Dwayne Phillips ' Day Book

Items I happen to view each day. Science, Techonology, Management, Culture, and of course Writing

This is my day book for this week. I have modeled this after science fiction and computer writer Jerry Pournelle's view, or as he calls it, his Day Book. I encourage you to see Jerry Pournelle's site and subscribe to his services.

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This week: December July 21-27, 2014

Summary of this week:

Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday - Saturday - Sunday

Monday July 21, 2014

Google's WebP image file format has greater compression, and Google wants it to replace JPEG on the Internet.

Edward Snowden speaks at a New York City conference on coding. With no-cost communications and computer technology, who cares where you are on the planet?

The story behind Google's Stories.

A look at the amazing growth of Amazon Web Services. Why buy a computer when you can rent them cheap?

The biggest video star in the world you've never heard of: Rachel Meyer.

Silly tech usage: drones to take videos of your outdoor wedding.

One person learns how much information our central government keeps on him. And for what reason?

America had people walking on the moon 45 years ago. Today we don't have the ability to send a person into orbit.

It seems that high school seniors are taking online courses on their own (without adult supervision).

This robotic glove gives you two extra fingers. Perhaps their will be good uses for such.

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Tuesday July 22, 2014

Your tax dollars at waste. How our USAF spent $1billion on a software project that delivered nothing.

Someone shows how to take control of your Chromecast and televise whatever they want.

Apple has ordered about 70million iPhone 6 units. That is the biggest order ever.

A ship sank in 1997 with 5million Lego pieces aboard. Yes, they are still floating to shore one at a time.

Satya Nadella continues to shake and rattle Microsoft.

Google is among the tech giants vying for the contract to turn NYC phone booths into WiFi hotspots.

Adventures in the BYOD paradigm.

Apple's sales of personal computers continues to grow in contrast with everyone else.

Data science is on all of us? You should know the difference between mean and median.

Western Digital announces its $300, 6TeraByte disk drives. Something for the home movie studio or something like that. What I don't understand is how Google and others only give you a few GigaBytes of storage on email and cloud.

The biggest non-celebrity celebrity on YouTube unboxes kids toys and has tens of millions of views every week.

Facebook is rolling out a new Save feature. When when when?

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Wednesday July 23, 2014

An attempt at reformating the Bible so that it is easier to read. There have been several attempts at this in the past few decades. The encyclopeia format of the printed Bible has been a hindrance to many people attempting to read it for the first time.

One man's experience with 25 days of drinking that soylent stuff.

Apple made a $7.7billion profit in just the last quarter, and most people yawned. That is a lot of cash added to an alreadly big pile of cash.

iPad sales are slowing. Apple is selling many more iPhones.

Apple's spaceship building will have a lot of underground facilities—in an earthquake-prone area? Are they sure about this?

Apple is being sued by 20,000 current and former employees over labor issues.

Microsoft will merge all its Windows versions into one size fits all.

Micrsoft has a good financial quarter driven by growth in its cloud business.

A viral audio last week was a terrible Comcast employee trying to convince a customer from cancelling his service. Comcast responds a little today by saying the employee did what he was trained to do and that they will change their training. This "change the training" is the most often used answer of the 21st century.

Fund a writer or journalist via Beacon. Here is the BeaconReader site.

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Thursday July 24, 2014

Southwest Airlines boots a passenger off after he tweets about a rude employee. Bad mistake by SouthWest.

ASUS has the first WiFi router that supports multi-user beamforming.

No one really seems to know how to measure sea ice. Remote sensing is difficult. Some climatologists admit such in this article, but still claim to know the temperature of the earth to a tenth of a degree 200 years ago. Sometimes I wonder.

There are many caveats to the Microsoft claim of developing one operating system for all platforms.

Yet another call to reform how computer science is taught at colleges.

LG sold 14.5million smartphones last quarter and tripled its profits in that market. Everyone wants a smartphone.

Noting this post is a little late, but Apple released the OS X Yosemite beta this week.

Attempts at allowing heirs to access the electronic accounts of the deceased. The computer is today's file cabinet. When my father was killed in 1990, I was able to access information that my mother desperately needed by looking through his pile of floppy disks. The world is different today with much of this information stored in emails and the cloud.

Many people with STEM degrees don't work in their field of education. Shortage of qualified workers? There is always a shortage of people with degrees willing to work at high school diploma wages.

The financial reports are fuzzy, but Microsoft continues to lose money on its tablets.

The growing complexity in writing a computer program.

This is terrible for America and Americans: the vast majority of terrorist plots in the US were created by the FBI.

This is pathetic: the daily harrassment of women in the video game industry. I pity the poor fool who harrasses my granddaughter.

Someone gets a copy of the manual on how our government classifies some of us as terrorists.

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Friday July 25, 2014

The difficulties of making a map of the no fly zones for drones in the US.

Amazon had a disappointing financial quarter.

Employee surveys rate their CEOs. Here are the best ones.

A look at OS X Yosemite in a little more detail.

A new Google X project to measure just about everything about a person's health.

Schools are buying more Chromebooks than iPads.

Journalist write a lot about diversity, but don't practice it themselves. There is a word for people like that.

The culture of Microsoft and the culture of Apple and why Microsoft can't seem to make a piece of hardware that anyone will buy.

The Hemingway writing software is now available in a desktop version for OS X.

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Saturday July 26, 2014

To lengthen your "creative career," remove the headphones and pay attention to what is around you. I guess there is no creative inspiration in listening to music and other content.

Google Docs can now use the tracked changes from MS Word edits.

Google starts Translate Community where you can help improve its machine translation.

The state-of-the-practice in solid state disks for Summer 2014.

The state-of-the-practice in laptop computers for Summer 2014.

How to camoflauge your face from those facial recognition systems. Yes, it does look a bit silly, but yes, it works.

This is just neat: turn an old pinball machine into a standing desk.

Verizon will start limiting data on its unlimited data plans. Isn't that a contradiction? Oh well.

Senator John Walsh plagiarized his final MS paper. Other famous people have been caught doing so as well (one was the late Dr. Martin Luther King who commited plagiarism in his doctoral dissertation). What strikes me about Walsh's paper is how badly it is written and how badly the copied passages are written. Is this supposed to be in English?

I have to get one of these hair clips for my granddaughter (or is it for me to use?).

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Sunday July 27, 2014

MS Windows 8 may come to be known as Vista 2. It was a bad idea and everyone told Microsoft it was a bad idea.

Some people think the ability to tell a good story is important for hiring in the tech world. I tend to agree, but I would probably use different words instead of "story." I want someone who can tell me something; I want more than "yes" and "no." Can the person tell me what they are doing?

So many people tried to download the beta version of OS X Yosemite...well, you know what happened.

A look at the  Inateck MacBook Protect line of felt sleeves for carrying the Apple portable computers.

How do writers deal with depression?

Thoughts on writing when you hate to write.

What one writer did to become a full-time writer. The first step is the most important: stop asking other people for permission.

A look at an add-on track changes program for Google Docs.

I like this web site: this day in history.

Writing a memoir and taking a selfie, a.k.a., a self-portrait photograph.

Here is a fiction writing tip: imagine your are someone else or something else. How would that else write?

Thoughts on using a pen name. I have an upcoming short story on that topic.

Jealous of other writers (those scoundrels)?

Here is a great title: 140 websites that pay writers.

Five good things a writer can attempt this year.

Good old weird Al Yankovic has a great video about grammar and such.

A list of some of the favored software for different types of writing.

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