Two cool tech stories this week got me a little worried. First there were was this one about self-guided bullet accurate up to a mile. Then there was this nano copter swarm: So nano copter swarms armed with self-guided bullets seems the next step. If I were Dr. Evil. Unfortunately, there are lots of Dr. Evils out there.
Blog Archives
Memory, or Its Lack
For some odd reason I agreed to be in a play. I haven’t acted in a real play in many years. It’s less than 2 weeks to go before we open in Look Back in Anger at the Ferndale Repertory Theatre and I am still working on my lines! I am only in one scene. But I have a lot of lines in that scene. It’s been a real struggle for me. It may...
Healthcare and Mobile Convergence
This is a slightly edited and enhanced version of an article that appeared November, 2011 as part of the Times-Standard/Redwood Technology Consortium Tech Beat series. The health industry in slowly adopting technology on a large scale, moving to electronic documents, computer generated prescriptions and information sharing. It’s been a rough road as standards and privacy issues have to be grappled with beyond the sheer technical problems. But the trade-offs in efficiency, accuracy and data...
Shared Birthdays and the End of the World
Pretty much every day I listen to The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. He always mentions the birthday of a few famous or infamous people. Today, he mentioned Elvis Presley, John Neihardt, the writer of Black Elk Speaks, and astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. He didn’t mention me for some reason. I also still don’t have a page in Wikipedia. What’s up with that? Other than January 8 as a birthday, I don’t see much in...
Can’t Tell the Bits from the Trees
On our trip to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington I helped guide our way using my IPhone and the Google maps app. I was having fun watching our pin move along Highway 101, going around curves as we drove around the same curves. My wife said “Look out the window!” Oh, yeah – there’s Sequim Bay and lots of trees. “But look, this app is tracking our every move!” I said. I have to...
Not Roadkill Yet!
I think I started out the new year right, today. I got up early and after the frost melted, went for a long run in the early morning sun. I encountered this poor fellow who didn’t fair as well as I. His life, like so many has been cut short but I keep moving, grateful, at nearly 60 to have some more time to breath and be productive. I have so many ideas and...
Thanksgiving 2011
In a world in which so many people have so little, I am truly thankful for my friends and family and that I have a warm home and plenty of food to share with them. I am also thankful for my health that allows me to enjoy, maybe even indulge a little in, these gifts. But as this is a blog on technology, I am also thankful for these astounding technical innovations: I am...
Wrapped in a Cocoon of Fiber
I am suddenly watching more TV or rather, video (TV shows, movies, Internet videos, etc.) over the Internet . I broke down and bought a Roku box the other day. If you’re not familiar with the Roku, it’s one of several set top boxes that hook up to your TV, download or stream video from various sources and play them on your big screen. Some of the the other best known devices are Boxee...
Cops Get Fooled Again
This video is hilarious. The “psychic” tells how she got involved in this missing person case in Nevada. I love the quote: “It’s called psychometry”. That’s a made up word where the psychic feels objects and gets feelings, and visions from them. I also like “I try to stay out of my mind”. No duh. (I wish I could embed the video here, but the code the source site supplies defies my technical ability:...
Boo Humbug!
(Read with your best Andy Rooney whiny voice): Do you ever wonder why people like to dress up in stupid costumes and have their kids go door to door begging for crap food? Yeah, me too. What’s the deal? OK, maybe I spent 20 years in the theater and the circus and greasing up my face no longer holds an appeal. I understand some people like to play pretend as it lets them get...
iBrick
Update: After several tries I got both my IPhone and IPad working with the new iOS. It appears I was a victim of Apple’s popularity and lack of planning. Their servers were overloaded with people trying to download the new system. Just because I’m sitting in front of my computer I think it’s good idea to get iOS 5 THE MOMENT it’s released. Dumb. As. A. Brick. Which is what my iPhone is now....
Putting Your Computer Cycles to Work for Good
Nearly 2 years ago I posted a list of some of my favorite podcasts. Reviewing that post I see some have disappeared and some I don’t listen to as regularly as I should. And there a some that I listen to regularly now that are not on the list. I will update my favorites some day soon, but want to mention one I listen to daily (working days): Marketplace Tech Report. It’s a 5...
If Steve Jobs Controlled the Post Office
Let’s imagine Steve Jobs was in a position to set policy for the government for various programs and one of the programs he had oversight for was the Post Office. Would we be at the position today where the Post Office was on the brink of collapse? No. In fact, 10 years ago he would have been laying the groundwork for eliminating the Post Office altogether. Or at least transforming it in to something...
QR Codes and You
When QR Codes started showing up in magazines a year or so ago I thought they were a gimmick. I still think, for the most part, they are. After all, why not just have a URL that can be typed in to a browser either on your computer or mobile browser? But the discussion of QR Codes has come up with a couple clients recently so I thought I’d take a closer look at...
Amazon Affiliates and Taxes
Last week I had my 15 seconds of almost fame. I’ve been an Amazon Affiliate for years. When I got my email from Amazon that they were closing my account because of the sales tax law passed by California. For some reason my name got passed to a couple journalists as a spokesperson for the 10,000 or so affiliates who had their business shut down without recourse. So while I was up on a...
