeles CBS anchor David Malkof talking with me about the found iPhone and what its implecations are for the Apple Engineer, Gary Powell who seemingly lost it!

http://cbs2.com/video/?id=132640

2010-04-01T03:24:00.006-05:00

I cannot WAIT to get my new iPad.

OK, for those of you who know me, and are astute to seen that this post was created on April Fools Day, I can just hear your chuckles now. I bet you are saying "Ha Ha Dave! You got me on this one!" But alas, I will probably buy a few. You see, I was present at the Apple launch event to cover it for G4 and back then said that the device was going to be a big fail, limited in use and will not be adopted. I even shot some YouTube HD video of my and another G4 producer's lack of love for it.

Yet today, perhaps due to my being out at sea for three days, I am considering a different tune. I have read the Walt Mossberg Wall Street Journal review where he says it has lasted more than 10 hours with constant and quality use, calls it a decent consumption device for media and websites. Uncle Walt even goes so far to say that the limitations on content creation, due to its lack of USB ports and an on-screen (for the time being) keyboard are not so bothersome. I have also read David Pogue's piece for the New York Times where he saved face and wrote two reviews. One for the technology experts like myself, and one for the people who just got on Facebook in 2009. He kind of likes it too. Those stories are OK, but this one is better.

At the 2010 SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, I covered a session on HTML 5 Video for Gearlive.com; which supports streaming media without the requirement for Adobe Flash. The iPad and iPhone do not support this format, as Steve Jobs says that it is a processor hog, unfortunately it is seen on many websites like YouTube, Vimeo and pro-media outlets like Hulu. Newspaper websites even use the format to give some "flash" to their words. This HTML evolution should integrate its capabilities within. At the same time, Google is announcing that Flash support will be built into Chrome, their browser. It is also supported in their Android mobile phone handsets, which I have been testing successfully with the Nexus 1 Smart Phone. More on that in a subsequent post.

So HTML 5 should make the iPad be a more usable media CONSUMPTION device. Accessories and hacks to Bluetooth should make it a better CREATION device. But one important thing is happening that I did not foresee due to prior stubbornness; Media sites like CBS, Hulu and New York Times are building specific applications and web sites for the iPad. This will deem the lack of Flash media support moot, but will most likely come with "premium content" pricing schemes.

If you want to find the real reason that I am excited about the iPad; with its no-contract 3G service plan with UNLIMITED (for now anyway; lets keep it up AT&T) data plan for $29.99 a month, take a look at the episode of Cranky Geeks that I was a guest on, just one week before the unit shipped to stores and Apple fan boy's hot little hands via UPS.

Ziff doesn't do embedded video, so enjoy this URL: http://www.crankygeeks.com/2010/03/episode_211_apple_ipad_details.php You just click on it, and a page opens!

2010-03-12T09:27:00.002-06:00

Why I am finally excited about the iPad

I am not a full-time iPhone user. My new friends frequently say "didn't I see you with an iPhone?" as I pull out my Blackberry. You see, I'm one of those guys that carried a flip phone and a Sidekick back in the early "black and white" smart phone days in 2003, because smart phones do not a phone make. These days I still carry two devices; a Blackberry on Sprint's 3G network as it has a real clicking keyboard, ultra fast email that I do not have to wait for and the ability to make and take calls at all of the tech conferences where the iPhone fails. The other pocket has a iPhone 3G, with a data only prepaid "Go" plan. This $20 data plan used to offer unlimited use, but now is limited to 100MB, which gets eaten up in the course of an afternoon on a high-speed data device.

Now I could share a SIM between a USB broadband device, and pop that in the iPhone when I am not using the 3G modem in my laptop, but since I do not want another contract, and my friends always complain of the voice quality on the iPhone, I chose the prepaid route on that gadget. But come April, no longer. AT&T has stated they will have a no-contract unlimited 3G service plan for the iPad for $19.99 per month.

Now I've touched the iPad and used it since I made my way to the iPad launch event to take some photos plus some HD video as I covered the excitement for the G4 TV network. Ultimately, here is what I think of the device - it's a first generation product that is not ready for my dollars.

Check out my thoughts on this G4 TV Attack of the show Loop segment:

Game Reviews - E3 2010 - The Loop

However, come April fools day, 2nd, 3rd - whatever. I will point my browser here, at AT&T's data plan site to get a iPad micro SIM, micro to standard SIM adapter, or just try linking one of my other AT&T SIMs to this new account type and watch my 3G iPhone get a new lease on its digital life. Since the iPad uses a new sized SIM card, which has standard pins, but a smaller size, you will need to fill the void in devices like the iPhone SIM slot.

As far as the iPad, I am going to wait for the 4G version and hope that it has a forward facing camera. But I cannot WAIT for the iPad AT&T data service. Lets hope the towers do not let all of us down.

2009-09-10T02:36:00.004-05:00

On 9/9/09 Apple had 100's of journalists and bloggers out to show us the latest iPods for the coming year. The big news is the iTouch gets the faster processor of the iPhone 3GS (but no camera or built-in mic!) and the Nano gets a video camera with H.264 recording. The compression and 16 effects built in are great, you only get 1.5 hours of record time and 7 hours of capacity on the 8GB version, so bring a charger!

Other features are a pedometer built in that syncs to Nike+ online, an FM tuner with RDBS (station and song ID) which syncs to wishlists for tracks in iTunes and a 15 minute recording buffer for radio! It's almost like pausing via a TiVo, but you cannot save the content.

Finally, iTunes 9 is launched with easy music and movie sharing between computers in your home, and the ability to receive additional media when you buy an album like photos, lyrics, and video clips for movies and music.

Watch my G4TV video below for more details!

Video Game - E3 2009 - Attack of the Show

PeopleBrowsr at the TechCrunch Real-Time CrunchUp 2009

2009-07-21T13:22:00.000-05:00

Last fall my buddy Brian Solis of bub.blicio.us introduced me to Jodee Rich of peoplebrowsr.com and I saw an amazingly powerful client that wrapped a unified, albeit noisy interface around all of the Web 2.0 properties. That's right, Flickr, YouTube, RSS feeds as well as Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed could all be accessed in a single dashboard.

I was hooked on the idea, but it needed some honing to make it more usable for the non-power set. A few months of Jodee's team tirelessly working on the interface, and we debuted search.peoplebrowsr.com at the TechCrunch Real-Time Crunchup in July 2009.

You can see how enthused I am over our work, in the video above. Take a look at the features, then give the service a try and let me know what you think of it!

2009-07-07T15:47:00.004-05:00

During the 2009 South by Southwest, I participated in what we had originally believed to be a private screening of Bruno. Instead of a showing of the entire film, we were treated to a dozen rough edits and clips of the movie that were used during its production to gauge audience response; some of these were eventually included in the trailers such as the one above. I has happy to see the obviously photoshopped photo, in which his adopted baby is covered in bees, showcasing Bruno's beekeeping hobby. This alone is absurd, along with naming his son the "traditional African name of OJ," demonstrates how twisted and elaborately thought out Cohen's comedy is.

Sacha Baron Cohen has clearly and intelligently contemplated his audience's reactions to his actions, and will once again earn him the acclaim and more which he enjoyed with is 2006 film, Borat. It is safe to say that his newest endeavor should not have worked based upon knowledge of his previous success.

The clips I saw at South by Southwest were jaw-droppingly hilarious and I honestly, was shocked to behold how once again, people fell right into his trap. Thanks to his over the top deadpan delivery and this unsuspecting subjects' reactions, his painstaking preparation, lightening fast responses, transform Cohen's Bruno into a veritable comedy. Whereas The Office is able to shock and awe you with highly scripted characters performing absurd antics, Cohen is able to achieve this with just a few people (himself and the producers off-camera) in the know.

Of course I know that editing and post-production can help make even reality TV funny, but considering this movie will have some modified context, it will still blow your mind. It is all about the subtle details too, not just blatant comments. Notice the words on the shirt of the baby who he received in exchange for an iPod in the clip above.

I cannot wait to see his custom Vespa (OK, so it's just the seat cover) with "the baby on the handlebars." Obviously that near accident with the car didn't happen with the baby on board. As I guy born and raised in the Midwest, he took liberties with my people and that's OK by me. Lets see what kind of lawsuits he gets into this time over their own embarrassment.

People need to take things they see and hear with a grain of salt and call others out in real-time on the absurdity. I cannot wait to see this movie in full.

Nice work "Bruno" - what I have seen so far rocks my world!

Topgear from the mouths of children!

2009-06-22T18:51:00.000-05:00

Top Gear season 13 is on the air again from BBC 2 in the UK and BBC America; if you don't have those, it can be found on the torrents of course. Check out this 30 second trailer from BBC showing what young Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hamster, I mean Hammond were like as dreaming children.

Also, you'll see a guest appearance from young "big Stig" (from the America South episode) or maybe he was just a chubby child...

Even if you don't like cars, this is quite an entertaining show to watch!

Tiger Direct PC Build competition at CES 2009

2009-01-21T15:40:00.000-06:00

Last year I was invited by the Max Borges Agency to attend their Tiger Direct/CompUSA (they bought the trademark and domain name) PC building competition with many of my industry buddies in television, print and online media. Jim Louderback from PC Magazine and Patrick Norton (now at Revision 3,) Tom Merritt from CNET and my old buddy Al Hernandez from Fox news were worthy competitors, along with the some 30 techsperts.

In 2008, my tower PC was built in lightning time, then I booted up Windows Vista. This was my achilles heel. The box was supposed to grab an IP address then ping a server, with sweet victory mine. What wasn't worthy was my installation of Windows Vista. It did not see the wireless adapter correctly, and therefor did not attach to the router and grab and IP. A quick reboot found the adapter and attached, but not before a hot-on-my-heels competitor pinged the server before me!

In 2009 it was supposed to be different. I was going to take the championship and donate $10k to my charity. But with the constant change in schedules that make up CES, I was unable to make it to the race in time; due to a last minute request for me to demonstrate the G4 TV "Best of the Best" winning products to the Chairmen of the major cable networks. Their demo took priority before the contest.

Fortunately I did make it over at the end, and my buddy Al won first place. Alison Haislip had fun with getting everyone psyched out over my PC building skills, and I was able to make an appearance, in the end. I guess he ended up with the big check AND the cheerleaders. Enjoy!

2009-01-21T15:14:00.005-06:00

Panasonic CES 2009 Thin was in...

At last years CES, Panasonic had the talk of the show; a 150" plasma that matched the yearling weight of a Jersey cow (that's 770 pounds for you non-diary folk.) Now I doubt any of my walls could hold that screen in place, but maybe I could replace a window with it.

This year thin was in, and that TV was shunned to a room at the back of the booth, next to the 3D screens they have created. Since I am personally not into 3D displays, as they typically require silly colored or LCD shutter glasses, and we cannot show that off on our standard definition broadcast, I stuck with covering the things that Panasonic is known for - great cameras and displays.

Here's the clip showing their 1/3 inch plasma, 1080p HDC-HS300 Camcorder and Viera Networked plasma screens. You may be able to notice the dry air of the Las Vegas desert and hotels was taking a toll on my voice... I sound a bit scratchy!

2009-01-14T02:12:00.005-06:00

CES 2009 Best Of from G4 TV

Another day has passed since returning from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and my dry throat and irritated vocal chords are nearly recovered enough to return my normal voice. We showcased 100's of products live and you can replay them until your mouse breaks from G4TV.com/CES at your leisure.

For those of you in a hurry however, the other hosts and I gave a rundown at the end of our six hours of broadcasting on what are our favorite items that launched at this years show. Here's the clip. Enjoy!

Backup Frequently and Often

2008-12-27T18:06:00.000-06:00

Seagate_FA_Go_silver_dock
Originally uploaded by gadgetgy.

Since my first computer with dual 83K (that’s Kilobytes) floppies, which were great for text, the multimedia computing age has made our storage requirements grow exponentially. We literally store gigabytes of personal content like photos and documents, which have personal value, as well as paid digital media which can be expensive to download and collect. This data on the internal hard drive in our computers is a ticking time-bomb that can carry our precious media away once it starts clicking like a popcorn maker that only Orville Redenbacher would appreciate.

Any storage media is susceptible to mechanical or electronic failure before a device’s lifetime is extinguished; the problem with hard drives is that you only know when it is about to give up its ghost when it is too late. Recovering this data can involve luck or expensive data recovery services.

For this reason, I say backup your important data in many places, and often. The best form of backup is with a central device on your network, such as a connected network hub such as Apple’s Airport Extreme, or a Linksys USB sharing device or router for Windows users. I prefer these methods over all-in-one router and storage device like the Apple Time Capsule, which includes 500GB or 1TB internal drive options. This is because the Time Capsule has a lot of technology under the hood, and running all of that creates heat. Heat and spinning platters of a hard disk can create a cascade of errors like chip failure or thermal issues when reading and writing to the drive itself.

External hard drives can run a bit cooler outside of a computer, which can help with a longer lifespan of the bearings and head motors, as they can see less heat. With these, you will want to keep the drive upright, out of the sun and with enough airspace around it.

Do it your-self fans will love FreeNAS which allows an old PC or laptop to run a free Linux based operating system as a backup server on your network. I have actually used FreeNAS to recover NTFS hardware based RAID partitions that Windows Servers would no longer mount and access! RAID is the ultimate in backup as many drives are spanned together into one single volume, and data is redundantly placed across these drives. This technology is cumbersome to setup and rebuild, but the external drive chassis by Drobo has automated this capability and is expensive, but very powerful. If you go this route, look for automated software that can run on your laptop and desktop computers to automatically backup their data on the LAN, like Apple Time Machine. See my post here on the Airport Extreme Router configuration!

Here are the things you need to look for in a backup external hard drive:
1. Warranty: First and foremost a 1-year guarantee won’t cut it. Go for 5-years, and three is all right.
2. Portability: Laptop based 2.5” external drives require no power or lugging of an AC adapter. With this portability, come smaller capacities of 500MB and slower rotational speeds of 5400 RPM, but you will be able to easily bring these on the road with you. The desktop 3.5” sized USB drives hold up to 1.5 Terabytes as I write this, and spin faster at 7200 RPM, but require a power brick and are 100% (or more) larger in physical size.
3. Speed – USB will be most compatible with devices like the new Macbook; which removed all other data ports, but if you store movies or shoot 12-megapixel photos, then you will want to find a drive that includes firewire 400 (traditional) and 800 (high-speed but downward compatible) as well as eSATA which is the fastest external interface currently known to man.

My favorite drives these days are the Seagate FreeAgent line. They max-out my three requirements above, sport a 5-year warranty, a choice of 2.5” and 3.5” sizes (get the big one for home and the little one for on the go!) and have fast interfaces. Their portable 2.5” Go series drives come in a PC version with a USB 2.0 port, and a Mac version (my favorite) which adds firewire and includes all of the cables for USB, Firewire 400 and 800 and a neat drive dock, plus these cables are “thick” and great quality with nice strain-reliefs built in. With the FreeAgent Desk USB is standard, but drives with Firewire and eSATA are available in up to 1.5TB capacities.

The drives have a neat industrial design, can stand on their edge perpendicularly for more airflow or lie horizontally, and the portable models have a neat silicone like bottom that may just keep them from flying off your desk or even out of your bag. The tops have an aluminum panel which works to dissipate heat and just plain looks cool, as long as it doesn't get scratched.

So there you go. You have data. It is important. Now get an external drive and back it up. Remember to store drives at different locations geographically if the data is extremely important. You do not want a natural disaster ruining your original and backups if they are all in one location. Just make sure you buy a quality drive!

Calacanis and Arrington Pups at TC50

2008-09-18T03:25:00.000-05:00

Calacanis Pups at TC50
Originally uploaded by gadgetgy.

Last week had non-stop events in San Francisco, TechCrunch 50 (TC50), Apple's Lets Rock announcement and CTIA took my days, and the parties took over the nights. The dust has settled this week and I wanted to share my thoughts of the event. I saw a lot of stuff, and below is a sample of the good and bad that resonated with me.

On the first day of TC50, there was no wireless Internet access, which I actually liked. Having been to events with full-speed unadulterated Internet access like Demo, a few Gnomedexes and the Web2.0 conferences, and actually presenting at many events, it is quite annoying to speak at people gazing into their laptops. While many are tweeting your moments of awesomeness (like twitter.com/dacort/statuses/896814882 this) it's hard to have a connection with your audience when a laptop acts as a physical wall in front of your would-be engaged audience. Thankfully, a bit of off the cuff humor or a quick roll through a slide deck (as performed by Jeremy Toeman bugblogger.com/author/jeremy-toeman/) can force people to be engaged.

After a slow (read boring) start from Ashton Kutcher and his www.BlahGirls.com site - which I thought was for kids, but it's PG-13, the content at TC50 became more and more interesting. It was cool to see Marissa Mayer show Google's indexing (read scanning) of newspapers and the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and hot-linking on their scans of the printed page. You can read about the Archived Search paper project here: news.google.com/archivesearch/partner.html

I thought Yammer - www.yammer.com/ which is twitter for corporations was as pointless as twitter for consumers (disclosure: I reluctantly tweet myself) and could kill productivity faster than corporate instant messaging and email already do. The "only when necessary consumer" in me loved the idea of OpenTrace - opentrace.org/ which is a way to see the environmental impact that a product has from its creation. Microsoft's Marc Smith tried this with bar code reading Pocket PC's back in the days of Aura (now closed) but it never "really" launched.

I can't believe that OtherInbox.com got such a great response considering their methods are obvious to tech-know-how-folk who run their own domains, or one of the 26 million people who use gmail. You see, those of us with our own domain, like www.davemathews.com can create a "wildcard" address scheme where anythingyouwrite at davemathews.com can come to one in-box. If someone (like Hertz Gold membership in my case) had their database of email addresses hijacked, I could turn off the address that I used by pointing it at a "blacklisted" or spam name that was created later. Gmail users can add a +uniquename to their gmail user name (before the @ sign - like dave+hertzgold@gmail.com and you can see who is spamming you, and create a filter to move them away from your inbox. I do like their ability for them to automatically "folder" a "user name" so you can send everything for your "latrip@otherinbox.com" and have a single click of a folder to see your flights, hotels or tickets easily. Their truly unique feature is a daily "snapshot" that they can send to your primary email address, to let you know what came into your other inbox that day. Think of it as a peep-hole to see if you need to check that other box. That is smart.

It seems as the stuff going on at Demo day one was more interesting to me than the TC50 day one. But that changed on day two the TC50. Unfortunately I was not able to attend either of those conferences as the G4 network had me cover the Apple Lets Rock event. Which was interesting, albeit evolutionary, not revolutionary. You can catch the fun that we had over there; here: www.telepixels.com/2008/09/ipod-nano-4g-and-itouch-2-along-with.html

Even though I wasn't present for their pitch, I did order the gadget from www.fitbit.com - I am more interested about what this will do to register my (lack of?) sleeping patterns than how far I run around the city during the day. Lets hope this hardware gets open sourced for other modules and capabilities. I also watched the demo from www.Tonchidot.com in awe. Their software uses GPS and WiFi location sniffing to overlay user submitted data on the top of video seen by the iPhone camera. Although it is a demo and may prove to be difficult to execute in the real world, it showed augmented reality - something that I worked on and dreamed of when I developed the CueCat barcode reader. Theirs was in a 3D space, which made it almost magical. Lets hope they create a database structure that can live up to its promise, without being too ambiguous. The guys from T9, the global standard in "touch once" texting software for numeric (read: non smart) mobile phones showed their Swype text input for touch screens. You can run this software on your Windows mobile device, by going to www.forwordinput.com if you still use one of those phones. Yeah, I didn't think so.

On Wednesday the Internet was flowing through the TC50 air at the pace of the drip on that sink that you always meant to fix. Twitters mobile site worked well; on your laptop. And that was good enough for me. I was most interested in www.TrueCar.com which uses actual sales data from lenders, insurance companies and god knows who else to tell you what others are paying for their new automobiles. This is an interesting service as the automotive business is never as cut and dry as you would expect a commodity product to be. Caveat Emptor!

The guys from www.bojam.com showed a collaborative music site, like Apple's Garage Band but with a Web 2.0 user generated flair. You can upload your own beats, loops or tracks and let other musicians contribute to a final song, or use your beats in theirs. What happened to musicians finding each other on Craigs List? This site tears down geographical boundaries, which should give an interesting spin to concerts. I can just see it now, a live conference concert via iChat!

Back on the "what's old is new" tip, www.GoodGuide.com gives users access to health and other environmental impacts that products have and reports them to consumers. Again this is a take on Microsoft Aura in a Web 2.0 world. Oh, and a bar code will trigger a users input from a mobile phone in the near future - how novel. With 61,000 entries so far, and 200 data sources polled for information on these products, it may just help you to buy something that is "greener" than not, if you stop and take the time to check.

So there you have it. A quick look at the TechCrunch 50 presenters that I found interesting and gauche. By the way, as much as I didn't think so upon my seeing them online, the Calacanis and Arrington dogs were kind of cute in person. Name badges and all...

2008-09-11T16:41:00.004-05:00

iPod Nano 4G and iTouch 2 along with iTunes 8.0 and the Genius Feature

G4 sent me off to the Apple Lets Rock event and we put together a quick package showing you what's up with the new Apple "back to shopping season" announcements. The details on Nano (4th generation) pricing (8GB for $149 and 16GB for $199) and the iTouch 2 (8GB for $229, 16GB for $299 and 32GB for $399) and what all they now do are within the video clip.

Enjoy!

2008-09-10T11:22:00.002-05:00

Apple - Lets Rock 4G Nano and iTouch 2 launch

The G4 TV guys asked me to help them cover the launch of Apple's latest Nano and the iTouch take two during their fall 2008 "back to shopping event." It was a cool event where Sir Jobs spoke, and I posted a bunch of photos on Flickr of what I saw in the press room.

I think that the Nano is back to the right "form factor" that it should stay in. I hated the stubby one, it was just too hard to use the wheel to navigate with it. I like that they included an accelerometer in it as well. The "shake to shuffle" feature is gimmicky, but clever. I expect more applications with it in the future. The new headphones with a mic (for voice recording) and wired remote control will work with the Nano out of the box.

As a user of the first generation iTouch, I really like the price drop on the current line. The cosmetic changes mimic that of the iPhone 3G, with a rounded back. The built-in Nike+iPod receiver is cool, but the real news is the built in speaker for casual games and personal listening along with its ability to use a mic on the Apple $29 and $79 headphones, which both include an inline remote control for tracks and volume. There is no voice recorder on the iTouch, but third parties have created this software.

Why does this excite me? Well, I cannot wait to play with some TRUE VoIP applications or even Skype with the new iTouch. This could really become something if muni-wifi comes into play and could turn the iTouch into a great free communication device, like when I used it in Europe instead of an iPhone which would cost much more due to data roaming rates.

Take a look at the loop segment I did with the guys from G4 TV via a fiber link from San Francisco, back to their studios in LA.

2008-08-21T22:23:00.004-05:00

I hate it when my worlds collide, and the weekend of August 22, 2008 is one such time when my work and pleasure (of all things musical) are conflicting with one another. You see my buddy Chris Pirillo is hosting Gnomedex 08 in Seattle and I haven't been to one of his conferences in a long time. At this show, I'm going to talk about the open source software boxee.tv, our social media center. Oh and my buddy Jeremy Toeman is going to talk about the killer open source hardware, Bug Labs. But, on this very same weekend, there is a HUGE three-day concert, Outside Lands Festival in Golden Gate Park. What's a guy or gal to do? Well, stream the one you are not going to, of course!

The Outside Lands Festival is getting their stream on through iStreamPlanet and you can find the feed within the AT&T Blue Room Fear not, Mac users, as you can still get in on the action too, if you head to this webpage and follow the instructions that Blue Room put together.

Chris will be using his favorite 24-hour selfcasting service, U-Stream and have the show live on the gnomedex.com website (right now the video is on the lower right hand corner, and is showing their pre-party that I cannot attend, because I am blogging. Oh, and I'm not in Seattle yet.

So if you are stuck at home these weekend, and want to see what is going on in the West coast(s), take a look at these feeds on your PC!

Gnomedex 2008 - Live stream: chris.pirillo.com/live/
Outside Lands Festival 2008 - Live stream: Outside Lands Festival

iPhone vs Blackberry FREE HTML email

2008-08-19T23:49:00.000-05:00

When I went to Europe this summer, two weeks before the new iPhone came out, I had to fight myself from buying the original iPhone before the new "3Jesus phone" was released upon my return. You see, as a Sprint cellular user, I am unable to use my 3G CDMA phone in Europe, because they do not support the network nor frequencies that we do in the US. For my mobile communications instead, I bought an iTouch and ran the iPhone 1.1.4 software on it, using WiFi hot-spots rather than the 2.5G EDGE cellular network. This mean that I had no roaming fees for data, which saved me buckets of money. The setup worked perfectly, although there were a few instances that I had to walk around more than I would have liked "dousing" for open WiFi. However, iPhone applications like eMail, Google Maps (with Skyhook WiFi location) and jailbroken applications like Twitteriffic all worked fine within open hotspots. The location finding via WiFi was spot-on and a real treat to have when I got lost in Amsterdam.

The thing that I really liked about my virtual iPhone, I mean iTouch, was that it was a wonderful media and information consumption device. "Flicking through" weather updates, web pages and even music (gasp!) was a deeee-light. But, trying to tap-tap away on a glass touch-screen for a twitter update, or worse yet an email, was a time-consuming and error ridden experience.

This European vacation with the iTouch convinced me that I was not going to buy an iPhone 3G (with what I also consider a terrible AT&T data and voice plan) upon my return to the States. But another phone had piqued my interest - the Blackberry 8330, another 3G device on Sprint and Verizon networks. As a long-standing member of Sprint's "All You can Eat" plan, now at $99/month, I was happy with the network, despite its lack of global coverage.

The Blackberry is no stranger to my pocket gadget arsenal, as I have had a couple in the past, but they were now down to 4 oz, and nearly half the thickness of my 3G Treo 755p. But one feature was really lacking on the Blackberry - its lack of HTML email support. I fell in love with the hardware however and made the leap, figuring that third party applications would provide the feature I missed, yet all fell short. Mail load times were longer, obtrusive messages popped up, and the font support didn't mimic the factory settings. You could tell this was an add-on, and if you installed it and can't figure out how to remove it, just look for SmartView within the Add/Remove Applications icon on the Blackberry Desktop software - and un-check it. Once I read about the 4.5 client software update, with the 2.5 Blackberry Internet Service upgrades that were coming to the carriers I hoped this could be my ideal solution.

As I am not one to wait for Sprint to release "blessed" firmware, I monitored the forums and checked others, who were less dependent on their mobile phones, that tested the "buried 4.5 firmware" on the Blackberry web site. A few catastrophes were debugged, and by deleting the vendor.xml file from the installation package which dropped it within the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Research in Motion\AppLoader then by running the 4.5 Desktop Manager, all of the Curve (83XX) model phones could be upgraded to the latest and greatest, with built-in HTML email support. Find your model of Curve's firmware and instructions here: http://forums.crackberry.com/f52/

After upgrading both an AT&T and Sprint Blackberry Curve without fail, I was still unable to get my HTML email from Gmail and my hosted domains. Turns out, the profiles (with their unique capabilities) are sent down from the Blackberry Internet Server (BIS) which must be accessed by going to yourcarrier.blackberry.com (sprint.blackberry.com in my case) then after logging in, delete all of your current email addresses, and finally re-instate them. After the "Congratulations" email (this feat, I hardly consider congratulatory) your addresses will default to receiving HTML email and automatically load images. These features can be turned back off by clicking on the Blackberry button while in the message list view, rolling down to options, clicking on Email Settings, then disabling HTML or Image auto-load for each of your configured accounts. You may want to stop loading images if you are on 2.5G networks, but the HTML color, font and other settings will be beneficial to you. Corporate users with Exchange servers will have other settings that I am not privy to in my installation.

Oh, and Gmail users who do not want to get a copy of their own email just sent from a Blackberry to hit them again when they press send, use this fix to create a from-address filter of your own address: Removing duplicate or email echos from Gmail accounts.

So for the next year or so, or until Android, some other hot phone, or Apple fixes all of their iPhone bugs (like this tweet from my buddy Brian Solis - http://twitter.com/briansolis/) I have the perfect phone for "producing content." Something I like to do. Like this how-to story for you.

Defcon 16 - 2008 Coverage

2008-08-16T15:59:00.000-05:00

There is no worse place to be than the city of Las Vegas in the summer. Yet, for years my brother and I have made our trek there for his birthday weekend and the conference that makes you want to never turn on your laptop, Defcon. This year is the 16th annual security conference and we learned about cable modem vulnerabilities, lock picking (a show favorite) and how to instantly take over an Internet kiosk via multiple vulnerabilities.

A ran into my friends at G4 TV while I was there, and got them hooked up with my buddies Zoz and Joe Grand from the new Discovery Channel show Prototype This! Take a look at the segment here and watch when I talk about the Wall of Sheep.

2008-08-09T01:54:00.002-05:00

Dave Mathews on DL.TV
Originally uploaded by gadgetgy

My buddy Robert Heron had me on his DL.TV show to talk about what it is like to be an inventor and to show my latest business endeavor, boxee.tv - a social media player. We got into what makes a good product, how to protect your invention with patents and an overview of how boxee can make your media better. It's a great episode! Take a look at show #244!

Lock down your Facebook or Myspace profile

2008-08-06T13:01:00.000-05:00

The amount of "transparency" people have which means the amount of seemingly private information that people put on the Internet these days amazes me. Wether it is photos on sharing sites like Flickr, or too much information on MySpace and Facebook, this could come back to haunt you or otherwise make you need to explain your life to a higher power. I'm not talking about the pearly gates either.

I wrote a story for Young Money, a magazine that hits a couple dozen college campuses on how to lock down your profile within the most popular social networking sites, so you do not have to worry about accepting your boss as a "friend" once they find out about Facebook.

If you have not locked down your profile, go do it now. Oh, and good luck getting the data which Yahoo and Google indexed already out of those search engines. The Internet is a house of cards, just waiting to tumble.

P.S. The endearing photo is of my G4TV host buddy Olivia Munn. I'm sure it was just pre-show nerves or something.

Cranky Geeks with iPhone 3G and more...

2008-07-23T20:00:00.000-05:00

I made another appearance on Cranky Geeks in the hot (yeah right) July summer of San Francisco, on episode 125. We spoke about the iPhone and its revolutionary app store; which is the real story of the 3G iPhone, not the 3G which brings talk time from 10 hours to 5 hours. The worlds oldest blogger at 108 years old (someone else typed for her) passed away and newsgroup sites are having a problem with porn images.

But that's enough about the episode, click here to watch it then click the iPhone image in the next window!

2008-07-23T00:52:00.007-05:00

Because boxee is a new type of software program, unlike traditional software as it utilizes a 10-foot user interface like a TiVo but with social capabilities, I put together a 4 and a half minute walk-through video. This shows you how navigate through the interface (by the way, we launched the Linux version today at boxee.tv!) You don't use a mouse with boxee, just your keyboard if you are on a laptop, or remote control (the Apple remote or Media Center version on Windows boxes works great) to navigate around. This makes things much easier than "pointing and clicking" from across the room and as a bonus, it gets rid of that annoying mouse arrow on top of your media. This software is best used is when you connect a computer to your wide-screen TV and enjoy media from your couch!

Check out the video below to see how to get the most out of boxee. Now this isn't the "teaser video" as to why you would want to use boxee, as that is coming later... This is something for our alpha users to view while they are downloading the application, to get a little more educated on how to use it once installed...

2008-06-16T19:23:00.007-05:00

Humans are inherently collectors. House sizes in America are huge today compared to what our grandparents owned, and we are stuffing them to the brink of explosion with "stuff." I try to live a lean "smart stuff life" but with a couple three terabytes of hard drives and RAID arrays around, I have found that I collect data. Lots of huge files like music (albums not just tracks) remixes that can be hours long and increasingly movies ripped and compressed with Divx from my DVD collection.

Managing this was a pain, and consuming was even harder as I had several appliances to help do so. My original Xbox running XBMC was good, but that hardware was getting rusty with no HDTV capabilities. The AudioTron from Turtle Beach did music really well but maxed out when I hit 32k songs 5-years ago. My Roku HD-1000 did MPEG2 movies and photos but the UI was cumbersome, if not abysmal. My different trials of firmware for the Xbox360 along with a NAS networked PC running Transcode 360 did other file types OK, but that's two full PC's to feed one living room media habit! Worst of all, this meant that I needed three different devices, with different UI's and input sources on the TV and amplifier. The geek acceptance factor (let alone what I speak of as the WAF - or wife acceptance factor) were reaching all-time lows.

What is my solution for the "all format/both local and online media player" today? It's boxee.tv - I've been working with the amazing team of developers (all who have funny accents from Israel) since the beginning of 2008 and am proud of their technical prowess and achievements in what I think is the ultimate 10-foot user interface for the television. This is software that begs to be put on the big-screen, with just a cheap DVI or HDMI cable be from your computer to control the media that you, like most others, are collecting.

The software needs to be seen to believed, and if you have a Mac, or Linux computer, you can get in on our Alpha test. I gotta say, the software feels more like Beta to me, as I've been watching less of my two TiVo HD boxes (both Sat and cable fed) and more of online over the top video and local content on my Mac Mini connected to the same TV as the TiVos.

If you are more of a music and photo collector with few movie rips, which is understandable, still give boxee a try - the team has put thousands of videos available for streaming or legal downloading within the rich user interface. You can ease your way into video collecting without fear of piracy. I crack up at the videos that are available and never would have found them without the comfort of browsing available online media from my couch!

2008-05-23T12:32:00.006-05:00

At the 2008 Consumer Electronics show, we got ahold of the Kindle: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device, for a quick overview on G4 TV. It is much lighter and thinner than I expected and while some people miss the fact that it has no power-hungry WiFi, I like that it is always connected over a cellular network (in the USA only) for e-books and RSS feeds. It even has capabilities to get e-copies of the NYT and WSJ!

Here are Olivia Munn and the Gadget Guy going over the Kindle and figuring out how she would use it in her home...

Fake Steve Jobs - Daniel Lyons @ Web2.0

2008-05-05T20:40:00.000-05:00

Fake Steve Jobs - Daniel Lyons @ Web2.0
Originally uploaded by gadget.

It looks as if all of my stories covering the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference have been posted to the PC Magazine world... Here's a recap:

Marc Andreessen talks about what it was like in the early days of creating the browser at the University of Illinois then Netscape and what he is currently doing with the white label social networking site Ning. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2288828,00.asp

Gear Log picked my story on Dash, the in-car GPS with WiFi and cellular wide area networking connectivity. It's got the whole "crowdsourcing" automatic web2.0 thing figured out! http://www.gearlog.com/2008/04/dash_gps_owners_search_for_sta.php

Finally, my buddy David Spark did a little Q&A with yours truly and I pontificate on what the future of social networking will become. Hint, it is already a time-waster, but does not let you play scrabulous, but spamulous... http://www.sparkminute.com/?p=333

P.S. I need a hair cut.

BUG and Fire at Maker Faire 2008

2008-04-29T14:30:00.001-05:00

BUG in Hong Kong magazine
Originally uploaded by offender

This weekend is going to be a geekfest delight at the San Mateo fare grounds (near the horse track) as Make Magazine's Maker Faire rolls back into town. Last year I visited it with jetlag from Australia, but this year I am taking it all in!

Be on the lookout for my friend Christian's Ristow's crushing artwork Subjugator and Manipulatrix and Lance's Greathouse's fire machines. They will warm you upon a crisp Bay area night!

But that's not the only reason for this post. My buddies at BUG labs asked me to write a bit about what I thought of their platform as a tool for inventors like myself. The essence is that I think the BUG is going to be an amazing tool for inventors - and think it has a huge future in the "long tail" with customized consumer devices. You can read my opinions at http://www.bugblogger.com/2008/04/dip-then-dive-i.html online.

With that, I will let you read more online and see you at the Maker Faire!

2008 O'Reilly Web2.0 Stories Part I

2008-04-28T20:22:00.000-05:00

Web2.0 Day 1
Originally uploaded by gadget.

Ok, so I'm a new tech guy in an old media (dead trees and analog broadcast) world. Until now, ya see. Last week was pivotal for me. A magazine that I normally write for in print emailed me right before the W2E event and asked me to blog on it. Coolio I think (but that means I need to leave the parties at a decent hour to edit) and I neglected to remember this: when you are used to long lead times in print and lots of back-and-forth conversations with an editor on "what your worlds meant" versus blog posts which need to be up quickly and succinctly.

That on top of a content management system that was trashing (removing/deleting/zero-daying?) my stories made things a little tricky, but alas that dilemma is being worked on by coders much smarter than myself.

Here's a quick rundown of the first bit that are posted:

Tim O'Reilly, conference organizer does a "Radar" event at most of his events - they are a favorite of mine since he has a bunch of Alpha-geeks (myself included-yeah!) that he watches to see what we are hacking on. This lead to the creation of Make Magazine (I'm lucky enough to be a founding contributor) and Foo camp in 2003. Check out what I caught from his speech here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2286997,00.asp

The Chairwoman of Mozilla foundation, creators of Firefox, Micthell Baker had mobile browsing on her mind. Good timing on this one as iPhone's WebKit and Nokia platforms are going to go head to head with advanced and high-speed capabilities as the Treo works its way out of pockets. I still have another year contract left on my 755p. Read about here vision for the browser here:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2287824,00.asp

MySpace VP Steve Peerman says that we can learn from our users (how Web2.0 of him!) by giving them advanced looks at interfaces or features and actually (gasp!) take their criticism. Find out if you want to have Tom as your friend again (you did delete him right?) by reading here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2287877,00.asp

Wrapping up this overview post is a story from Google's Matt Cutts, who was talking about Spam, no not the food or what ends up in your email in-box (despite GMail's bad ass filters) but comment and web page spam. Solutions for this double yickyness can be found here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2287888,00.asp

More to come as their content management system at PC Magazine dawt com gets corrected!

Time Machine to Airport Extreme Router

2008-03-24T13:33:00.000-05:00

Time Machine to Airport Extreme
Originally uploaded by gadget.

I an effort to consume less power, I am turning off my terabyte RAID server, and other full PC's but still want to maintain my automatic backups and remote file or server-like storage while I am on the road. The Airport Extreme became my router of choice a few months ago, with its ability to host 802.11n connections to my MacBook Air and its NAS capability. From my testing in 2007, the Linksys NAS on its 802.11n products is abysmal and should never be trusted.

With the March 7.3.1 firmware for the Airport Extreme, we are now able to do a Time Machine backup from a Mac running 10.5.2 to any USB connected drive - as long as it is supporting the following:
1. HFS+ File System that is Journaled
2. File Sharing enabled with "AirPort Extreme Password"
3. You must connect to the drive with Finder before launching Time Machine to select the drive

In my case, after upgrading the operating system (I love the Mac's auto-update) and manually updating the base station (I avoided 7.2.1 due to other issues) I thought I would be ready to go. That was not the case.

For the 500GB low-power USB drive that I have hung from the Airport Extreme USB port, I used HFS+ without Journaling to get a little more speed - important for me as I steam videos and music from this to media appliances that do not have hard drives. To add Journaling, I "disconnected users" on the Airport configuration, connected this drive to my Mac and loaded disk utility. From here I highlighted the volume name and clicked the button in the tool bar that says "Enable Journaling." After a few minutes of drive activity, I removed it and reconnected it to my Airport Extreme base station, with 100 Megabit - this is fine as the Gigabit version cannot run NAT fast enough to justify those speeds.)

My next "problem" was that I enabled specific user accounts to keep my shared data and private storage isolated. That will not work with this current firmware, so I "downgraded" to a single user account. I am not a fan of this, but the importance of the backup outweighs my desire to keep private files, well, just that. Since I am a one-man user on my home network, this is not such a big deal. The password is different from my WPA2 WiFi signal however, so that adds a layer of obfuscation.

Next, I launched Finder, connected to my drive with my new credentials and launched Time Machine. My drive is now visible as an "approved" Time Machine backup volume. This means that my Air can truly work as it should - with only a wire for powering its battery, not for backing up. I really dig that all Macs on my network will auto-backup to my big shared volume.

Now if only Apple would make a feature to disable big backups while I am working. It seems that even with 802.11n, backing up 100MB of data while I am trying to use the web is slowing things down. Note that I am not running NAT on the Airport, due to its slowdown of network address translation (converting my single ISP provided IP address to my private range inside.) For my router with fail-over ISP connection, NAT and VPN tunneling and host modes, I use a Netgear business class router. More on what I am doing with that, later!

Geeking out with the Cranky Geeks

2008-02-27T13:04:00.000-06:00

I will be a guest crank today on Cranky Geeks with my old friend John Dvorak - the head crank, today Wednesday the 27th. We go live to the web at 12:30pm PST and replays can be found here: Cranky Geeks Episode 105 - February 27th, 2008

Watch all of the crankyness if you are eating your desk for lunch today. :)

Live CES 2008 Coverage on G4 TV with Dave Mathews

2008-01-06T17:33:00.000-06:00

G4 Stage
Originally uploaded by gadget

It's the first week of January and you know what that means! That's right, all of the electronics that you received for Christmas are now rendered obsolete thanks to the new product announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show.

This year I am working with the guys at G4 to bring you the latest in technology from the show floor. Tune in live January 7th and 8th at 4pm PST and 7pm Eastern on G4 TV (DirecTV 354) or tell your TiVo to record Consumer Electronics Show 2008 on both days to see what you will be looking for in your gadget future!

You can also keep up with us online at http://www.g4tv.com/CES/ and of course via my Flickr page by just clicking on the photo here.

CES 2008 on G4 TV!

2008-01-06T17:26:00.001-06:00

G4 Stage
Originally uploaded by gadget

It's the first week of January and you know what that means! That's right, all of the electronics that you received for Christmas are now rendered obsolete thanks to the new product announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show.

This year I am working with the guys at G4 to bring you the latest in technology from the show floor. Tune in live January 7th and 8th at 4pm PST and 7pm Eastern on G4 TV (DirecTV 354 or tell your TiVo to record Consumer Electronics Show 2008 on both days to see what you will be looking for in your gadget future!

You can also keep up with us online at http://www.g4tv.com/CES/ and of course via my Flickr page by just clicking on the photo here.

Last Minute Gift Ideas for 2007

2007-12-19T18:12:00.000-06:00

Tommy and Rumble FM99.com
Originally uploaded by gadget.

If you are up early in the Midwest, or chillin' in the cold Northeast; browse-into fm99.com on December 20th, 2007. I'll be a guest on Tommy & Rumble - on 99 FM - Hampton Virginia's rock station. This is my second time talking to the guys (but don't ask me which one of the guys is the Rumble) about gadgets and finally last minute holiday gifts for people who have everything. Like me. Tune in early - they are on from 5:30-10am Eastern time, and my segment will run a couple times... While I sleep in perpetual 60 degree California. Look, somebody's got to do it!

2007-10-24T18:48:00.001-05:00

AT&T Tilt by HTC
Originally uploaded by gadget

This week I have been at the CTIA Wireless I.T. and Entertainment show in San Francisco. I've not seen anything revolutionary, just evolutionary. Take a look at my Flickr Stream for photos from the event. There are a few new handsets like the HTC Touch and Tilt, as well as some cool LG phones with touch screens more akin to the iPhone than the Treo... No iPhones though!

PC Magazine Productivity Expo

2007-10-24T18:31:00.000-05:00

It's time again for the PC Magazine Productivity Online Expo, which opens Thursday, October 25th (9:30AM - 6:00 ET/6:30AM - 3:00PM PT)

I'll be speaking on PC Magazine's online trade show, the Mobility Technology Online Expo. There will be a cast of other experts and characters speaking on how you can achieve excellence in the latest in mobile computing and connectivity.

My topics are: Productivity for Road Warriors: On-Demand ApplicationsFor low monthly fees, providers of on-demand applications keep small- and medium-size business from having to pay large up-front costs to keep mobile workers productive. And the good news is that the quality of on-demand applications has risen dramatically in recent years. In this interactive webcast, experts from PC Magazine and leaders from top on-demand application companies will show you how to optimize on-demand solutions for any kind of business.

Head on over to watch it live, or see the rebroadcast whenever you desire!

2007-10-12T13:15:00.001-05:00

TiVo HD DirecTiVo and Audiotron
Originally uploaded by gadget

In July 2007 a law took effect that mandated the cable industry move to a method of conditional access, or content security that was open to users selecting their own tuners, while still being protective of premium content like HBO. This technology is known as cable card where a small PC-Card (formerly known as PCMCIA) form factor descrambler can be installed into your late model LCD or Plasma screen, digital video recorder (DVR), or even some new Vista Media Center PCs, and eventually accessory PC cable QAM tuners. Cable TV subscribers need only call their operator to get for free, or a low monthly fee, a cable card for their chosen tuner. Currently, as this is a new technology, these cards are installed via a truck roll from your cable company, at a cost that you can frequently have waived. In the near future I expect this to be self-installed like DSL as the process is extremely straightforward. Cable companies today do not have their customer service representatives trained yet on this new activation process, as their legacy set top boxes are installed by technicians as well.

Because of this government mandated user empowerment, the newly released TiVo HD looks like it is going to replace my Mac Mini running XP Media Center Edition 2005 via Boot Camp with tuning via a Silicon Dust dual QAM tuner in the living room. The reason? It's cheaper than my Mac configuration, it's way easy, and it always works. You can pick up a TiVo HD for about $250 delivered depending on tax from Amazon; which supports dual tuners and can pull in all encrypted digital cable channels, except the on-demand programming. Best of all, thanks to cable-card for conditional access, and the M-Card supporting multiple streams, a single coax cable plugged into the TiVo; along with a single M-card unlocks both internal high-definition tuners. My favorite model of TiVo before this, the DirecTiVo supported two tuners as well, but required two coax lines feeding it from the satellite, a difficult installation proposition for most users. The TiVo HD also has the ability to record from two ATSC UHF HDTV digital signals through a second airial port, so you can stay away from cable fees, enjoying great HD content from over the air (OTA) reception.

The internal 160GB drive is a little small; supporting 20 hours of HD content and 184 hours of SD content (at the High quality setting) but rumor has it that TiVo will be releasing software to enable the external hard disk eSATA port for expansion plus the ability for the home media option to work as well - giving bi-directional content sharing with PCs. With that "open" access to additional content, we will have a winner on our hands. I have already seen two updates on my unit, one to fix macroblocking problems that some users experienced and a second that enables more sophisticated "Universal Swivel Search" which searches not only the program guide information within TiVo, but also new movie releases and Amazon Unbox content - which can be delivered to the TiVo from the living room user interface! Take that AppleTV!

Best yet, between October 11th and November 8th, 2007, you can transfer a previously purchased lifetime service from an older box, activated before October 2003, to a new TiVo HD for $199. From here: http://www3.tivo.com/tivo-promo/show.do?pg=/buytivo/hdservicetransfer.html

Now if you are lucky enough to find or have a TiVo activated back then, that unit's lifetime cost you between $199 and $249. At $16.95 per month, it seems to be a good deal, with a quick 1-year payback, considering you got your "lifetime's worth" on your original TiVo hardware. If you add the TiVo HD on as a second receiver however, and go with a 3 year commitment on your HD box, the monthly payment is only $6.95 per month, which means 29 months to equal $199. This means a two-and-a-half year payback of the transfer fee. If you buy a lifetime box off of eBay, which are available yet carry a premium (note, do NOT buy a "LifeTime DirecTiVo" box as MANY are hacked via software and are not elidigable due to these boxes receiving their program guide from the DirecTV satellite stream) consider the additional preium to pay back your investment versus $16.95 per month. By the way, you can find Lifetime subscription "cards" from retail stores that were once sold on eBay too, but they go for around $600. Yikes!

I am a huge fan of the TiVo interface, and with the features of the HD like simultaneous digital and analog output (some early receivers only allowed digital or analog via a switch) so I can run my HDMI TV and Slingbox Pro simultaneously and not be stuck with a cable provider user interface. This does come at a time when Comcast is slowing rolling the TiVo user interface out to its subscribers on a market by market basis. This at a premium cost over their plain vanilla DVR hardware from Motorola.

By the way, users who said the TiVo HD interface was slow may have been talking about its operating during initial setup, as the box was parsing its data files. I have had nearly every TiVo, from Series 1 @ 30GB, Series 2 with 120GB and a DVD burner (a favorite for making DVD's faster than real-time) the DirecTiVo with integrated Dual Tuners for DirecTV and finally the TiVo HD. All have what I feel to be some un-necessary lag during operations that could be performed in the back ground (like re-prioritizing season passes) but overall this new TiVo HD performs better or as well as my other units.

TiVo, thanks for putting Multi-Stream M-Card support on the TiVo HD box, versus the single stream S-Card on the Series 3 TiVo, which would require a second card and additional monthly charge in my Comcast territory. You've come up with a great product at a decent price. And Amazon has it for $244 now! Oh, and when you activate your service, tell them tivo at davemathews.com referred you!

2007-10-05T14:15:00.001-05:00

Radiohead - Name your price music
Originally uploaded by gadget

Johnny, you are the man. You get it! The Internet has leveled the playing field for music (and soon video) and we want to pay you, not the machine.

On October 10th, 2007 Radiohead will release their 7th album In Rainbows with a "pay what you want" model. You name the price that you want to pay for the entire album! Pay what you would for one track on iTunes, or an album at retail, maybe more if you really love the band. This trumps the last innovative sales technique by the steady flower, Chuck D of Public Enemy who in 1998 said that "musicians will circumvent the record label's distribution role." After dropping his label Def Jam in December of 1998, the group who includes current TV star Flavor Flav created history in May of 1999 by releasing the first album over the Internet from a platinum selling group. "There's a Poison Goin On" was available in Real Audio format via the web, with a CD mailed direct to consumers for $10. This was during an age of RIAA lawsuits over the first mass-consumer MP3 player, the RIO PMP-300. I had one and its parallel port interface and 32MB of storage was a joke by todays standards. You can still buy PE music from http://www.publicenemy.com/ and their current album, still $10, is "New Whirl Odor." Now instead of one portable MP3 player there are thousands on the market, with more than 110 million sold according to an April 2007 announcement from Apple.

But I digress. Back to Radiohead. You visit their website and enter the amount of UK Pounds that you wish to pay for their new album "In Rainbows," register for their site, then plug in your credit card digits and presto. They get money directly in their bank account. There is a 0.45 pound credit card processing fee, and Waste Products, LTD is handling the transactions for them, since an iTunes song has a similar processing fee, I would venture that Waste is making 0.15 pence (or UK pennies) on each transaction.

Read deeply into these artists album titles. They have more meaning than we imagined... Labels look out! The artists are restless!

Neiman Marcus Gifts 2007 Fantasy Gifts

2007-10-05T13:15:00.000-05:00

2008 Lexus IS F
Originally uploaded by gadget.

Neiman Marcus dropped their 2007 Fantasy Gifts catalog insert with over-the-top ideas for the holidays on us this week. My favorite vehicle is the $68k Lexus IS F with a 400 HP V8 under the hood and quad pipes sending a growling note out the back. You get this car, a concept gone production from Steve Millen, plus Skip Barber racing school with accommodations for one extravagant price. The rocket racing team (A.K.A. Red Bull Air Race) is even a little more pricey for me at $2m with just one year of support, and I'd probably get disoriented flying those little jets every-which-way.

For technology the interactive Swami at $75k is clever to visually recognize members of your family and carry on conversations; plus it comes with an unknown model of laptop to run his virtual brain. I predict that WowWee will have this in stores for the 2008 holiday season for $100. What I do like however is the $100k Interactive Touch Media Wall from Jeff Han - AKA the visual and user interface from Minority Report. Think of it as a huge 8 foot by 3 foot iPhone as the keyboard floating letters and pinch and flick features are replicated with it. Remember, that the software you run must be compatible with this wall, so do not expect Excel to interact like the demo video here is - otherwise your fingers will work like a human mouse. But with their proprietary software, it looks like a great way to slide photos around, do some cropping and show your rich friends how well your stock portfolio is doing...

Finally, stay away from the $110k chocolate his and hers portraits. That will just attract ants into your mansion.

BTW: I'll take the wall inside and the Lex outside. :)

San Francisco is the #1 City for Singles

2007-10-03T12:10:00.000-05:00

Gavin doing photo sessions on Octavia. Heeeey!
Originally uploaded by gadget.

This August, I was tapped by a freelancer at Forbes for an interview of the best spots to date in San Francisco. Since I live in and love this great city, I was up for the challenge. However, by the time the story was posted it was changed to a brief with bachelor and bachelorette picks plus some rankings on culture and cost of living amongst many great cities. Forbes.com take on San Francisco as a dating city.

This year, San Francisco beat out New York for top honors and I have to agree. The hustle and bustle of NYC can kill its inhabitants and the weather buries them under snow, rain or humidity for many months of the year. I love to visit New York, but see it tear too many people to shreds. San Francisco is nice and easy, and breezy. Literally.

For my part, Instead of recreating my "top dat spots" Violet Blue, author, sex columnist and all around vixen, headed to one of my picks, "Dateway" the Marina location of the Safeway grocery chain, where she and a girlfriend tested the isles for love. Her gal pal picked up a local with a Berkeley sweatshirt and she headed to a speed dating event at the Crush Lab. And scored too.

So there it is, the 2007 Best City for Singles. San Francisco, California. It's good to be perched in the middle of it.

Go Mobile already with the Mobility Online Expo

2007-09-26T21:31:00.000-05:00

On Thursday the 27th, early in the morning (8am) on the West coast I'll be speaking on PC Magazine's online trade show, the Mobility Technology Online Expo. There will be a cast of other experts and characters speaking on how you can achieve excellence in the latest in mobile computing and connectivity.

Topics include:

Portable computing devices, including Tablets, UMPCs, Notebooks and Handheld PCs
Cutting-edge cell phones and PDAs, plus essential applications for them
Mobile software-as-a-service applications for online storage, field sales force automation, and more

Virtual/online telephony solutions such as hosted PBXs, e-faxing, and VoIP

Mobile VoIP solutions, including cell phones, plus VoIP services
EVDO, EDGE, 802.11 and other wireless communications standards

Popular mobile applications for business use, including GPS and mobile browsing

So point your browsers to: http://presentations.inxpo.com/Shows/ZiffDavisSMB/06-07/Website/home.htm and tune into our PowerPoint and audio cast!

2007-09-25T11:59:00.001-05:00

Dish and Archos Docked
Originally uploaded by gadget

As I said during my Dish to purchase Sling Media post it is going to be difficult for Echostar to make advances in technology, which empower consumers, when the media companies that they purchase their programming from try to lock down their content.

Only a dozen hours after purchasing the privately held Sling Media, Inc., Echostar announced that they are preparing a registration statement for filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in connection for a spin-off that represents their technology and investments - like Sling Media, their Archos personal video player investment, and MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 set top box and DVR manufacturing.

This could prove to be an important move as the content and consumer side of the house can be separated, albeit with a dotted line, to these important technology innovations. Charlie Ergen, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of EchoStar comments "We believe separation of our consumer-based and wholesale businesses could unlock additional value. Each company would be able to separately pursue the strategies that best suit its respective long-term interests. The spin-off transaction would also allow employee incentives to be tied to their respective company's performance, and improve opportunities to effectively develop and finance expansion plans."

Keep pushing that envelope for the consumers Charlie! The days of popping a DVD in the home player, car player and a portable player need to be as old school as what MP3 has done for the music CD! Help us to "8-Track" that video format!

Echostar press release on their desire of spinning off their technology group.

DEMO fall 2007 with Chris Shipley

2007-09-25T11:22:00.000-05:00

Demo fall Opener with Chris Shipley
Originally uploaded by gadget.

This week brings us the DEMO fall 2007 conference in San Diego. There are a hundreds of people comprised of VC's, PR folks and companies eager to display their technologies, and big companies who are eager to SEE new technologies - which must have never been released in order to launch at DEMO.

So far its off to a great start - my favorites are Motion DSP with a multi-frame video frame aggregator - to give high quality stills from video (spook/security agencies will love this.) Digital Fountain uses Amazon's S3 service to improve video quality from steaming sites. With much more to come.

Comanies presenting for DEMOfall 2007 are as follows:
360desktop, Pty Ltd.; Victoria, Australia; http://www.360desktop.com/ Advanta; Spring House, PA; http://www.ideablob.com/
AgendiZe; Grapevine, TX; http://www.agendize.com/
Apprema, Inc.; Sunnyvale, CA; http://www.apprema.com/
Attendi, Inc.; New York, NY; http://www.attendi.com/
BatchBlue Software, LLC; Barrington, RI; http://www.batchblue.com/ CashView, Inc.; Palo Alto, CA; http://www.cashview.com/
Check Point Software Technologies, Ltd.; Redwood City, CA; http://www.checkpoint.com/
ClipBlast!; Agoura Hills, CA; http://www.clipblast.com/
coComment; Geneva, Switzerland; http://www.cocomment.com/
CodaSystem France S.A.; Paris, France; http://www.shootandproof.com/ CornerWorld; Dallas, TX; http://www.cornerworld.com/
Digital Fountain; Fremont, CA; http://www.digitalfountain.com/
Diigo, Inc.; Reno, NV; http://www.diigo.com/
DimDim, Inc.; Burlington, MA; http://www.dimdim.com/
earthmine, Inc.; Berkeley, CA; http://www.earthmine.com/
EncryptaKey; Cypress, CA; http://www.encryptakey.com/
Exalead, Inc.; New York, NY; http://www.exalead.com/
FastCall411, Inc.; Hollywood, CA; http://www.fastcall411.com/
Fluid Innovation, Inc.; Austin, TX; http://www.fluidinnovation.com/
Fusion-io; Salt Lake City, UT; http://www.fusionio.com/
Generate, Inc.; Maynard, MA; http://www.generateinc.com/
Glam Media; Brisbane, CA; http://www.glammedia.com/
Global Communications, Inc.; Houston, TX; http://www.globalcasttv.net/ Global Mobile Technologies, LLP; San Francisco, CA; http://www.push-it.com/
Graspr, Inc.; Sunnyvale, CA; http://www.graspr.com/
iForem, Inc.; Redwood Shores, CA; http://www.iforem.com/
InstaColl; Bangalore, India; http://www.live-documents.com/
Jasper Wireless; Sunnyvale, CA; http://www.jasperwireless.com/
kannuu, Inc.; Dallas, TX; http://www.kannuu.com/
LiveMocha, Inc.; Bellevue, WA; http://www.livemocha.com/
LogMeIn, Inc.; Woburn, MA; http://www.logmein.com/
LongJump; Sunnyvale, CA; http://www.longjump.com/
matchmine, LLC; Needham, MA; http://www.matchmine.com/
MetaRADAR, Inc.; San Bruno, CA; http://www.metaradar.com/
mig33; Burlingame, CA; http://www.mig33.com/
MotionDSP, Inc.; San Mateo, CA; http://www.motiondsp.com/
mSpoke, Inc.; Pittsburgh, PA; http://www.mspoke.com/
MuseStorm, Ltd.; Yahud, Israel; http://www.musestorm.com/
Myndnet; East Palo Alto, CA; http://www.myndnet.com/
Myxer; Deerfield Beach, FL; http://www.myxer.com/
Ncursion; Carlsbad, CA; http://www.ncursion.com/
PeopleJam, Inc.; Los Angeles, CA; http://www.peoplejam.com/
Phreesia, Inc.; New York, NY; http://www.phreesia.com/
PlanHQ; Wellington, New Zealand; http://www.planhq.com/
Prolify, Inc.; Waltham, MA; http://www.prolify.com/
Propel Software Corporation; San Jose, CA; http://www.propel.com/
Proxure; San Luis Obispo, CA; http://www.proxure.com/
Pudding Media, Inc.; San Jose, CA; http://www.thepudding.com/
Quire, Inc.; Mountain View, CA; http://www.myquire.com/
Qumranet; Santa Clara, CA; http://www.qumranet.com/
Real Time Content, Ltd.; Ipswich, England; http://www.realtimecontent.com/
RedSquare Ventures, Ltd.; Moscow, Russia; http://www.redsquareventures.com/
RelevantMind, Corp.; Berkeley, CA; http://www.relevantmind.com/
SceneCaster; Richmond Hill, Canada; http://www.scenecaster.com/
SpaceTime; New York, NY; http://www.spacetime.com/
spigit; Pleasanton, CA; http://www.spigit.com/
Sway, Inc.; Middleton, WI; http://www.shoutlet.com/
|Talari Networks, Inc.; Cupertino, CA; http://www.talarinetworks.com/
Trovix; Mountain View, CA; http://www.trovix.com/
Truphone; London, England; http://www.truphone.com/
Tubes Networks, Inc.; Boston, MA; http://www.tubesnow.com/
Tungle Corporation; Montreal, Canada; http://www.tungle.com/
Vello; Mountain View, CA; http://www.myvello.com/
Vitarati, Inc.; San Luis Obispo, CA; http://www.seenr.com/
Vyro Games, Ltd.; Dublin, Ireland; http://www.vyro-games.com/
WMS Gaming; Waukegan, IL; http://www.wms.com/
Your Truman Show, Inc.; San Francisco, CA; http://www.yourtrumanshow.com/
Yuuguu, Ltd.; Manchester, England; http://www.yuuguu.com/

2007-09-25T02:36:00.001-05:00

Fully Connected to USA
Originally uploaded by gadget

It's nice to see something that I helped with become a part of a bigger picture where it can grow and prosper. I was the Forward Thinker and Director of Product Innovation for Sling Media, helping to launch the second generation products and the initial video content recognition and rules engine behind the Clip+Sling portal.

The folks at Echostar, who market their satellite service as Dish Network, have agreed to purchase my former employer and the creators of the Slingbox for $380MM. This is an interesting purchase for them, even as an initial investor, as they may get some backlash from their premium content providers like HBO, ESPN and the like who feverishly fight to keep their content locked to as few devices as possible, unless additional revenue is pushed into their coffers.

Dish network is no stranger to network fights as it has dropped Viacom and CBS channels in 2004, Lifetime in 2005 and and Court TV in 2007 due to the networks attempts at rate hikes. The channels have gone "dark" but have each come back after their "we own the pipe to the consumer" tactic of negotiation. They also have been under attack from TiVo for not licensing the DVR technology while building their own around patents TiVo owns. This could also mean that TiVo, which is the peanut butter to Sling's chocolate, could stop promoting Slingboxes on its store and through its rewards shopping site. Sling's CEO Blake Krikorian has stated that "By combining strategies, resources and technologies with EchoStar, Sling Media will be able to rapidly expand our open multi-platform product offerings, not only for DISH Network subscribers, but for digital media enthusiasts around the globe." This means users will still be able to sling content from other providers, even DirecTV.

Echostar will be riding a double-edge sword while pushing the innovation envelope, giving consumers new ways to enjoy services that they subscribe to while convincing the media outlets that they purchase content from, that it is in every one's best interest to let consumers enjoy more content in more places. An interesting achilles heel to the network providers is that Dish does not provide the upstream bandwidth to "sling" content outside of the house, which providers may feel would break their carriage contracts. Dish partners with Wild Blue to provide its DSL Internet service, and StarBand for satellite Internet access which is a high-latency and slower service of the two that does not have the upstream bandwidth for an acceptable quality of service. Because of this, they could argue that the Slingbox makes a much more compelling in-house experience (something half of the initial customers surveyed said that they were using the hardware for) to a laptop or the upcoming Slingbox Catcher, than adding another satellite receiver and TV in the home.

I have always respected Charlie Ergen, who in 1980 sold C-Band "BUD's" or Big Ugly Dishes out of his car in rural Colorado, and dreamed of having his own satellites in space. In 1996 that dream came to a reality thanks to Ku-Band and MPEG-2 technologies. When we were building the Communication Expo stores, we merchandised his new Dish Network service against the Hughes funded DirecTV, and it is a true David meets Goliath story with Charley putting up a great fight against the big corporation. So kuddos to your team for seeing the innovation and strong leadership created by Blake, Jason, Bhupen and the engineering team and executed by John and his team. You have a multiple award winning technology that needs to thrive. Be proud of their 2007 Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Advanced Media Technology for the Creation of Non-Traditional Programs or Platforms! I am!

Echostar press release to Acquire Sling Media.
Sling Media's press release announcing the purchase by Echostar.
My good friend and former Sling co-worker Jeremy Toeman's take on the buyout.

Free VoIP on your home phone

2007-09-07T19:06:00.000-05:00

Supura SPA-3000
Originally uploaded by gadget.

The Late Summer 2007 Alt Vehicles issue #11 of Make Magazine has a story that you'll love if you were a former customer of SunRocket. This how-to shows you what you need to get a Washington State phone number and terminate it on the Sipura device here, or any unlocked VoIP adapter, or software. By doing so you can then receive all the calls you want for free, or make toll-free calls with NO MONTHLY CHARGE. Nada, zip, zilch.

The caveat is that you cannot make calls to other home or mobile numbers, nor Skype for now. If you have broadband (duh) and need a phone line to authenticate your TiVo or satellite box, activate credit cards or give your parents a way to call you that doesn't use up your cell phone minutes, then this is the story for you!

Got broadband? Add phone service for $0/month: http://makezine.com/11/diyhome_voip/

Oh, if you get your friends on Free World Dialup and THEN you can call each other and get off of Ma Bell's back!

2007-09-07T18:55:00.001-05:00

P1000760
Originally uploaded by gadget

I wrote a story for Young Money Magazine, a print and online 'zine that hits over a hundred college campuses, about hardware gadgets that will let you watch YouTube on your living room television.

Devices like the Apple TV, NetGear EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD, iPhone, your typical 3G phone, and even the iPod with third party conversion software can watch videos on YouTube. These are all covered in the story...

Check out: Tech Lover’s Guide to YouTube On-Demand http://www.youngmoney.com/technology/internet/146

The only irony here is that most college students don't have televisions... They watch YouTube on their laptops. Oh well, students; remember this story when you graduate! :)

Mercedes-Benz Search and Send is a very cool failure.

2007-09-05T03:32:00.000-05:00

Mercedes-Benz Search and Send
Originally uploaded by gadget.

These guys were SO close with this innovative service that reminds me of the "send to phone" browser plug-in for Firefox. Close, however but no cigar. Look, I love the redesigned C-Class. MBZ did a great job capturing the essence of the expensive S in this platform that even I could maybe afford (like my old 90's E-Class.) My question is how could they release a GPS feature which requires a second step "pull" of the address by the owner seated in the car after the first action or the "push" from the desktop - which could come from the owner, an executive admin, or significant other who asks for an errand run.

Engineers frequently screw up the user experience - as proved with this image above showing the steps for the Mercedes-Benz Search and Send:
1. Search for the location you want to find on your laptop (good idea #1 - we do that today often)
2. Send the directions to your device (good idea #2 - we email stuff to people from the web)
3. Download at the touch of a button (really BAD idea - who thinks to dial a voice service to get the data that has already been sent via a PC?)
4. Directions pop up on the navigation system (great idea #3 - but a SMS text message could do that automatically today.)

Consumers are overwhelmed with electronics and you need to know that "multi-steps means multi-failure points" causing products to fail in the marketplace. Case in point: it was Apple who created a better ripping and purchasing software program, that we all know as iTunes, along with a playing device that auto-synced the player which won the battle of the portable players. They were not the first in the market - by a long shot, Apple just made the experience better.

Search and Send should not be the forgotten technology that it will soon become. I have seen my friend's Germany based Autobahn cruising Porsche factory audio system receive and send text messages - just by putting your SIM into the head-unit, even "way back" in 2003. The Search and Send feature of their summer 2007 vehicles should have the ability to receive this map destination information as a SMS based text message that is automatically queued within the cellular network and pops up on-screen once the car is turned on. This is technically a closed solution with the Mercedes-Benz Telematics system via a partnership with Yahoo Maps and Google Maps, so creating a parsed single or even multiple SMS (to get over the 160 character limitation) message system would have been trivial.

Very cool, nice try, but it's doomed to failure. There is always version 2.0 however.

2007-09-02T13:16:00.001-05:00

XBox 360 HDMI Cables
Originally uploaded by gadget

Update: Clearly I should be on the beach, not in front of my computer as this is merely an HDMI cable for the new HDMI equipped Xbox 360, not an adapter for the old one as I had "read into" it. Put down your credit cards and I promise to turn off my computer. :) From the "OMG its really about time and who knew it could do this anyway" department comes the HDMI cable accessory for our favorite aging white console, the original Xbox 360. Snuck out over the Labor Day holiday, with no press release, this $49 Xbox 360 HDMI cable plugs into the original video connector of the Xbox 360 to bring you left and right audio + optical audio and a female HDMI (also supporting audio) jack.

This means that you can avoid losing money by selling your original console on eBay to re-buy the console with the integrated HDMI jack, or the Elite XBox 360 in stylish black, which should, but does not contain an HD-DVD drive (but only a 120GB HD upgrade) and you can just limp along with your old console. That is until further upgraded (and nearly required in 2007) hardware gets placed within the 360, like a cooler CPU and HD DVD player.

iPhone losing its luster and $500 notebook computers

2007-07-27T12:27:00.000-05:00

Since I get called upon as a guest expert by the media in the consumer electronic space, I am going to make an effort to share the outlet details here so that you can tune into the net streams....

On Saturday, July 28th '07, I'll be making a second audible appearance on WCCO Radio's Esma Murphy show at 10:10 Central time. Last time we spoke about the iPhone where I weighed in on my opinion that "Americans love tactile feedback" and do not want to look at their thumbs on a screen in order to type. We will do some follow-up on that topic, as a few of the originally heavy users of the iPhone have grown less enamored by the $600 device and are longing for the "clickity click" of their Blackberries.

Don't get me wrong as this keyboard is truly revolutionary in nature - it auto-heals or picks the correct letter that it thinks you mean to type via a real-time dictionary; It can remove buttons that are not needed depending upon the field you are typing in - for example, the space bar is converted into www, "/" and .com during input of URL's; finally as you type, letters "rise up" out of the on-screen keyboard area to above your thumbs to show you what key was registered. The only lacking feature that kept me away was a way for my thumbs to "know" where they were. Even with the virtual click of the speaker, which is a nice way to audibly recognize input, it lacks that "touch factor" that Americans love about buttons. As a feature, what if you could choose between clicks of the speaker or mini-vibrations of the silent ringer alert? Could this benefit from a type of haptic response? Sounds novel and interesting to me!

For the Saturday radio show, also on deck is a chat about sub $500 laptops and what can you get for that bargain price. Back to school season is coming in a week or two and notebooks are cheaper, and of course more powerful than ever. They are also heavy in this price point, at around 6 pounds, so paying a little more saves you a pound or two. Most people keep their laptops plugged in at home anyway...

If you want to hear more, tune into http://www.wccoradio.com/ on July 28th at 10:10pm in the central time zone.

2007-06-20T11:55:00.001-05:00

AppleTV YouTube
Originally uploaded by gadget

The AppleTV "Upgrade software" button finally worked on June 20th, after three months of "Your Apple TV is up to date" messages. Pressing this button gives a seemingly long download of the new operating system (version 1.1) and an even longer reboot time.

Once rebooted however, two new menu items appear. In the Settings menu, a new item "iTunes Store" lets you pick your country, however no further options nor the ability to buy Movies, Music or Videos surfaces in those menus.

The big addition is the YouTube interface, with its logo looking just as shiny as the Apple created functions. As long as you have Internet connectivity on your Apple TV, the videos stream right into the device, no transcoding PC is required to sit in the middle, like the Netgear EVA-8000.

On my HDMI connected 720P DLP TV, YouTube videos actually look OK, not as blocky as I would expect on a big screen, but the content quality of course varies by the producer. The addage "Garbage in, garbage out" still applies years after my 1987 RPG and COBOL classes. Click on the photo for a few examples of stolen (music video) and user generated (crap) content in my Apple TV HDTV Flickr stream. Watching the videos within the Apple TV Top Music Videos interface still looks the best, but these HDTV published videos are still hard to come by.

You need to know that all videos on the YouTube PC interface are not available, like the quitely launched 3GPP mobile (m.youtube.com) portal. For example, searching for Ze Frank on the YouTube PC interface gives 620 results, but on the Apple TV, none are found. There will be some time before the Adobe flash content is converted for both the Apple TV compliant H.264 and mobile 3GPP codec platform.

Now if only YouTube could get some compelling and legal content - anyone?

And why Apple, does iTunes CRUSH the AMD 3000+ CPU utilization on my machine when syncing with the AppleTV? Maybe you should check out what is going on with your Ethernet stack. (Update: This system slow-down seems to be fixed with the 7.2.035 iTunes release.)

I have also created a video walkthrough on the device to give you a look at the UI.

Killer cellphone and Kyte

2007-04-25T02:03:00.000-05:00

I decided to check out the new web video posting service, Kyte.com tonight. To do my premier test, I took an MPEG video that I had lying around and uploaded it to their service. It was pretty straightforward, and I was also able to add a viewer poll to the video. I wish that I could pop the poll up at the end, I don't like it covering the video, but the service is new, and I didn't tinker with it much...

This video is from a email that circulated in late 2000 and shows a Yogoslavian or Croatian made four chamber .22 caliber gun. It is encased in a chassis resembling a mobile phone and buttons on the keypad are used to fire the rounds.

Note that these have not been found on U.S. soil, only Eastern Europe, and airport screeners have been trained to look for these weapons. This story is really only a test, but I wanted to throw a gadget into it that would make you think twice about why things like this even make their way out of people's minds and into the world.

Vista Media Center dual-screen bug

2007-04-23T20:24:00.001-05:00

Media Center Primary HDTV - Web second monitor under Vista
Originally uploaded by gadget.

If you use a dual-screen monitor setup these days (with LCD monitors so cheap, who isn't?) there is a good chance that you will perform work on your primary monitor (the screen with the start button) and use the second monitor to multi-task and enjoy some media. I typically use my Sling Player or the Winows Media Center interface on my second monitor.

These days, I am testing Windows Vista Media Center Edition with a HDHomeRun ATSC/QAM digital tuner which outputs its video via dual 26mbps Ethernet streams. Vista does not require a legacy analog tuner, which is an improvement over MCE 2005, but there is a glaring and obvious bug. My Vista powerhouse machine (trust me, the OS requires it) is a 2.4GHz Dual Core with 2GB of RAM and a GeForce 7900 WDDM video card.

The problem with this system (besides Vista not supporting many multimedia conversion utilities) is a glaring BUG that the Media Center development team did not fix. When you move the mouse over to the Media Center monitor, make a seclection with the mouse, etc, then try to slide it back across the screen to the primary monitor, it "hits a wall." That is, as soon as you click within the Media Center "full screen" interface, your mouse becomes "locked" on that screen.

To fix this; use the Windows Media Center interface in a stretched (not maximized) window or if you are in full screen mode, you can hit ALT-TAB to re-activate the primary screen window, then after the flickering ensues, you can then move your mouse off the Media Center window and onto the Primary screen.

What a silly bug to have to blog about...

How big a star can change a resolution?

2006-08-17T04:13:00.000-05:00

Letterman HDTV- XTina Arm Ouchie Singing
Originally uploaded by gadget.

I enjoy my HDTV so much, that I have built a high-definition PVR from a Windows Media Center Edition just to time-shift it. I also have been capturing still screen shots and posting them to my Flickr account to share the amazing scenery. Even the talk shows like Leno and Letterman look brilliant in HD; it's not just those sporting events or helicopter shots in CSI that lure me in. But could the stars on these shows start telling the networks how to broadcast their signal? That's exactly what happened on Late Night with David Letterman on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 when Christina Agulara visited. After her amazing performance, she has the pipes of a dozen gospel singers from Atlanta, broadcast in HDTV, Letterman went to commercial and came back on in HD with the show bumper. What happened before the bumpers faded into the set was interesting however; the program went not only narrow screen but into digital NTSC, standard-definition. Gone was the wide aspect ratio, rich contrast and details that I was waiting for with the close-up shots of David and Christina.

How did this happen? Did Christina, her people, her publicist (who says she hurt her TENDONS in her arm at home on July 16) or her label RCA, owned by BMG put the pressure on CBS or Viacom, who owns MTV, to down-res the show?

The damage on her arm doesn't look like tendon injuries at all; but something that the 24 year old would walk away from a cat-fight with. It wouldn't be her first altercation, in July 2005, Page Six quoted a source as saying "Christina hurt her arm in a scuffle with a drunk fan at a nightclub." But that's not the point of this story.

Who can force the networks to turn off their HDTV broadcast when they want to mask something from the viewing audience? I want to know, and I do not want this happening again.

Dozens of photos regarding this story in high-definition and the low-def evidence can be found here: www.flickr.com/photos/gadge

Asterisk @ Home or Trixbox with FreePBX

2006-07-27T02:36:00.000-05:00

Cisco 7960 VoIP phone w/SIP
Originally uploaded by gadget.

When the Camelot Internet Phone and VocalTech software came out in 1995 I was hooked on Voice over Internet Protocol. Phil Zimmermann's PGPFone brought encryption to VoIP 10 years before Skype but none of these modem delivered technologies were ready for the Internet as it was then. Now with broadband multi-megabit pipes (or is that a series of tubes?) along with services like those above as well as Vonage and beyond have the bandwidth and quality of service required to send voice traffic at a quality near that of the plain old telephone service (POTS). But these still have their own problems while POTS is a more stable product that has been around for the last 100 years, that's a lot of debugging time. Thanks to the instigation of my buddy Matt Deatrick, I have been building systems running Asterisk@Home for a little over a year and their capabilities are mind blowing. No longer are you tied to a proprietary phone system and the hardware base of the switch vendors. You are free to setup forwarding, linking and automated scripts to your heart's content. This system is not for the faint of heart, but chances are that you have a no-longer-used, sub-gigahertz PC at your feet below and have just the amount of curiosity that it takes to tinker with one of the most powerful telephony applications on the planet. I'm only upset that the bugs that were fixed in Asterisk@Home didn't make it into the 1.0 and even the 1.1 version of TrixBox. If you can; go with an @Home distribution with FreePBX until 1.2 gets rid of these silly daemons.

More info on setting up your own Asterisk box can be found in my PC Magazine story here: Your Virtual Assistant.

2006-05-25T21:29:00.000-05:00

In this world of PVR commercial skipping it is odd to find me actually searching for a commercial, but I've done it more than once. The last time was close to the year 2000, with unsuccessful results. Back then, I was looking for the AT&T "You can" campaign. These were a series of commercials that showed the future (the time that we live in now) and all of the great things that we can do on in it. You know, like the ability to fax on the beach.

Today with Google video I expected better results, as I searched again for a campaign, but this time from the new and improved, so they tell us, lowercase at&t. My efforts to find "Three Screens" was thwarted by the lack of online content, but I did run across this gem from the 1950's. Times have changed in so many ways a half-century ago. As we cannot even smoke in restaurants while we eat in many cities, it is hard to believe that a doctor could recommend you a cigarette to relax as it elevates heart rate and introduces so many toxigens into your system that it literally makes your head spin. Now click play above to enjoy the show.

Tangle Management

2006-05-24T15:17:00.000-05:00

Multipot Personal Electric Charger
Originally uploaded by gadget.

It is ironic that our life of wireless and portable devices require us to have a complex and tangled charging experience. Standardized charging ports and inductive methods to recharge mobile devices have never materialized, despite even Google's attempt to bring light to the subject at hand at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show.

The Design Within Reach Multipot is a great, albeit pricy, product idea to hold those power "wall-warts" and their associated cables that charge your vast yet growing personal electronics. Just plug your handfull of up to five adapters under the lid of the pot and snake a few inches of cable through the hole in the top. You can charge your gadgets without a lot of cable clutter.

At $250 it doesn't seem exactly within reach, and I wonder if some of the larger device wall-warts fit within the layout of the electrical outlets. Yet it is still a good idea. What it really needs is an iGo Juice inside! Personally, I use a iGo everywhere power 15 with dual outputs to charge my mobile phone and GPS regularly. Just one wall outlet is taken and two devices can be charged. Velcro wraps tie down my cable clutter, not the expensive pot. No wonder DWE has a new CEO.

Camera Searching for Signal...

2006-05-03T14:53:00.000-05:00

Kodak V610
Originally uploaded by gadget.

In the 1980's I had a dark room where I would enlarge and develop 35MM prints taken with my SLR camera. To this day I have boxes and boxes of negatives from shots around the world, taken over several decades. Unfortunately, I have no way to sort or search these effectively. When Kodak released their first, and archaic with no flash, Digital Science consumer camera in the late 1990's I instantly jumped into a new revolution. Now I could name my photos and have them searchable and pulled up instantly on my PC. Back in the days when the internal camera memory could only hold 16 to 30 photos, naming them was a trivial process. Nearly 10 years later, my current camera sees 512MB and 1GB SD cards, and holding hundreds of photos on a single card. Naming them becomes an impossible task. Picasa does a decent job with importing them and letting me name and create folders, but I still wish for photo specific naming based upon a location where they were shot, which is typically how I like to organize photos. Expensive SLR cameras have GPS connection options, but these are mainly used for insurance company or survey applications where precise location is important. I just need to take the latitude and longitude numbers, bounce them off a database to determine a city or street name and name the image file accordingly. This would seem to be a relatively simple consumer application. Today, it does not exist. The closest thing, Riya.com uses logic to scan photos for faces it recognizes, after you initially name them, or the text of a street sign to automate the indexing. This is great for people but is not for every shot or location that you take. It will be many years before object recognition software could identify a building and map it back to a location.

New in their spring lineup for 2006, the Kodak V610 dual lens camera has a 10X optical zoom, a 2.8" LCD and 6.1 mega pixel CCD along with a Bluetooth radio inside its svelte chassis. This yet-to-be seen Bluetooth option is used to transfer images from your camera to your PC, but this would be an extremely tedious process for a six-mega pixel image with their large file size. A better application, and one mentioned as feasible by Jens Hinrichsen, a Kodak marketing manager, would involve a "pull" operation rather than a "push" or output operation. Since every mobile phone in America is mandated to have location information for Emergency 911 calling, the camera could request a data transfer of the last know coordinates form the phone and place them within pre-existing EXIF data fields for lat/longitude location information. Now this would require a firmware upgrade to the camera to modify the object push control and add a software button or two to request the location manually, but that's not the hard part. Carriers, especially Verizon, have crippled the mobile phone "standard" Bluetooth stack to only allow headset and hands free profiles. Exchanging photos just as Kodak mentions on their web site is not even supported on the majority of handsets. Using the mobile phone as an inexpensive GPS receiver to give you location data is out of the question.

Listen up carriers, quit crippling the Bluetooth stack in our mobile phones to allow features, such as this, that benefit your consumers!

Apple to Build a Media Center XP PC?

2006-05-02T18:54:00.000-05:00

Mini Mac XP MCE 2005 and XBox 360
Originally uploaded by gadget.

I gotta tell you, over the past few weeks I have been using the most silent PC that I have had in my living room. The fan of my DLP television is louder than this computer. With it, I am using a Microsoft Media Center and its infrared remote and keyboad for wireless input. It has a 300GB drive full of HDTV and DVD media attached to it, as well as networked connectivity to another HP Media Center with HDTV tuners.

As if that wasn't enough, it is also hosting video and data feeds to my XBox 360. What computer is this? My Mac Mini Core Solo 1.5GHz machine running XP MCE 2005.

Yes, it works, but only after you combine the two Media Center CD's into one DVD, or place a copy of the files on the second CD onto a removable hard drive. Viola, instant quiet Media Center. Next on my list of things to ask for, drop the USB IR Dongle and use the internal sensor and maybe have a little plug-in for Apple's bundled little remote! Viva the quiet revolution! Even my Shuttle small form factor PC is jealous!

Inno-vative pre-order restrictions on the XM Inno

2006-03-31T14:03:00.000-06:00

CES 2006
Originally uploaded by gadget.

The XM Store is offering pre-orders of the Pioneer Inno player today, which will ship in April. They will hold a $1 charge on your credit card until it ships, then send the radio pre-activated by billing you for 3 months of service @12.95 plus $399 for the unit, minus $25 off in the form of free ground shipping and a waived activation fee. Did you follow that? Me neither. The real bad news is that they put a boatload of restrictions on the purchase of this device and no visible way to add it to an existing account. Rather than my paraphrasing the rules, here is a copy from the "account protected" website:

All orders and purchases made through this website cannot be combined with any other promotions or offers including rebates.
Orders are cancelable prior to ship date only. Your credit card will be preauthorized for $1.00 at the time your order is placed.
Your credit card will be charged in full at the time that the product is shipped to you without any other prior notice.
At the time of order, you acknowledge that you are required to purchase three (3) months of service, which will be charged at the time your radio ships. You also acknowledge that your XM service will renew on the same payment terms and billing frequency after initial three (3) months. A six (6) month minimum service commitment is required for each radio. Failure to maintain six (6) months of continuous service on any of the radios purchased via this offer will result in a $65.00 early cancellation fee on said radio(s).
Radios are shipped pre-activated. XM service billing automatically begins on the day your radio is shipped.
The credit card number used to activate your XM service via this promotion will be added to your XM account for future billing.
Responsible billing party may not be changed or transferred until the 6 month service commitment is fulfilled for any radio(s) purchased through this offer.
The terms of this offer shall supersede the terms of the Customer Agreement with respect to the cancellation of the XM service.
Returns are not accepted. Exchanges are accepted for defective equipment only and within 30 days of hardware receipt. All sales are final.
Ground shipped orders usually arrive within 8-10 days. Adult signature is required on all deliveries. There is no charge for ground shipping & handling.
Shipping Carrier will not deliver any packages to a P.O. Box. Please use a valid street address.
This Website may not be used for commercial purposes and radios purchased through this website cannot be resold.
Offer is available to customers within the continental United States only.
Limit ONE (1) pre-order per customer email access code.
Limit ONE (1) Pioneer Inno.
Please read our Customer Service Agreement (www.xmradio.com/get_xm/customer_service.html) for more information about XM`s service and subscription terms and conditions.

So, that all being said, and the discount being only about $25, I think I'll hold off. My original XM2go and iPod Video work fine for my needs... This thing is going to be discounted this summer like you wouldn't believe - especially with Samsung fighting for market share too.

Home Audio Hub

2006-03-17T18:20:00.000-06:00

JVC RX D702B PC Mag
Originally uploaded by gadget.

PC Magazine just picked up a story that I wrote on the JVC RX-D702B home theater receiver. The product is entirely digital, and even up converts analog fed inputs to HDMI at 480p. At the time when this was written, most TV's had only one DVI or HDMI input, now that many TV's have two, the novelty of the integrated two-port HDMI switch is wearing off, but it does make for a high WAF or Wife Acceptance Factor. What I mean by this is that one remote can select the DVD, Satellite or other input device then funnel the audio out the speakers and push the video to a single input on the screen. This unit may just save you from the call from the babysitter when the kids want to watch a movie! Plus it has great sound and is even DTS compliant, all in a svelte chassis.

Check out my review of it at PC Magazine here: www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1937158,00.asp

HTC Wizard is no Sorcerer

2006-03-03T17:56:00.000-06:00

You have new Picture Mail!
Originally uploaded by gadget.

I got my paws on a freshly bolted together HTC Wizard AKA Cingular 8125 today and it leaves little to be desired. The display is nice, and the orientation flips automatically when you slide it open, only after releasing a latch on the lower left side to unlock the screen. This means that you need two hands to open the thing, which begs the question, who thought that was a good idea? Why not use a ball bearing? It's all ball bearings these days! When opening or closing it, you frequently tap the volume knob at the top left corner which brings up the huge volume display over the top whatever it is that you really want to see. The 200MHz processor is a slow dog running Windows Mobile 5.0 and it frequently freezes, or should I say "thinks" when you are trying to use the interface. A stylus is nearly required when closed since using a touch screen to dial a phone is like using a keyboard with mittens, neither of which I recommend. The worst thing about dialing via the screen is that it only auto-completes when you enter numbers from your address book, not a name. Even when the keyboard is open, you have to select a first letter of the alphabet, then use the wheel to scroll down to the entry you want to dial. This better get fixed from a menu option or a flash upgrade... This phone is no Treo, which does a great job finding numbers in the address book just by typing a name on the phone screen. Now why couldn't Microsoft emulate that interface? This one, goes back to where it came from. Treo 700p, where art thou?

Add Class to your Hacks

2006-03-03T14:07:00.000-06:00

Front Panel Express - rdd-10
Originally uploaded by gadget.

When new technology comes into my gadget lab, the cases come off and the electronic guts come out of their factory designed metal or plastic containers. Once the circuitry is modified, they typically end up in "gadget boxes" or more often hot-glued into Tupperware containers. Now there is a way to get some class with your hacks and even make them look better than what the original manufacturer had intended. Front Panel Express has a free down loadable design tool to take your dreams and turn them into engraved aluminum masterpieces, shipped right to your door. This Boss RDD-10 digital delay used to be a black and purple 1990's vintage gadget that wouldn't fit in a rack. Now you can put an etched and labeled aluminum front on that Tupperware lid.

High Definition Became the Story

2006-02-14T17:55:00.000-06:00

CSI HDTV Closeup
Originally uploaded by gadget.

Just after the year 2000 non-catastrophic event, my team at Net Talk Live was ready to revamp our 1996 era TV show and blast into the world of HDTV. We designed a new black set with "miles" of depth plus Intellibeam lit sails along with camera shaders and even fashion experts to make sure that we "popped" on screen with our "new for the millennium" show, Net Talk Interactive. The show looked great and was shot it HD then ultimately broadcast in standard definition because editing expenses were so high. Even if we made an EDL, or Edit Decision List on our standard definition Avid editor and used that to automate the High Definition edit suite, it would have broken our bank. Today, the $999 Final Cut Pro HD gives $2000 Macs amazing capabilities for editing in HD, but the point of this story is that we now need more than just pretty faces and scenery to make viewers stop and take note.

What a difference five years makes. CSI: Miami has put viewers with HDTV sets into the scene, right along with the detectives. In the "Three-Way" episode broadcast mid-February 2006 a contact lens was found at one of three crime scenes. A witness was called in for questioning and the detective said that it was probably hard for her to get around with only one contact lens. Right after this line was delivered, the camera zoomed into a closeup of her left, then right eye where the ring of the contact was clearly visible in HD. You would only see fuzzy eyes if this were standard definition television. Using technology to build the storyline naturally, without being overtly technical is an art that Jerry Bruckheimer's team should have many others playing catchup with. McG did a great job with eye candy in Fastlane and Charlie's Angels but CSI gets the details on the candy.

The capture above is from my Media Center PC as a 720p JPG lifted right from the broadcast with the wonderful Gadwin Print Screen utility to capture images.

Click on the image or here to see more from my flickr photo stream.

Google Earth To Go

2006-02-11T14:07:00.000-06:00

Google Maps on a Blackberry 8700
Originally uploaded by gadget.

We live in a drive through fast food, need our information now society. To help with finding this so called information, mainly just confirming useless trivia at parties, I have been carrying Google on my hip since the original black and white T-Mobile Sidekick was released, but have since moved onto SMS and Treo Blazer browser access of their increasingly mobile driven applications. Text driving directions were OK on these platforms, but Google has outdone themselves with this BlackBerry application (no browser used here folks) that attaches via your data plan to the Google Map and Satellite databases to stream imagery to the phone in real time. My favorite additions are the "push pin" search results and the extremely fast updates via the EDGE data network.

Get your Finnish, Asian or Motorola J2ME flip phone or Blackberry nearly as smart as your GPS by heading to google.com/glm online. As per Verizon's stranglehold on BREW, those subscribers are going to have to live without this software or service.

Be Sweet on Valentines Day

2006-02-10T11:23:00.000-06:00

Valentines Day Candy Bikini
Originally uploaded by gadget.

Despite my trademarked nickname of "Gadget Guy", some of my favorite gifts are the un-technical unique products that do not require batteries. Two of them hark from the other side of our pond, in the UK. Now with St. Valentines day and other made-up holidays like Easter around the corner, not to mention my birthday, I wanted to share these gift ideas. Oops, I just mentioned my birthday didn't I?

For your friends with all of the bright ideas, look for the Glow Brick from Suck, UK. This gadget gathers light during the day, then glows during the night. Don't expect a voluminous amount of candlepower output, just a faint yet haunting glow. It would make for a great item to throw at would-be burglars as it is quite heavy. It's more art than function and looks like a MOMA piece, without the dangling cord of a power cable. BTW You can find these discounted on eBay.

This next gift is sexy sweet, literally. The Candy G-String from iWoot, or I Want One of Those, is not meant for everyone as one size fits all, but is sure to get things hot and sticky. Meant to be worn over skin directly, Alessandra Ambrosio adorned hers over skimpy Victory Secret wear at the winter 2005 fashion show, click the photo for the photos. The iWoot Candy G-String will make you want to change your sheets.

Shipping can take some time and a bit expensive on these items when sending them to America, so either hit your girl up with them when you are on holiday or order early for your favorite real or made-up holiday!

Managing HD Media Center Files

2006-02-09T23:59:00.000-06:00

DVRMSToolboxGUI
Originally uploaded by gadget.

My HDTV Media Center 2005 box has a half-terabyte inside and is bursting at its capacity seams. I want to rip my movies to its media drive, but hours of 24, CSI (Miami or New York with the helecopter shots) and the other beautiful HDTV programs like the Victora's Secret show take up just too much space on my drive. For example, the Grammys, Superbowl and pre-game show were each 30GB as stored in high definition!

Enter DVRMSToolBox - despite both an ugly name and user interface, this program is my new love. I have taken the 4.3GB that it takes for each HDTV 24 episode and shrink them down to 2.6GB all while maintaining the MPEG2 resolution and Dolby Digital sound, but removing the commercials and fluff.

All automatically. No kidding. It works by looking for the station "bug" in the corner of the screen, or black frames before commercials in the programming and removing what doesn't have the bug. So far it's not wiping out video that it shouldn't, thanks to the commercial cutting engine of the Dragon Global ShowAnalyzer, and not requiring any editing time on my part. I love that, and have set it up to monitor a directory of media converting files with certain keywords of files that I want to archive. Not all shows will get converted, just the ones I want to hang onto.

A two hour HDTV show takes under an hour and a half to convert and remove the commercials on my Hyper Threading P4 running at 3GHz with a gigabyte of dual channel RAM. All while taking around 60% of my CPU cycles. I can even watch HDTV or work on the computer normally during the conversion! This type of multi-tasking while converting video is unheard of normally.

Currently, the video converted to MPEG2 format does not contain the META guide data and description, but you can remove commercials and retain this by keeping the file in the DVR-MS format if you wish. I chose to go the MPEG2 route so that I can share the data on devices like Media Center Extenders, Roku's or portable devices. This is a program that you must have if you are recording and archiving high or low definition programs with XP Media Center Edition.

Now I just can't make myself cut the commercials out of the Superbowl, but you can cut the commercials into their own video and destroy the program as an option. Based upon the quality of the the 2006 Superbowl XL, I think that is the path to take.

DVRMSToolbox @ Download.com

Samsung XM+MP3 Player

2006-01-09T16:23:00.000-06:00

CES 2006
Originally uploaded by gadget.

I made my way back from the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and have a whole slew of photos and technology to show from my trip. Including this slim battery powered XM Radio that supports the transfer of MP3 files into the device, and the deletion of tracks within. It also has a 40 second buffer so when you hit the record button, you don't miss any of the begining of the track! Nice improvements over last year's Delphi MyFi! I will be blogging on these later as time allows, but in the mean time you can check out my Flickr site for higher resolution camera photos, nice for the girls and cars and photos with brief descriptions from my Treo of the trip.

XM's "Stack of SD" sized tuner

2006-01-09T16:02:00.000-06:00

P1040526
Originally uploaded by gadget.

I made my way back from the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and have a whole slew of photos and technology to show from my trip. Including the new XM tuner that migrates from your home and mobile devices just like a memory card. In fact this one is about the size of a stack of 8 SD cards! I will be blogging on these later as time allows, but in the mean time you can check out my Flickr site for higher resolution camera photos, nice for the girls and cars and photos with brief descriptions from my Treo of the trip.

Media Center wasn't the first with Changer Support

2005-11-30T18:10:00.000-06:00

Nakamichi AKA NEC 7 Disc CD Changers
Originally uploaded by gadget.

With all of this talk of 200 disc DVD/CD changers with Media Center Edition and DRM associated with modern media, I started thinking about CD ripping and why the original iPod was successful. It was a winner because it supported seven different audio formats. Sony allowed just one, their ATRAC. Apple opened up the gates and let you put many types of music within. Going forward, their iPod with Video is cool with H.264 movie support, but mine is primarily going to be a music device since I am frequently driving and don't need another distraction while on the road. Plus, it does take a while to get movies onto the thing. CD ripping is not only LEGAL, but relatively quick and easy.

Back in the early 2000 time frame, I used many PC's to simultaneously rip a handful of CDs to MP3 format, so the process didn't take long during evenings that I was home. Five years later, the new Sony X1 Media Center PC and associated VGP-XL1B 200 DVD/CD changer supports a Media Center plug-in to rip 200 CD's at a time, but at a cost of over $2200, it's an expensive proposition. Trying to do this on the cheap, I dug around my house and found some old SCSI NEC 2Xc 7 disc CD changers (just like the Nakamichi's) and went about finding software that supported them. Turns out that iTunes shows the two of them as 14 disc drives, and grabs the CDDB information associated with each disc, but doesn't allow you to rip sequentially.

The solution? Enter the Riptastic! MP3 CD Ripper with multi disc changer support. This thing will even sequentially rip between two single disc players in your PC if you don't have a changer! It grabs the CDDB information and rips along at 1.1x for my SCSI NEC's and faster with some of my other drives. The best thing about this solution is that I no longer have to babysit my computer. I just load up my discs then head about my business. You can pick your compression and bitrate and also the file naming convention. It will also encode simultaneously while ripping, but my 1GHz test machine could stand to be a bit more stout for the encoding process. Does anyone need a hundred or more discs ripped? My hardware is ready, but my music is already on hard drives...

Robbing bandwidth from the rich...

2005-11-29T13:18:00.000-06:00

USDigital HDTV Tuner
Originally uploaded by gadget.

...and giving to the poor. The US Digital HDTV Tuner was the first high-definition tuner at WalMart when it came out a year ago, but it had a secret inside waiting to be unlocked. Its video output supports every analog format from HD component to standard composite so even regular television owners could benefit from this product. A digital audio output was present for surround as was traditional stereo jacks. All of this was fed through a single UHF antenna port.

The tuner works as an ATSC or high-definition decoder for free but the magic was that in select markets, for a mere $19.95 per month, Fox News, Discovery, Disney and about 30 other "cable" channels can be received. The signals for these channels are broadcast over unused capacity within the HDTV UHF spectrum using technology from DotCast. HDTV frequencies are 6MHz wide and offer 27mbps of throughput. The FCC requires that an HDTV channel use only up to 19.4Mbps of bandwidth so that leaves a bit extra for USDTV to lease and combine with partially used channels over remaining spectrum from each broadcaster in a region. DotCast developed this multiplexing technology to spread data across many channels as a way to download programs to computers or set-top boxes. With USDTV, this "video data" is decoded with an ATI NXT2004 as standard definition video programming from a VSB/QAM tuner. This is sent to the TV by way of a ATI Xilleon chip running at 300MHz, which handles the AC3 and MPEG2 decoding. The only connection that you need to receive their signal is a bow-tie or external UHF antenna. No cable feed or even satellite dish aiming is required. This also means that rain fade should be non-existent as well. All that you need is a strong UHF signal to your home, or an antenna suited for its reception.

This is an interesting concept, as USDTV has created an MVNO model for television. Think about all of the money that your local broadcast networks spend to keep their broadcast towers up and online. An even more expensive undertaking is keeping Murdock and Ergen's DirecTV and DISH Network satellites in a 22,300 mile orbit in space. USDTV can ride on the backs of infrastructure that is already in place and their only cost is customer acquisition and programming. It worked well for Virgin Mobile, Boost and hopefully the just released Amp'd. There are some TV affectionado's who are concerned that HDTV quality will suffer as broadcasters supplement their revenue stream with data casting, but most markets that are using the technology get a majority of their bandwidth from digital networks owned by PAX, which only programs in standard definition - leaving plenty of bandwidth for USDTV. The jury is still out on whether they can be successful in the market place, but with a great channel selection, low cost and inexpensive hardware, they have all of the things going for them including the ability for the end user to "self install." Now that is scalable!

888-ELF What?

2005-11-28T22:26:00.000-06:00

Virgin Mobile 2005 Campaign
Originally uploaded by gadget.

I love a smart advertising campaign. When a company goes nuts though, that's even better. Who else should go a little crazy, and not take life so seriously than Richard Branson, billionaire playboy. That statement was said only out of the extreme jealousy that I have for him. The return of the 2004 Virgin Mobile holiday campaign is silly and fabulous. I can't even believe that RadioShack's name is mentioned within the voice script. It's more Best Buy style, who was a launch partner for their MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) wireless service anyway. And who on this earth is going to remember and be able to type www.chrismahanukwanzakah.com? I absolutely love it. You must call their toll-free number to really get into it. I'm pretty sure that they are not "harvesting" phone numbers for future customers, although they could. And by the way, dialing *67 will not block your ANI (like Caller ID) inbound number since they are footing the bill for the call. Hell, even if a gay elf calls you back after the holidays to say thanks for calling the number it's worth it! Call 888-ELF-POOP for a customer service IVR system that takes voicemail hell to a new level.

Non Powered Gadgets

2005-11-24T09:17:00.000-06:00

Tetran Headphone Holder
Originally uploaded by gadget.

With all of the hype, buzz and "must have" around gadgets that plug into the wall for the holidays I like to show cool no-tech gadgets that are cheap and innovative. After a blog entry on my multimedia sister site http://www.telepixels.com stating that XBox 360 mania has gotten so out of control that eBay auctions are bringing from $1,000 to $10,000 for the system this story is even more fitting.

Gadgets like the Targus Coolpad, a turntable swivel for your laptop and the Tetran Headphone Holder are $12 smart accessories that just make sense. These problem solvers are cheap and smart - perfect for stocking stuffers or the guy or gal who has everything. Especially if you are on a budget.

So if you are still going to be shopping for the top gadget of the season, keep your eyes peeled for some gems that have no battery slots and that do not plug into the wall. Chances are your gift will be an unexpected suprize hit for the holidays.

XBox 360 Launch Part Deux.

2005-11-23T09:55:00.000-06:00

XBox 360 Launch
Originally uploaded by gadget.

My prediction is that the early low quantity sale of the XBox 360 was an artificial demand smoke screen to get people to think that they will be sold out for the holidays. Think about this: Microsoft releases a few hundred thousand units early, just dozens of units to thousands of retailers. Local news crews show kids lined up in front of stores freezing to get an early XBox. Parents take note and remember Cabbage Patch Kids, Furby's and other holiday "must haves" and figure that they too need to purchase the 360 whenever they can find it! Brilliant! Why else would Microsoft put a product out just BEFORE the largest shopping day in America? The original XBox wasn't exactly a smashing success, so this tactic creates an artificial "want/need" demand because just as in dating, everyone wants what they can't get.

Production should not be an issue since they have been making these since the spring. I went to Tokyo 30 days after the launch of the PSP and they were still not available at retail - I had to get mine from a back-ally DVD trader. That contrasts with the spring US launch of 500,000 units sold which were easily obtainable. My local Best Buy had hundreds of units available in stacks with few customers. I even went back the next day to pick up another one. Microsoft has stated that 400,000 360 units were being shipped to the US before Christmas, while these numbers are just shy of the PSP two-day sale quantities, this artificial demand and sales during the "right" selling season should mean that although the XBox will be a sell-out, you will have plenty of units between now and December 25th. I'm headed to Costco to see if I can get one before Black Friday. I bet I will.

2005-11-22T01:30:00.000-06:00

"I've got the XBox 360 until 9am Blues......" This happy strumming camper outside of the Grapevine, Texas Best Buy is at the head of the pack for one of their 30 "Premium" $399 allocated systems to be released in the morning. A line stretched across the front of Best Buy to Mattress FIRM, who lost an opportunity to rent mattresses to these young adults. Just around the corner at Wal*Mart, 16 "Core" units were available 9 hours earlier, at midnight. I was lucky #17 in line. If only I didn't return home to get my camera, I too would have one, but with merely a 10 minute check-out wait. That's more my style! At another mid-cities Wal*Mart, 2 units were there until 8 were picked up from UPS by an employee, which had embargoed them until November 22nd. Across town in Addison, two 360's were sold at Wal*Mart and a handful of campers waited at a Best Buy - one had been there for 25 hours already. With 40 degree nights in North Texas, I can't see myself waiting. Further North in Frisco, my friend who left the Addison store arrived at 12:30 to be the 21st person in line out of 16 units available. But why is there such a demand for the device? Is it that the XBox 360 is the nearly the first "true" HDTV capable gaming system. Or is it an artificial demand due to low numbers of product allocation like the PSP had this time last year in Japan, but not during the spring US launch? The console will operate at all high-definition resolutions, albiet using the component analog video connection. A digital HDMI connection is rumored to be released "when Microsoft thinks that the market is ready." My home theater has two HDMI devices and a switching receiver. We are ready MSFT! The console will also make for a nice Media Center Extender to play back stored content in another room. My burning question is will it play back my HD content recorded via my All in Wonder ATSC tuner, or will it ignore that video like my Linksys Media Center Extender. It will never receive DVD's across the link due to DMCA issues but as my library of HDTV content grows, it would be nice to share that around the house - over wired 100MBPS links of course, just like I can with the Roku HD1000. More photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/gadge/65875289/ from the launch festivities.

The Return of the Blob

2005-11-14T00:54:00.000-06:00

Just add water for instant Blob!
Originally uploaded by gadget.

The little Mr. Wizard in me loved to experiment with water in science class. It was amazing to me that it could be a liquid, a gas and a solid. But now in 2005, water can congeal, forming a jelly-like matter with the addition of 8 ounces of a product called Jellybath.

Why congeal water you say? Because in a bath tub that you could soak in, it forms an insulating barrier to hold the heat of the water in longer. And that is way cool. The powder additive contains non-toxic elements to turn the water to jelly as it is absorbed into sodium polyacrylate. Additives that are good for your skin like vitamin C as well as black tea extract, L-menthol, coloring, and fragrance are also mixed within the powder.

The inventor from Kobe Japan filed the patent in February of 2000 (probably after taking a bath that quickly became cold) which was granted relatively quickly in August 2001. The patent #6,281,177 reads like a recipe until you get to the scary claim fifteen, a subordinate of number nine. It reads "gelatinous mixture draws water from human skin immersed in said gelatinous mixture." I may be reading into this, but wasn't something JUST like this a source of a horrifically scary movie from the late 1950's? That's right. Jellybath is The Blob.

I am not getting near this stuff, but if you do, be prepared for a "NOTICE" of the patent before you buy the product online. I guess at $24 dollars per bath they want to keep competition down so that you are the only one who is getting soaked. Just don't forget that you will still need to take a shower afterward. www.jellybath.com

DRM DMCA FireWire and HDCP Blues...

2005-11-14T00:19:00.000-06:00

A Picture Share!
Originally uploaded by gadget.

Digital Rights Management, known as DRM to my people, is a pain in our content because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. This law says that if an effort has been made to protect content from reproduction through encryption, and that method is broken then you can be held liable for breaking the protection. It also slowed the adoption of FireWire as a transmission path for DVD and High Definition until it could be protected during transit between a playback device and a display. DVI got us started, but the High-Definition Multi-media Interface or HDMI does all which FireWire does with the inclusion of High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection or HDCP. Did you get all of that? Without acronyms I would not have a job. Basically HDMI is encrypted FireWire and you cannot "capture" and reassemble packets in motion as they go between devices without a secure encrypted handshake.

All that being said, I find it odd that Sony, owner of many labels, production companies and media production facilities has begun shipping their latest product to aid in mass-theft, I mean ripping of digital media. The Sony VGP-XL1B 200 CD/DVD/Dual Layer Burner has a FireWire/iLink port to tie into their matching Media Center PC. The Windows XP MCE 2005 Roll-up has new features to let this 200 disc changer literally rip through a majority of your CD collection and digitize them on your hard drive in a single sitting. The dual-layer DVD burner within will copy those tracks back to discs or write your recorded low-definition captured television to a DVD. An empty PCI slot inside will hold an HD tuner which you can record and also burn to DVD (albeit in a low definition, yet clear version) now. Finally, it will use your Internet connection to grab the artwork from up to 200 of your store bought DVD's that you place inside and let you choose a movie by selecting a picture from the assortment displayed within the Media Center Interface.

Two features are missing in my opinion, due to DRM, which may be able to be "patched" with a program like DVD43 or AnyDVD. You cannot play your DVD's through Media Center Extender devices and thanks to Content-Scrambling System or CSS you cannot rip your DVDs to the hard drive. Now at an average of 6GB per DVD, ripping movies would take 100 times more space than ripping an audio CD. But that is using MPEG2; DivX or MPEG4 would take much less space and make the content much more portable.

I think that you should be able to put the movies that you buy on any device or television around your house. I have all of my music CDs encoded into MP3 and they can be played in any room in my house. My whole house audio system is my most used gadget in my life. Video, however stays on DVDs in a shelf until I get up, choose, and insert them into one of a half-dozen players in my home. I wish that it was digitized like my music was. I want my DVDs to be seen anywhere. Throw a watermark in the video to track the serial number of the device that encoded it and make the people who do bad things pay for their crimes of distribution. If I want to make a copy for my own fair use on another device I own, like the Sony PSP then let me!

As I close this, did you notice anything unique about the photo above? The DVD player only has a single connection, even better, it is a high quality digital port. A port that pushes video and audio in the clear, FireWire. That's right, no encryption means that we may soon see FireWire CSS strippers just like devices that would remove Macrovision from composite signals to allow you to make VHS copies of your video tapes or DVDs. If this 200 disc changer is the hackers dream, sign me up for the 400 disc version. I have some fair use to get to.

VoSKY Chatterbox

2005-11-08T14:02:00.000-06:00

A Picture Share!
Originally uploaded by gadget.

Feedback sucks. Nobody wants to talk to someone who has a sqealing speaker box or who cuts out before every word spoken. Thankfully the Chatterbox does not suffer from this phenomenon. Plug this device into your USB port and it shows up as a typical sound card and microphone. Skype or your VoIP software will see this as a new input and allow you effortless conversation without the squealing that you typically have with desktop microphones. Now the conversation will not be private, but they have included a typical 3.5mm cellular headphone jack on the side. Now you've got your cake and you are eating it too. A mute and volume button adorn the front and the sound quality is just short of amazing.

10 Video Playback Devices

2005-11-08T00:07:00.000-06:00

10 Video Playback Devices
Originally uploaded by gadget.

Apple beat Sony at the portable music game because of CODECs (compression) first and design second. Sony's digital players required that you CHANGE your MP3 music into ATRAC format up until September 2004. This relatively unknown compression was a carryover from their 1993 MiniDisc technology. Meanwhile Apple's PortalPlayer designed iPod could play 7 different audio formats. This meant the music that the early adoptors had already placed on their hard drives required no more than a copy to the iPod hard drive - no re-encoding or time consuming step was necessary.

Once the early adopters like something they become the gorilla spokespeople on the street pushing the best technology to their peers. The Apple led design made them easy to look at after the technology made them easy to listen to. Video players have a difficult battle as digitized content is wrapped in Digital Rights Management, or DRM that is difficult, if not illegal to break. DVD's employ Content Scrambling System or CSS, which under The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (warning: PDF link) makes it illegal sell ripping software which "breaks" this. That means you cannot play the DVD that YOU bought on a different piece of hardware which may not have a DVD player embedded. On top of this, the different portable playback devices, ten of which are shown above, all support different processor speeds, CODECs (technically just the decoders) and screen resolutions.

What are you to do? Sony and Apple want to make it "easy" by providing a closed system that will let you convert content that you create into video for the PSP and iPod with video. Forget about putting your DVD movies on those devices without jumping through a multi-step process. There are third-party programs that will re-compress multimedia content like DivX, but these applications do not speak portable device language however.

Enter Diversified Multimedia - the company that created the once popular, but now illegal DVD X Copy that was taken off the market from court orders in the spring of 2004. This sharp team of programmers has regrouped to create software that manages your audio, video and photos residing on your computer hard drive, with the necessary encoder CODECs to make this content palatable for your mobile devices. Their Media Vault software to converts any number of different compression formats into any number of mobile device resolutions.

The best part about this software, which gives it true utility, is that as your devices get upgraded, you can add modules to the software to support your new devices. So your Treo 650 can play back your library today and the currently un-released Treo 700 with its different screen resolution and CODEC can display old or new content in the future. These guys have created the missing link between movies and TV shows stored on Media Center PC's and TiVo's. No longer will you be beaten by a CODEC. Information wants to be free, and mobile.

http://www.divmm.com/ - Diversified Multimedia

How to watch TV - from outside your house.

2005-11-07T00:12:00.000-06:00

Sony's Location Free PC Kit.
Originally uploaded by gadget.

Many people find a need to watch TV in rooms, like the bathroom, or locations, most likely the patio, that typically do not have televisions nor cable TV drops. Short of cutting a one-way mirror into your bathroom, or peering into a window to look at your or your neighbor's television, Sony created LocationFree TV. This $1500 WiFi based "tablet style" television encoder and wireless transmitter sits near your audio/video gear and beams to a pricey 12.1" LCD that operates on batteries and has the necessary receiver. Sharp followed suit with a similar LC-15L1U-S Aquos 15" portable LCD screen and transmitter which works well, even in environments with WiFi data present. Cheaper solutions have surfaced as Sony announced that the $249 Playstation Portable with version 2.5 firmware will become a 4.3" LCD screen for LocationFree TV. However, at the time of the announcement, they forgot to tell us where to get the stand-alone transmitter for it, without the TV. The device has surfaced as the LocationFree Player Pak for $349.99. If you do not have a PSP, you can add the LocationFree Player for PC software LFA-PC2 for $29.99 (which is a $120 discount from the older LFA-PC1 it updates) and use your laptop as a screen - you are even able to connect to this when you are outside of your house. Now LocationFree bundles can be as low as $370 using your PC to view programs or $600 with a PSP. My solution however, is use a $249 SlingBox encoder if TiVo is your media server at home as they integrate extremely well together. I have one sitting on a Verizon FIOS (2 Megabit Fiber Uplink) and get ~1Mbps downlink video that looks amazing. You can install their required viewer and control software on all of your PC's, but can only connect one at a time to your encoder. If you have a Media Center Edition of Windows XP, the only way to go is with the free Orb Network. Add its TiVo Anywhere upgrade and you have a web launched Windows Media player that you can even get to from Internet cafe's. Note that TiVo recorded programs must be transfered from their hard drive to the XP MCE box before they can play remotely. Now, it is only a matter of time before someone comes up with a realtime MPEG4 encoding module (versus the Windows Media codecs that Orb uses now) to stream MCE video to a PSP or even a 3G phone via MPEG4. For free.
Location Free TV
Sing Media
Orb Networks

PSP UMD game forced upgrade

2005-11-06T12:19:00.000-06:00

A Picture Share!
Originally uploaded by gadget.

The PSP's Grand Theft Auto Liberty City UMD demands that the firmware on the unit is upgraded to 2.0 before the game will even play. Fortunately the upgraded firmware is on the game UMD as well, but unfortunately you will not be able to run some home brew applications on the upgraded PSP. Some of my favorite home brews now are PSP Millionaire and PSP Radio - which streams radio stations over WiFi. No more copying songs to Memory Stick Duo's. :)

Garmin GPSmap 376c

2005-10-31T10:34:00.000-06:00

Garmin GPSmap 376c
Originally uploaded by gadget.

The integration of GPS mapping and satellite delivered data can bring you real-time re-routing to our car navigation system, ala XM NavTraffic on some Acura and Cadillac vehicles, as long as the traffic data collection is supported in your city. Boaters and aftermarket GPS fans can use the GPSmap 376c from Garmin to display weather overlays on their current map. A 3.8" 480 X 320 256 color screen looks crisp and bright, a battery gives between 4 and 15 hours of use and this, of course, tunes in all 150 channels of XM satellite radio. Radio will cost you $12.95 a month, but weather data, a whopping $29.99 to $49.99 per month. Looks like weather needs a better service model from XM, like NavTraffic which is only an additional $3.99/month for existing radio subscribers. It does however look to be a nice convergence piece of satellite technologies. Plus you could even spill your boat drink on it as it is water restant. Now available at your favorite boat store or online retailer for $800 to $1000.

http://www.garmin.com/products/gpsmap376c/ - For boaters

If you are more of a driver than a boater, the 7" widescreen 16:9 480 x 234 pixel Street Pilot 7200 gives you traffic updates via ClearChannel's or XM NavTraffic service plus weather information albiet more limited than the marine version above. In addition to XM satellite radio, Audible book and MP3 playback adorne this in-vehicle GPS and an SD slot gives you the storage capacity for multimedia and map updates. An integrated FM modulator eliminates the wire between the display and your head unit for stereo audio playback. Look for this unit in December at streeet prices of $1000 to $1200.

http://www.garmin.com/products/sp7200/ - For drivers

2005-10-26T00:24:00.000-05:00

The Apple iPod gave us so much, now it taketh away. Gone from the top of the 5th Generation iPod is the remote control port that few probably used anyway. The real travesty is that this port also provided power for accessories like the Griffin iTrip FM modulator and iTalk voice recorder. Watch for replacements to these in "sled" form factor that connect to the bottom port to derrive power and line-level audio. This should not have the distortion problems that the headphone jack was prone to in the past.

The real interesting feature deletion from this iPod though, is its lack of Firewire. Yes Apple, who helped to create this standard has orphaned the technology on thier latest incarnation of the Nano and iPod with Video. That's right, the entire iPod line for fall 2005 only supports USB 1.1 and 2.0. Was this a way to save a few precious cents at manufacturing or is this a testament that there are much more PC than Apple users now? I say the latter as most iMac and iBook users do not have the opportunity to put PCI 2.0 cards in their computers. Perhaps this is just a creative way for Apple to force computer upgrades rather than their throwing in the towel on the technology. Expect slightly longer charge times and slower speeds in syncing with USB 2.0 over Firewire also called IEEE 1394.

Video on the iPod vs the PSP

2005-10-13T01:35:00.000-05:00

Sony PSP UMD slot
Originally uploaded by gadget.

We knew that Steve was going to do it, even when he said that people don't want to carry movies around with them. Apple announced their familiar form factor yet thined iPod with 30 frames per second video playback through its new 2.5 inch screen. It also supports a composite RCA output, which is unique over the PSP's closed video output architecture. Will iTunes content (which is weak with 2000 mostly unknown videos at launch) beat the Sony Connect service with its downloadable media and retail UMD movies? Time will tell, but we can dig into the technical specs right now between the two devices.

The iPod won the war of the pocket music players against Sony, the inventor of the portable music category, from their Walkman and Discman players in the 1980's. Apple beat them from their 30 year monopoly because the iPod supported 7 different compressed media formats versus Sony's single ATRAC codec, a carry over from their MiniDisc technology they pushed into their "MP3" player lineup. It was not until Fall of 2004 that Sony announced MP3 support, well after the device game was lost. In 2005, they began shipping laptops with SD and Memory Stick ports - a further shift towards supporting standards other than their own.

Lets look at the specifications of the Sony PSP vs. the iPod 5th generation video player.

Sony PSP:
Overall device size: 6.7 x 2.9 x .9 inches
Video formats via "UMD": H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Main Profile Level3
Video formats via "Memory Stick": MPEG-4 SP,AAC
Output via 4.3" 16:9 TFT
480 x 272 pixel, 16.77 million colors (130,560 pixels)
Content via Sony Connect or retail UMD movies
Create your own via Image Converter 2 Plus for $14.99
Storage capacity: 2GB or 10 hours via Memory Stick Duo or unlimited via UMD media
Battery: 2-3 Hours

iPod 5th Gen:
Overall device size: 4.1 x 2.4 x 0.43 inches
Video formats: H.264 video: up to 768 Kbps, 320 x 240, 30 frames per sec., Baseline Profile up to Level 1.3 with AAC-LC up to 160 Kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats
MPEG-4 video: up to 2.5 mbps, 480 x 480, 30 frames per sec., Simple Profile with AAC-LC up to 160 Kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats
Output via 2.5" 4:3 TFT and RCA Composite output
320 x 240 pixel 16.7 million colors (76,800 pixels)
Content via iTunes Music (and Video) store
Create your own via Quicktime 7 Pro for $29.99
Storage capacity: 60GB or 150 Hours of video (max)
Battery: 2-3 Hours

The iPod is clearly smaller, but the screen is nearly half the resolution of the PSP. Remove its wide screen capabilities and you are going to need to get your eyes close to the iPod to see detail in videos. There is a psychological difference to these devices too. The iPod is known as a "passive" listening device where the PSP is an "active" engaging product. We have to engage to watch TV or play games so the iPod's video capabilities may go forgotten after the novelty wears off or the time to download content into iTunes then transfer it from your computer to the iPod makes us weary. If users have large music collections, the tradoffs between many songs being replaced by only a handful of TV programs may be another detriment.

Sony has their Connect download service and many UMD movies in retail stores while Apple has no movie program because of digital rights issues from the DMCA and only a few "formerly free" broadcast TV programs and some music videos available to purchase. I predict that it is only a matter of time before Pixar and Disney movies are available on the iTunes service, with the other studios to follow. Downloading a 2+ hour movie will be extremely time consuming and expensive for both a time and cost of bandwidth standpoint.

Both Sony and Apple offer software programs to convert home movies or TV programs that reside on your PC hard drive into MPEG4 formats compatible with their devices. Unfortunately, as easy as it is to rip your audio CDs to MP3 format, neither of these will allow you to "rip" a DVD that you own onto the devices although third-party "hacks" will let you achieve this with a few extra steps.

Now Apple does support a TV output and even an optional $39 remote control which makes this a neat "pocket PVR" for your television at home or on the road. Today, at the launch of the 5th gen iPod, I say the PSP wins at video and the iPod wins at music. These tables could change however, if Apple buys TiVo and enables their PC Home Media Option or rear USB ports to sync between the two formerly disparaged devices. An iPod that "talks" to a TiVo would be one of the few killer convergence devices. If you think about it, both Apple and TiVo have nailed the perfect consumer experience. Sony is playing catch-up.

Video on the iPod vs the PSP

2005-10-13T01:34:00.000-05:00

Sony PSP UMD slot
Originally uploaded by gadget.

5th Generation iPod Top View

2005-10-13T00:04:00.000-05:00

5th Generation iPod Top View
Originally uploaded by gadget.

The greatest thing about the 3rd and 4th generation iPods were their top and bottom accessory ports. Say goodbye to the top power and control port on the 5th generation Video iPod. This means that remote controls and FM modulators like those from Griffin will need to be larger to house their own batteries. Unless, they are pushing power through the headphone jack, which I doubt.

The bottom connector stayed the same, so your speakers from Altec Lansing, JBL and even the new iHome iPod alarm clock (which sounds GREAT! for $99!) will work with this new portable player.

I was also suprized that they did not include the Bluetooth stereo profile (A2DP) for wireless headphones. This is also unfortunately disabled in the Motorola ROKR phone as well.

2005-10-12T18:08:00.000-05:00

Since the Intel Intercast boards of 1995 I have been fascinated with the convergence of PCs and Television sets. This path, however takes two routes which I have been known to call push and pull. Windows 95 brought TV tuner cards (that actually worked) to the den and WebTV boxes, now called MSN TV, extended PC like functions to living room. Both of these examples are a pull or consuming activity. My Apple computers and now with the stability of XP, my Windows machines let me manipulate and encode digital video from photo and movie cameras, recorded media or live TV. My TiVo content can now live on my huge PC hard drives and be further compressed to resolutions and compression rates more suited to portable devices. Services like Google Video will host my old television shows and even let me charge for them if I wish - ala iTunes. The problem at hand is Digital Rights Management or that bad three letter word that techies call DRM. Now I understand what it costs to produce content. I'm a writer, producer and content creator by trade. I get paid for disseminating what is in my head and putting it in the media. However, I believe as the content becomes available to more people in an easy manner, it gains value. Just as the original swapping of bootleg concert tapes, and now MP3 files help build fan communities for new and established bands, I hope that media content can be aggregated and live on in the new world of TelePixels. Whether it is to extend brand or reach, or become a click and view micro-payment model. The days of the network are dying. I do not watch networks. I watch shows. Networks are ineffecient, difficult to navigate and slow. It is time to trim the fat. This blog will investigate the world of TelePixels, or multimedia content on personal electronics.

We need your old PCs!

2005-09-08T09:24:00.000-05:00

We need your old PCs!
Originally uploaded by gadget.

Over the Memorial day weekend I was trying to get groups together to build a mesh ad-hoc network at some of the big centers where Katrina victims were coming in. This was not feasible with all of the movement and confusion, but the fine folks at www.publicwebstations.com have come up with a Linux distro that boots from CDR and loads FireFox. Here is what you need to do. Go to your closet and grab that old P2 or AMD machine (or greater) with 128MB of RAM. Take out the hard drive and configure the BIOS to boot from CD-ROM. Burn the ISO from the above web site, plug your machine into a wired Ethernet jack and boot it up. You should see Firefox load and take you to a Red Cross welcome page. If that works then head to a shelter in your community and offer to install the systems that you bring. What are you waiting for? I know that you have an old computer in your closet!

The animals are hurting with Katrina too.

2005-09-04T13:14:00.000-05:00

The animals are hurting with Katrina too.
Originally uploaded by gadget.

The traditional news media is giving little attention to the animal shelters in cities surrounding the states affected by Katrina. As of Labor Day weekened, they are OVER their capacity taking care of hungry, wet, dirty animals that often to not have collars. Please offer to donate your time or money at a local shelter or as a foster home to take care of these animals at your house.

Most cats did not survive as they are not good swimmers; few made it out of homes and into trees. Many dogs were tied in their yards and perished in the rush of water. Those that were able to swim are missing patches of fur and have cuts from the debris.

If you are missing or have found a pet, you can send a description of the pet including its name and breed to the ASCPA at: disaster@aspca.org

One of the few AP stories shows a grim look at the state of animals in the region.
AP Story on Snowball and other pets with a more grim outlook.

Please dontate your time or money NOW: Donate here!

Distributed Audio over Power Line - AOP

2005-08-20T16:31:00.000-05:00

Distributed Audio over Power Line - AOP
Originally uploaded by gadget.

I didn't make it to Foo this year, and can't make it to Barcamp, so I put together this hack to listen to the Barcamp conference over my second Vonage VoIP line. Audio from the conference bridge gets pumped out the earpiece jack of a Polycom Soundpoint phone, then goes into a power over Ethernet audio adapter, then gets received in my audio rack and pumped throughout my Russound whole house distributed audio system. Now every room in my house can hear the conference. My audio hack would also work well with earnings calls or those forever work conferences...

Before the Treo 650 and Bluetooth DUN, my data phone solution required lots of cables.

2005-06-21T10:40:00.000-05:00

Before the Treo 650 my data phone solution required lots of cables.
Originally uploaded by gadget.

Since 1993 I have been connecting laptops to mobile phones for "wireless data" and even used the AT&T EO with its telnet client and internal Oki 900 mobile phone. Telnet on a tablet was a real chore with 9600 bps connections. Remember the "someday you can fax on the beach?" commercials? I faxed from the beach.

The Sidekick and Treo 600 were the first smart phones that you could really use data on without going insane and I replaced both of these in my pockets with a Treo 650. Since many of us in America have not used Bluetooth for dial up networking I put a little how-to together for Make to get you over the tricky parts.

This solution also works for GSM phones pending that you get the correct dial-up number and login information from your carrier. Before the 650, I used this setup with the very rare CDMA Sony Ericsson T608 which had the worst firmware (SLOW and buggy) that I have ever seen on a phone.

Enjoy the story. Let me know if you want a Mac version too. It's a little easier and almost self explanitory from the PC. Go figure eh?
Follow more at the link.

HowTo Treo 650 Bluetooth Dial-up Networking

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High Altitude XM Radio via the MyFi

2005-05-31T12:51:00.000-05:00

A Picture Share!
Originally uploaded by gadget.

Nothing beats automatic delivery of audio - especially at 30k feet. Just place the XM external wearable antenna between the window shade of the airplane and glass and you have instant CNN and audio when your on the go!

Flickr

2005-05-27T18:28:00.000-05:00

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

2005-05-27T18:08:00.000-05:00

With Google now behind blogger, the ability to Moblog and search integration, it may just be time to bring this site back from the grave.

Starting with Grey Matter on my site was cute, but I do not have the time to keep up with the comment spammers and deleting their rubbish. Ben and Mena's TypePad based on their Movable Type engine is cool, but I found myself not wanting to pay the $80 a year for that service. Maybe the $50 version would suit me well with the level of features that I would use.

In the mean time, I'll give this service from Blogger another go! Maybe it's worth being different from the rest of the MT crowd.

Dave

2003-07-30T14:38:00.000-05:00

Internet Explorer is not safe with SSL unless you have upgraded it since the spring of 2003. If not, you are succeptable to a "man in the middle" attack which could even happen at your own office! See this story for the details.

Internet Explorer SSL Weakness

2003-07-29T15:42:00.000-05:00

In a middle step between using Grey Matter, which has been great for two years, and my building a new box to support Movable Type, I thought I would check out Blogger after the Google purchase, to see if it supports XML and RSS capabilities!

My goal for this project, is to make my video reviews easily accessable via an RSS feed online!

Enjoy the video content!