Summary of this week:

The rumor of the day is that Apple is make an iOS wrist watch
And that rumor grows stronger every day
Home Depot replaces 10,000 Blackberry phones with iPhones
The battle in the smartphone market is for third place
Google will open its own retail stores this year

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

Monday February 11, 2012

Excellent gifs from Batman art. These are a bit creepy as well.

Established companies are using crowdfunding to raise money and test ideas.

A look at the big ad Google ran last night during the Grammy Awards.

This is an interesting look at technology adoption over the past several hundred years.

How two college students snuck into the Super Bowl. If you have little to lose, you try these things and usually succeed.

The hole in the ozone is shrinking. Now we can debate whether this is caused by internationl treaties or just because it is part of a cycle.

The rumor of the day is that Apple is building an iOS watch.

Some government agencies are moving to agile development in response to budget cuts. What I have seen is that government managers are saying, "we do agile development" while they do everything but agile development.

This is what a personal computer case should look like.

A web site that shows you what it is like to be color blind.

Yet another theory on how the mammals replaced the dinosaurs.

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Tuesday February 12, 2013

Home Depot is replacing 10,000 Blackberry phones with iPhones. Very bad news for Blackberry.

The FCC spent $10Million on a network security project, but all the money was wasted. It isn't often that we have a story that warrants both a "is everyone ready for national electronic health records" and "your tax dollars at waste," but this is one of them.

The government of Myanmar hacked gmail accounts of some of its subject journalists. Is everyone ready for, well, you know.

And a local emergency alert system was hacked in Great Falls, Montanna. Is everyone ready for the dead rising from the graves to eat you national electronic health records?

Google will pay Apple up to $1Billion to be the default search engine on iOS.

A look at the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2 - a Windows 8 tablet.

Here is the concept of flying underwater in this unusual suit. I suppose the fabric that stretches between your torso and your limbs will make you more bouyant. It looks like fun.

The President will issue an Executive Order concerning cybersecurity. This has got to be good (not). Congress has tried to pass legislation in this area, but every attempt has been met with opposition from the Internet community as those boring techies find all sorts of holes in the legislation. The executive order will have the same holes.

I like this idea of the unfolding apartment. Use the space wisely and for many different tasks.

How USB thumb drives are made.

College professors are rejecting technology in the classroom. There is of course good and bad to this story.

One of America's biggest charity givers is Facebook's Mark Zuckerburg.

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Wednesday February 13, 2013

The competition in the smartphone market is for third place, and no one is in the lead, yet.

An attempt to change the world of academic publishing. Best of luck there. The odds are against them, but it is worth the effort.

The rumors continue that Apple is building a wristwatch.

I trust Apple will remember the great Texas Instruments digital watch disaster. A watch is a piece of jewelry, not a time piece. As this post reminds us, a $10 Casio keeps better time than a Rolex.

Intel confirms the rumors that they are building an Internet TV service and hardware.

Google will pull in $5Billion in revenue from search on tablets in 2013 alone.

A&E, History, and Lifetime have updated their iPhone apps to include more shows.

If you can program in the COmmon Buisiness-Oriented Language, you may have a job for years to come. COBOL won't die, and its decades-old applications are still running and being maintained.

OpenOffice is being used at no charge by millions of people.

On the day of the State of the Union Address and Fat Tuesday, North Korea conducts another nuclear test.

Watch out for Valentine's Day scams.

This is oft forgotten - stretching may benefit you more than exercising.

Computers using artificial intelligence concepts are better at diagnosing patients than human doctors. We knew this in the 1980s and before that. The lawyers have kept these techniques out of practice.

Looking at the parts inside the Microsoft Surface Pro.

Amazon is now the most trusted company in the U.S.

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Thursday February 14, 2013

Happy Valentines Day in the U.S. My sweetheart, the former Miss Karen Bundy, has been my wife for 29+ years. Marrying her was the smartest thing I ever did.

Here is a good story that examplifies the problem of computer security. Microsoft just released a big security update that addresses about 60 flaws. Persons at Google found about half of those flaws and reported them to Microsoft.

Must see these photos of the sun taken by a guy in his backyard with a home telescope and a cheap webcam.

Apple has cut the prices on some of its portable computers.

In New Zealand, the police will use iOS (iPhone and iPad) instead of Android - 10,000 units.

HP will re-enter the tablet market - this time using Android.

I like this story. An entrepreneur has bought a house in Kansas City on the Google Fibre network. He won't live in it. Instead, he will let people trying to start businesses live and work in it at no charge.

At last, a home security system that doesn't look like a home security system.

It seems that researchers at USC have made progress with nano technology and batteries. Maybe one day some of this will become real, i.e., you can buy it a Wal Mart.

An improvement in mobile hot spots for Android devices (only Android).

Farmers in a remote British village are building their own fiber network. They need money to finish it.

The President's executive order on cyber expands the definition of critical infrastructure, and that expands what the Feds can regulate.

MTV moves into the tablet business - calls them "Fablets" and the hardware has a cell phone inside.

Every employee at LinkedIn just received an iPad.
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Friday February 15, 2013

Staples will now start selling Apple products. I guess Home Depot is next on the list?

The source code for the 1990 Adobe Photoshop 1.0 has been released. There is much in there that would be good reading for students of image processing. Of course there are millions of lines of image processing code out there already for reading and use.

Apple is not the only one with complaints about working conditions. Amazon is to investigate complaint about conditions at a warehouse in Germany.

Microsoft would probably earn a $couple-billion with Office for iOS, but they haven't done it yet.

Always looking for ways to collect and spend other persons' money, Congress is looking at ways to make it easier for states to collect sales tax on Internet purchases.

The Large Haldron Collider is closing for repairs for the next two years.

Here is a little perspective to remind Americans how rich we are.

Here is a good tip: buy MS Office 365 not Office 2013.

Warren Buffet becomes the ketchup king as he buys Heinz.

There seems to be discussions about using drones in the U.S. against citizens. See here and here. Let's consider this a moment. The U.S. Constitution in a little thing known as The Bill of Rights says that the Creator endowed every person with the right to privacy and the governments in the U.S. cannot infringe on the Creator-given right. Do we need new laws to say that again? Perhaps so.

Logitech introduces an Enterprise-quality webcam for work.

See here for the lowest prices on the retina-screen Apple portable computers.

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Saturday February 16, 2013

George Will has an excellent editorial on that annual silly exercise called the State of the Union address.

These researchers are trying for an almost self-driving car for only $150 extra. An excellent goal.

This post asks a good question: why do so many cars in Russia have dashboard cameras?

And here is an answer: the cameras capture what happens in an auto accident so you have proof that it was the other guy's fault.

This is a clever hack: Use a Game Boy case to hold your Raspberry Pi.

Some tips on writing with the fear of writing.

Haul in some SleepBox modules and you have a hotel or a refugee center.

This college freshman scooped everyone when it came to Apple's latest iPad release.

California has spent $135Million on a $208Million DMV IT overhaul. They cancelled the project. Your tax dollars at waste.

Google will open its own retail stores by the end of the year. What will they sell? They give everything away.

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Sunday February 17, 2013

Some Internet providers do not provide the speeds they promise. Verizon and ViaSat come closest to meeting their promised data rates.

Pinterest is competing with Twitter to be the #2 social network on the Internet. Both are far distant from Facebook with their use combined still a distant second.

The two things you need to do to be a writer: (1) write a story and (2) share it.

Writing and being distracted by other worthwhile pursuits.

As writers, we can think too much about the number of words in a piece.

Thoughts on writing more. Is writing one book per year a lot of writing? How about four books a year? How about nine books a year? Some people do these things.

Add a few moments of quiet to your day - every day.

And take breaks. Relaxation helps writing a good deal.

A few ways to attend a writer’s conference for less than full price.

The many uses of Google Drive for freelancers and writers.

An excellent diagram of how the State of Union address is becoming less literate year by year.

If you write through an editor, this will happen to you at least once: the editor will change everything you wrote. How do you react? If nothing else, always try to learn.

Thoughts on being a prolific writer. Excellent examples of picking beans and raising hogs and how that relates to writing. Ignore the pain. Keep at it. Focus. Don’t stand around talking. WRITE!

A fascinating concept: redraw the boundaries of the 50 states so that the population of each is about equal.

Two letters to help you write faster: ”TK” means “to come.” When drafting, write words. If stuck looking for just the write word or just the correct object name or whatever that doesn’t come to mind, type TK and go on. You can come back later when you find the technical term for that part of the gun where the bullet exits (muzzle).

Never delete your writing. In the day of low-cost, mass storage of writing, copy your writing to something else before heavily editing what you are writing now. In the words I learned from Jerry Weinberg: put away instead of throw away. Notice in my advice, I write “Never.” This is one of the very few bits of advice that I recommend universally.

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