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.
Local Tech Notes
Thoughts on technology and its uses on the North Coast.
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...
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...
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...
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...
Redundancy Reshmundancy
It’s been a couple years since I’ve used the term “redundant’ to refer to the chimerical second fiber line to be built for Humboldt County. But the Times-Standard is still using that term as evident in the article that appears today about the IP Networks fiber line build along the Highway 36 corridor. I prefer the term “alternate.” For one, redundant fiber can imply it’s superfluous. After all it’s redundant! For another, it implies...
What the IPhone Geo Tracking Data Reveals About Me
The headlines were rather alarming. The Apple IPhone is storing data both on the phone and on the computer where you connect with ITunes that reveals all the places where you’ve accessed a cell tower. Who knows why? Who knows if other phones are doing the same thing. Even though Apple doesn’t seem to be sucking the data to their own servers, apparently people are really concerned that hackers, estranged spouses, marketers and law...
Greening the Planet Dreams
I attended the Plan It Green Conference last weekend and I found it both stimulating and frustrating. I was stimulated by the size of the crowd and the number of vendors. There’s clearly a great deal of interest in and “energy” around green technologies at least locally. Many of the vendors had interesting information to share. Though I didn’t see anything really mind blowing. What frustrates me is the return on investment that using...
Fiber In Danger? AT&T Not Telling
There’s been some concern that our (still) only fiber connection could be in danger due to the massive mud slide on 101. Hank Sims has done a good job of trying to get to the bottom of this story over on his excellent new news blog. Unfortunately, the story peters out right where it usually does: The AT&T stonewall. I think that’s the real story. All of Humboldt County is still beholden to one...
