Summary of this week:

Strong rumor that iPad 3 will have 4G (LTE)
Apple's success is making the economy look better than it is
The President proposes raising electric vehicle tax credit to $10,000
On a cruise in the Gulf of Mexico

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

Monday February 13, 2012

The Apple TV has disappeared from store shelves. The rumors are that an update is coming soon.

Twitter beats the mainstream news media again. This time in the death of Whitney Houston.

When travelling in China, business executives are employing counter-intelligence tradecraft to protect their business interests. That is smart. Good for them.

How cities are growing. My old home, Lagos, Nigeria, is growing at a rate of 40 people per hour. That is one of the fastest rates in the world.

I like this. External disk drives usually come in clever, designer fashion cases that are hard to dispose. These guys use cardboard boxes. They work just as well.

One in six parents don't understand the electronic gadgets their kids are using. Great photo in this article of cute kids.

Six skills that IT graduates are lacking. Just six? Recent graduates only have a taste of their profession. Time.

Google is adding 120,000 square feet to its Mountain View, California office complex. They call it the "Google Experience Center."

The Google rumors are now about a personal communications device, not a music device. Time will tell.

A prosthetic arm and hand made mostly from Legos.

Acer continues to make new really small portable computers, a.k.a., netbooks. I still see these small computers in coffee shops locally.

A map of America showing the Craigslist.org geographic areas.

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Tuesday February 14, 2012

An annual Harris Poll of consumers shows that Apple has the highest reputation of any company in America.

HP is making servers that require less human interaction to keep them running. This is just smart. Build products that need less maintenance.

This study shows that off shore wind farms are susceptible to hurricane damage. I hope this is not new news to those who build such things. I mean, surely they would have long ago considered the threat of storms? Right? Someone help me here.

The Texas Instruments WiLink 8 family of chips.

Apple stock closed above $500 a share for the first time yesterday.

The rumors are strong and everywhere on this one: the iPad 3 will have 4G wireless (LTE). What will that cost a month?

The government of Iran is blocking various Google services from its subjects.

And the Canadian government is introducing massive new Internet surveillance legislation. Odd.

I like word clouds.

The world's largest cave is in Vietnam of all places.

A small look at the grim reality of life in North Korea. They don't have electricity at night. This is the 21st century and they don't have electricity in the cities.

The number of U.S. households that have broadband Internet and over the air television grew 22% last year. I am considering this option myself.

MITx is open.

Buying a car? Get information on line.

Bitcasa is a new company that will provide - get ready for this - infinite disk space in the cloud for $10 a month. They will probably make lots of money. I hope so.

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Wednesday February 15, 2012

SanDisk shows its new line of solid state disks. More speed, more storage, lower price - this is a great industry.

The amount of data moving through the internetwork of computers is growing at staggering rates. Most of the growth has been due to mobile phones. The next big thing in data will be machine-to-machine (M2M) communication as everthing will have a bunch of sensors, e.g., cars.

The American government has been seizing Internet sites that violate copyright. Most of these sites were located outside the U.S. Well, you could see this one coming, the UK government is siezing US sites that violate UK copyrights. A copyright cyberwar coming?

A flaw has been found in the encryption method used for online banking and such. Is everyone ready for national electronic health records?

Agriculture consumes 92% of all fresh water. At least that is a good use of the water. We would hope that efficiency would kick in sometime.

The European Space Agency's Vega, small load lifter, had a successful first flight.

LibreOffice 3.5 was released.

Pushing back the frontiers of ignorance NOT. A 3D printing lab at the University of Washington had to slow (practically stop) sharing information with the world because of university policy on intellectual property.

Apple is succeeding so much that it is skewing the numbers for the rest of the economy. Think about that one for a while. The non-Apple economy is still pretty bad. Apple could cause the President to be re-elected. That is ironical given the anti-success and anti-business slant of the President.

A company claims to be able to remove unwanted people from the background of your photos. If you have a video camera, something that can build up the true background, this is not magic.

HP is releasing some impressive all-in-one desktop computers. Very impressive.

Accessing the Internet via a satellite is much better now. And look at this portable unit. At $20,000 it isn't cheap, but take one into a city that has just been hit by a hurricane and see how many people you can help by giving them 10 minutes of email. Great stuff.

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Thursday February 16, 2012

Lacie shows a series of Thunderbolt-equipped external disk drives.

A quarter of European doctors are using iPads on the job.

Nvidia is trying to move in to the smart phone market at the low end with less-expensive, dual-core processors.

DARPA is putting mobile broadband hotspots in the battlefield. Neat if you are walking patrols in where-ever-stan. Note, you can use the same technology for aid workers moving into areas hit by natural disasters.

Most people who exercise are exercising way too much. 20 minutes, twice a week will do it.

The vast majority of Google+ users are men. The vast majority of Pinterest users are women. Now you know where to find the opposite sex.

Redefining success - iCloud has 100 million users. That is a third of the U.S. population. Twenty years ago, no one dreamed of having that many customers for anything.

Even the U.S. government, as backwards as it is in IT, has dropped the Blackberry.

There have been 15 major Federal anti-piracy laws passed in the last 30 years. And some people want more. Actually, this is pretty tame behavior for Congress. Just look at the 100s of gun laws.

President Obama wants to raise the Federal bribe, er, I mean tax credit, for buying an electric vehicle to $10,000. Your tax dollars at waste.

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Friday February 17, 2012

Travel day - no viewing

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Saturday February 18, 2012

Must be a slow day as people are discussing the new Windows 8 logo. It's a window, not a flag.

The next generation of Chromebooks are to be much faster at doing nothing but allowing you to go to the Internet.

Congress has decided to auction the white spaces to fund something or other. Congress has no trouble spending other people's money. You tax dollars at waste.

People are realizing that the U.S. is not a good place for Internet startups. Thanks to the government and it's anti-Internet-business practices. There go the jobs.

The Fair Labor Association has visited Apple's China factories and declared them much better than most Chinese factories.

Working on better solar cookers. To be practical, they need to collect heat during daylight hours and store it for later so people can cook the evening meal after the sun sets and the morning meal before the sun rises.

This is a good graph showing how fast the iPhone, iPad, and such have swamped the market much faster than the Mac.

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Sunday February 19, 2012

It seems that Charles Dickens liked to walk - sometimes 20 miles a day. I guess that is at least one thing the two of us share. As a reminder, I walked from Washington D.C. to New Orleans (1,100 miles).

Henry Miller on writer. Note his first item, it is just like the below item.

This productivity for writers works for me: focus on one task each day. Some people call this "batching." For example, write half a dozen blog posts one day. Whew. Rest. Now the next day write a short story start to finish. Whew. Rest. Now the next day...

An interview with author Paulo Coelho about writing.

29 little notes on writing and publishing. These are pretty good.

Here are some good writing prompts. I like them.

I like this: don't sell books, spread ideas.

Places where a freelance writer can find accountability, a.k.a., peer pressure.

Some reminders about quotation marks.

A tip to writers: VOLUME. Keep writing, keep sending things to people. Something I leared recently: if I send at least one short story to Smashwords every week, people buy short stories. When I sit and wait for purchases from the 60+ stories I have up, no sales. Keep writing, keep sending things to people.

And then you rest at least one day a week.

David Ogilvy on How to Write. Brevity and clarity.

Twenty common grammar mistakes.

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