Posts under ‘Tech’

I went into a Barnes & Noble this evening and spotted stacks of Nook eReader pamphlets at the information desk and near the registers. I picked one up and an employee was all too eager to tell me more about it. There’s just one problem: the Nook is already sold out through the end of [...]

“Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?”
I just finished a long night of karate and I’m not sure I’m ever going to stop sweating. It started in class, and it was Sensei’s birthday so he decided we’d get in a really good workout and do some sparring. Two and a half hours later, most [...]

I dug up some info on the Honda FCX Clarity today. It’s their hydrogen fuel cell vehicle that emits nothing but sunshine and rainbows when you drive it, and apparently there are several test cars on the road in California. The biggest problem is the infrastructure, of course, and I kept wondering where one would [...]

John recently set up his neighborhood cigar shop, New Trends Cigars, with a Twitter account. When we stopped in for a smoke Saturday afternoon, we found ourselves explaining Twitter to one of the regulars. This guy has been seeing it talked about on the news and spotted the links appearing everywhere, but he still had [...]

This video of Shai Agassi, founder and CEO of Better Place, is about 18 minutes long but is well worth watching:

The video explains how Better Place came to be, the plan for the cars, and the economics behind the Better Place plan versus oil over the next ten years.
Whether you think his plan will work [...]

I think Nine Inch Nails is a perfect example of what can be done when creators break the traditional distribution models.
When their contract with their label ended, they went digital, offering both physical CDs and MP3 downloads unencumbered by DRM and copy protection schemes. Now you can download their latest album for free (in multiple [...]

It’s been nine years since Metallica launched their crusade against Napster. Since then we’ve also seen the MPAA and RIAA shit their respective beds, Sony’s assault on consumers, the DeCSS controversy, and the rise and fall of DRM.
Through that time, I’ve been wondering when the same behavior would hit the publishing industry. The Google Book [...]

Now that I’ve had to upgrade my iPod to a shiny new iPod touch, one of the first things I did was download all the free comics offered by iVerse Media via Apple’s App Store. A friend showed me a few of them on his iPhone a few weeks back, and I hadn’t realized anyone [...]

Yes, plumbing. Bear with me.
Our local utility sends out a pamphlet with every bill, and this month the pamphlet included an advisory to turn water heaters down to 120 degrees Fahrenheit to prevent scalds and save energy. Most water heaters, apparently, are dialed up to 140F by consumers.
Someone already resolved the energy issue by inventing [...]

I installed two mobile WordPress plugins on my site, one to format this page for mobile surfers and the other to let me blog from my new CrackBerry Curve. I’m testing the latter with this post.
It occurred to me I could make the much-maligned Twitter tweets from the crapper, but it further occurred to me [...]