Summary of this week:

My wife and I celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary
Google may walk away from Android and to Chrome OS
BMW enters the electric car market
Intel launches the MinnowBoard (too expensive)
Black Hat is this week
DIRNSA speaks and is challenged at Black Hat

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

Monday July 29, 2013

Good thoughts about familiarity, comfort, and homeostatic systems like the human body and mind.

Growing thoughts that Google is about to walk away from Android and concentrate on Chrome OS.

This is clever and useful - how to make a USB cable that you can carry in your wallet.

Toshiba adds style to their lower-priced portable computers. Now if people would stop buying tablets and buy these instead.

Amazon promises the President that they will hire 7,000 new full-time employees.

Samsung is adding more different screen sizes to their tablet lineup.

Remember the name: Pegatron. It is a new Chinese Apple supplier, and it appears to be violating all labor policies.

White Hats at Defcon will present how to hack into automobiles. If Toyota and Ford cannot build secure systems, why do we think they government will have secure online health records?

Sony and Panasonic are developing an optical disc that stores 300GigaBytes. No, you won't put this in your tablet, but data centers will buy lots of these for long-term storage.

The rumors are growing for a lower-priced iPhone 5(c) - made of plastic.

MIT researchers build a "perfect" mirror. No, you don't need one for your bathroom, but for fibre optic communication and solar power, this is a big deal.

Why one writer stopped using the iPad and just uses his portable computer. The iPad is for consuming, not producing, and there still are people out here who produce content.

Google and Yahoo are both spending lots of money buying smaller companies.

The hardware revolution that the iPhone started.

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Tuesday July 30, 2013

Thirty years ago today I married Karen Ann Bundy - the smartest thing I ever did.

The USDA will hold hearings on rural broadband access. What happened to those Billion$ that were already spent? Where did they go? Your tax dollars at waste.

Eye-Fi improves its connectivity to iOS devices.

BMW shows its own electric car - the i3.

5G is coming to the wireless world. Who knows? It might work as planned.

Someone traced the money on the recently failed House vote on the NSA surveillance program. The results are not a surpise.

The tide has shifted in the security vs liberty question. More Americans want liberty (privacy in this survey).

Asus plans to enter the U.S. smartphone market in 2014 - good for consumers, more competition.

Considering the ease-to-hack of the global positioning system.

Why YouTube is suffering from not buffering. Odd, my oldest son raised this conversation last night. He recently started working at Cogent Communications: one of the big Internet backbone providers.

Even more rumors on the iPhone 5c (the c is for color - plastic color cases)

A look at Google's elite Gopher Team: they dig into code problems or something like that.

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Wednesday July 31, 2013

More on the subject of broadband access in rural America. Despite claims by ISPs, many lack access.

Danville, Kentucky, population 16,000, hosts little Centre College: the college just received a $250million gift.

Quip: a word processor built first for mobiles and then for the desktop.

Further reports indicate that Microsoft has only sold about 1.5million Surface tablets. The world is upside down. If you want to stand out in the Internet coffee shop and have people come up to you and ask about your mobile device, buy a Microsoft tablet.

Google Fiber bans attaching a "server" in your home. Not a good idea from Google.

Some good pictures of Android fragmentation.

A closer look at Google's Chromecast.

Intel launches the MinnowBoard - sort of like Raspberry Pi and BeagleBoard except that it costs $200! Way to costly!

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Thursday August 1, 2013

George Will has an excellent editorial on the demise of Detroit. The citizens voted themselves benefits from someone else's pocket until all the someone elses left town. Now they are stuck with the bill.

The Black Hat convention is this week, so we are learning how insecure many of our systems are. Is everyone ready for national electronic health records? I'll just write that question once today.

For example, there are "phoney" iPhone charging stations out there that have a back door into everything. Apple is working on the fix.

The DIRNSA addressed the Black Hat conferece and was heckled by the untrusting crowd. This is what happens when you sort of tell the truth on record to Congress. People sort of don't trust you anymore. It is a terrible thing when citizens don't trust people who work in government.

The Senate Judiciary Committee isn't happy with the NSA. They key is that the NSA is before the Judiciary committee, not the Intelligence committee. You don't want to go to the J.

A look at Motorola's X8 system of chips that powers several Droid platforms.

Google is trying to boost the idea of local news (from its Glass).

HP's Android PC is here.

Make calls from your Mac through your iPhone - also record them on your Mac.

A in-depth look at remote work (not necessarily telecommuting or working from home).

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Friday August 2, 2013

Perhaps in response to the Google Chromecast, Best Buy is giving away an Apple TV with purchase of portable computer.

Curiosity has been on Mars a year.

The smaller Android tablets are slowing gaining on the Apple iPad.

A movie pasted together from cuts from other movies. I wrote a short story about a writer who pasted cuts from books to write another book.

Russia has granted assylum to Ed Snowden.

DIRNSA asks hackers to help defend the country. Sigh. He is living in a time when "country" meant something that it no longer does. America, mostly the government school system, raised a generation that diminished the concept of country or nation. Instead, we live in a world of cities and cultures - not countries.

The number of cores in your processor isn't what is important. I agree. Battery life is important. Processors that can run climate simulations are not important.

A call to replace the family dinner with the family breakfast. There are some good points here.

Samsung may bring back the flip phone. Why not? You have twice the surface area in the same size package.

Must see video: this walking robot from Boston Dynamics - a little frightening.

Not a morning person? That is artificial. Go camping and the soon and moon will make you a morning person.

More not-so-good news from Black Hat: it is easy to hack into industrial systems. If it is connected to the Internet, you can hack it. Don't tell me about all the secure firewalls you have.

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Saturday August 3, 2013

The University of California system is moving towards open access to research results. Now many of us can afford to read what the results of taxpayer-funded research.

AOL has another round of layoffs.

One of the reasons Yahho is buying companies is that it is a quick way of hiring programmers.

Google boosted the economy by killing is free RSS Reader. The market for paid RSS is booming.

A map of the consistently poor counties in the U.S. Note the block of counties spanning Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Crowd-funding a (one-way) trip to one of Jupiter's moons.

Apple has an "iPad in Education" initiative. As part of it, they have a pre-teen special iTunes account.

Aargh, all these WiFi routers are full of security holes. Being lost in the crowd is the greatest protection.

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Sunday August 4, 2013

Yes, the webcam on your televisor could be watching you. If it is connected to the Internet, someone out there can hack into it and look at you.

This story is all over the Internet today, so it must be important: President Obama vetoes an ITC ban on Apple shipments. The U.S. President, or the head of state of any country, can veto an internation body's regulation? I guess I don't understand how any of this is supposed to work.

The saga between Apple and the Justice Department continues. There seems to be a feeling among some in government that when they find a company breaking the law that punishment should be the government running the company for a long period of time. What happened to make them pay a big fine so they won't do it again? See, for examples, the great anti-trust case against IBM that went no where and the great anti-trust case against Microsoft that went no where. The Justice Department moved so slowly and over reached so much that the cases became irrelevant.

A researcher creates a phoney water plant and catches Chinese hackers attacking it.

The world of disposable computers and surveillance.

Some thoughts on using ten minutes a day on Pinterest. Good idea.

"When I am writing, all is well." I agree 98.6%.

Thoughts on writing the memoir.

Dean Wesley Smith begins his year of blogging everyday about that day's writing. This guy is a go to be VERY late and rise VERY late. Oh well, in the tech modern world we all live in submarines anyways.

A few excellent books about writing.

And excellent advice from famous writers that may be completely wrong for you (or me).

Lessons from one writer writing for a blog. Sometimes you cannot wait for inspiration. True, put your body in a chair and your hands on the keyboard and start pressing keys.

One writer's experience with keeping a journal. Journaling is one of the very few techniques that I recommend for everyone.

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