Summary of this week:

Netflix pays Comcast to carries it traffic - Net Neutrality dead (again)?
The Samsung Galaxy S5 is here
Mountain View is becoming a Google company town
Raspberry Pi is two years old
Apple sold 10million Apple TV units in 2013

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

Monday February 24, 2014

Netflix will pay Comcast to speed its packets through to customers. The concept of net neutrality hiccups as everyone tries to understand what this means. Commentary on this. It doesn't look good for the consumer. And more commentary. This is catching my attention as one of my sons works for Cogent Communications, and much of the commentary today says that Cogent is doomed by this.

It appears that Samsung pays for favorable news covereage while does not.

Sony claims that its new smartphone has the world's best mobile camera.

Putting more acronyms onto a single processor — Qualcomm introduces a 64-bit, 8-core, processor with LTE built in.

WhatsApp has 465million users. Yes, that is more than the population of the U.S. The definition of sucess has changed.

Trying to revive or create the pico projector market, TI shrinks its processor a bit more. I thought the pico projector would have been common place by now, but it has yet to catch on. To date, they have been too big for consumers, and that is where the money is.

MediaTek releases a lower-priced 64-bit processor to run lower-priced smartphones.

SanDisk releases a 128GigaByte MicroSD card. Put 24 hours of HD video on it.

There is a lot of fraud in India swindling those who want to come to the U.S. to work.

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Tuesday February 25, 2014

More research into the idea of turning common physical movements into electrical energy. Perhaps one day something will come of this.

Hiding cell phone towers in street light poles.

Harold Ramis dies at 69. I went to his movies and laughed. There is something commendable about those people who can do this for us.

Kids in Oklahoma must master personal finance before graduating hight school. I think that is a good idea.

The world has gone mobile, so it's not a surprise that malware writers have as well.

It only took ten years for phone memory to leap from 128MegaBytes to 128GigaBytes - that is 1,000x.

Even with bad networks and cheap phones, Facebook is pushing into the mobiel market in developing countries.

Americans work harder and vacation less than everyone else in the world. Is this the reason for our sucess or the explanation for some failure in quality of life?

The Samsung Galaxy S5 is here.

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Wednesday February 26, 2014

Broadcomm shows a new processor that brings 5G WiFi.

This man escaped North Korea, and he sends in supplies and gifts to the PRK subjects via baloon.

Apple releases OS X Mavericks 10.9.2.

The $25 Mozilla Firefox OS smartphone. I won't buy one, but I am not trying to just make it in India or other places where iPhones and such are used only by the gods.

The smartwatch is still a watch, and the watch is still a piece of jewelry, not a timepiece.

A new ARM microcontroller that fits inside the dimple of a golf ball. The applications are endless.

A phone network in a backpack can return telecommunications after a disaster. Great application.

Sometimes, still, government agencies do things that are so stupid that even I am surprised. The Chicago Police Departments has a secret watch list created by a secret computer program that contains names of future criminals. The CPD visits them to warn them. Again, even I am surprised by the stupidity.

The LibraryBox 2 project.

The world's first "made for iPhone" hearing aid.

More evidence that if you live in San Franciso and you don't like those new tech folks, you just beat them up.

The future of reporting the news.

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Thursday February 27, 2014

ShareLaTex: another online LaTex system that allows document sharing and editing. In January I found writelatex.com.

TripAdvisor continues to grow. Some of the most-read things I have written are TripAdvisor posts. People simply want to know if that motel on the edge of town is a decent place or not.

Barnes and Noble hasn't given up on the eReader market yet with a new nook coming.

Why tech companies need to hire story tellers and historians.

TechCrunch experiments with crowdfunding journalism. If you readers put up enough money, we will send someone to X to report on Y.

Mountain View, California is becoming a Google company town.

A group claims that the space elevator is feasible.

More on the angst of the lack of women in computing and programming. The field is hurt by those who block women from entering and thriving.

“Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice." — Elizabeth Mattijsen

How modern communications helped people in the Ukraine change their government.

Google will continue to push the modular smartphone concept with conferences this year.

code.org is using the demise of Flappy Bird as an example of programming education.

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Friday February 28, 2014

Research shows that playing Tetris can curb appetites.

This is great news (not!): researchers create a virus that travels through WiFi networks like an airborne virus.

Google continues to move into education with Oppia.

Hackers do one thing really well: discover. That is a trait that we should probably teach in school.

Prezi and Adobe join the ConnectED initiative. This is what a President should be doing: use celebrity to garner community efforts. At least our President has figured this out. It took five years, but late is better than never.

We are learning how bad the Mr. Gox-BitCoin fiasco really is. It is really bad.

Good news: in California you can now read a smartphone map in your car without going to jail.

Google works on the San Francisco image by donating $6.8million to kids to ride public transit.

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Saturday March 1, 2014

An engineering exploits Google Maps to listen to citizen calls to the FBI. We all love having information on the Internet like maps and photos of streets and buildings and phone numbers. Such information, however, allows those with evil intentions to bring havoc and harm. A simple hack of a Google site allowed this man to sit in the middle of phone conversations as a demonstration. I recall over 30 years ago being in airports around the world and reading the big signs: no photography. Those signs had a purpose.

A look at Intel's 480GigaByte solid state disk.

Google admits that Android is ripe for hacking while Apple says iOS is really secure.

The Raspberry Pi is two years old and is looking to add an open graphics driver. This little, inexpensive device is one of the world's greatest education successes. That is why it is on the cover of Time magazine and its creators are Men of the Year. Oh wait, that last part about Time magazine isn't true, so I have to wonder what the folks at Time are doing.

The mysterious Google barge leaves San Francisco for Stockton. They didn't have the right building permit, and it is now fashionable in San Francisco to bash Google at every opportunity.

Nissan improves the rearview mirror with cameras and software.

The world's longest airship is sort of a blimp, but it can fly at 100mph and stay aloft for three weeks.

This simple yet brilliant water filter from MIT uses a stick.

Microsoft migh release a no-cost version of Windows 8.1.

Apple sold 10million Apple TV units in 2013. Not bad for a hobby.

IBM lays off a quarter of its hardware division. Those jobs will never come back.

Cities are trying to reduce ride sharing. I understand that taxi companies hate ride sharing, but I don't understand how local governments hate it when fewer vehicles are on the road. Does the big taxi lobby own local governments?

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Sunday March 2, 2014

It is Sunday, so most of the notes are about writing with a few technology notes tossed in.

Raspberry Pi has shipped 2.5million units in two years. They wanted to maybe ship a couple thousand when they started.

A Kickstarter project to build electric motors to clip on bicycles. Good idea.

A look at how ICANN secures the foundation of the Internet.

A look at the steady Tim Cook and his work at Apple. Steady people of the world applaud.

Open source software is running telecommunications in poor countries.

The growing mountain of student debt in the U.S. Debt robs you of choice, and the economy suffers because of it.

Another report on high profits and low wages. What these reports seem to ignore is that unemployment is very high. That means people are willing to work for lower wages just to have a job, any job. Ask me. I am unemployed and I am willing to work for much less than than a year ago.

Writing on a train and train writing residencies. Who knew such existed? I wonder if United Airlines would let me sit on an around-the-world flight at no cost so I could write about it?

Freelance workers need to know and regularly meet with other freelance workers.

It can be difficult to separate home problems from work problems when you work from home.

One of the challenges of freelance work is that you don't have an organization to back up. You can't complete the sentence, Dwayne Phillips of fill-in-the-blank. I encountered this when I left graduate school and was trying to publish in academic journals. I was not associated with a university; I was just me and, as just me, no one would listen to me or read anything I wrote.

Another online LaTex site that allows sharing of documents.

Some tools to help a writer stay focused.

Often, the most difficult task is to do nothing.

Creating and writing are hard.

Test your work by giving it to a teenager.

Good editing tips: read it aloud. That is perhaps the single best piece of editing advice I know. Where do you trip while reading? Where do you have to read it twice?

A nice chart on the elements of a story.

Fiction is not like real life—that is why we read fiction.

How to sell the book you have written. There is a key point here: write the book first.

Notes from JK Rowling about writing and living in poverty.

Do freelancers or telecommuters really work in their pajamas? No, they don't. There are exceptions, but ...

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