Summary of this week:

The country slowly recovers from a long 4th of July weekend
The FingerReader camera reads text aloud to the blind
Samsung factory in Brazil robber of $36million in goods
Apple to build more solar farms in North Carolina
The Chinese hack into OPM
Microsoft's Satya Nadella challenges employees
LeBron James returns to Ohio

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

Monday July 7, 2014

This could change everything: the Brainwriter—an open source device that reads brainwaves and enables the crippled. This is what we should be doing in technology.

The computing and communications worlds are becoming more connected, but the Google and Apple systems are, to date, incompatible.

LG releases its 10" G Pad tablet.

The government to the rescue. The TSA wants to see your smartphone turned on, so be sure to charge the batteries before going to the airport.

Mercedes takes a step towards autonomous trucks with a model that lets drivers work while on the highway. Work? What kind of work?

A look back at the last ten years in personal computing hardware.

A cross between wolves and coyotes is preying upon the US East coast.

People are still raving about the UAV with a GoPro camera that flew inside a fireworkds display.

Maybe coming soon to your local area: Google Shopping Express. Order from a local store and Google delivers it to your home.

15 cities that are driving the future of the US economy. They are in the south and the west.

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Tuesday July 8, 2014

The best tech news of the day: the FingerReader is a camera a blind person wears on their finger that reads printed text to them. This is what we should be doing in technology.

InBox: a new email application of sorts that is to be the next generation of the old email.

Python is now the most popular programming language for introductory computer science classes.

John Arrillaga Sr. turned Santa Clara Valley farms into Silicon Valley office buildings. I remember some of those farms.

Google is buying real estate in Silicon Valley—lots of it.

News from Brazil that is not about the World Cup: a Samsung factory is robbed of $36million in phones and tablets.

How not to attract women into tech fields.

Ghostery shows you how web sites are spying on you.

Yet another new programming language that may change everything or fade into that room full of programming languages.

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Wednesday July 9, 2014

Apple buys more land and builds more solar farms in North Carolina (right across the Virginia border). I'm still upset that Virginia, where I live, allowed all this money and construction to go to NC.

The Android data wipe tool doesn't really wipe the data, ooops.

A number of tech companies create the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC).

The Chinese hack into several American think tanks.

There appears to be a building demand for new PCs brought on by the Windows 8 fiasco. Companies waited for over a year to replace aging computers because they weren't about to jump into Windows 8 and all those rectangles on the screen. They stayed with Windows 7. Now, just maybe, Microsoft is about to build Windows 9 with a familiar "this is not a tablet" interface, at least people are hoping for that.

Google's idealist view of part-time workers. As the post says, if you have a half-time job, your landlord isn't going to cut your rent in half.

MusicVault releases 12,000 rock music videos to YouTube. Their channel is here.

People are increasingly looking to the Internet for medical information before seeing a doctor.

Why are manhole covers round and other stupid questions some companies ask potential employees. I have always thought that such puzzles and clever trick questions were stupid. By the way, manhole covers are round because manholes are round. That, however, is not the "correct" answer. The correct is answer is that you cannot turn a round hole cover in such a way that it will fall into the hole. You can do that with a square or rectangular cover.

Yet again, Google lowers the price of cloud storage.

Tech firms are recruiting kids in high school. I wish they are not taking advantage of eager teenagers. I think there are laws about these things.

Our government has been following some Americans based on their religion. This is terrible. It leads to mistrust of people in government and requires the government to hire more people in order to accomplish the same work. Terrible.

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Thursday July 10, 2014

The Chinese hacked into the Office of Personnel Management computers and got all kinds of information about current and former government employees. And some people still claim that Health Care dot Gov is secure. I don't understand those people.

Bell Labs pushes data across twisted pair copper wires at 10GigaBitsPerSecond. Don't expect that in your home anytime real soon now, but maybe the usual DSL data rates will increase.

Aereo continues to fight in court as a cable TV company or something like that.

Google, Canon and others are banding together to ward off patent trolls.

Researchers have found a way to make high-performance batteries from sand. Maybe one day this will come to something.

The future of wearable computers. Still, people ignore today's most popular wearable computer—the hearing aid.

Out with the Turing Test; in with the Lovelace Test.

The government is here to rescue us. Regulators close Lyft in New York City. Consumers lose. Next story of government rescue coming tomorrow.

Apple claims to be using more renewable energy than anyone else.

The lack of females employed in Silicon Valley is shown here. This is a result of a lack of women studying technology in college. That is a result of the lack of girls encouraged in math and science in high school and below. We can't change Silicon Valley without first changing other things. Someone has to start this.

Muuzi: a language translation service that operates using on text messages.

This story has been hanging around on the fringes for a few days now. Apple cuts the price of an iMac 20%, but cuts the performance 50%. If that is all you can afford, it is still a good deal.

Not all Kickstarter projects deliver after they are funded. That seems to be a great shock to many people. I guess I don't understand their surprise. All great ideas do not become reality. It has been that way for a few dozen centuries (at least).

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Friday July 11, 2014

Upon further review, two nearby, earth-like planets don't exist. Science can be a funny thing, especially when we take measurements from a long ways away in distance as well as in time, see, e.g. measuring the temperature of the earth to a tenth of a degree a thousand years ago.

Upon further review, our President pulls his own nominee for the USPTO.

Airborne surveillance of entire cities 24 hours a day. It will be here real soon now.

T aiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) is now shipping processors to Apple. Samsung is out.

Netflix, those guys who used to mail DVDs to people, receives 15 Emmy nominations for its original programs. What happened to those guys at CBS, NBC, et al?

Microsoft's Satya Nadella challenges employees.

Roku is coming to dominate the world of those little gadgets that you attach to your televisor.

Of the 100 people working on the District of Columbia healthcare site, only three were Americans. Are you kidding me? Tax-funded jobs going to non-US citizens. This is a travesty.

As the post says, expect to work while on your vacation. So? That is normal.

Amazon Web Services introduces Zocalo for storing and sharing documents.

Microsoft lowers the price of its Office 365 subscriptions.

Girl Geek Academy aims to bring women into the tech world. Here is there site. While it is admirable to offer such services to females, what about the males. Such efforts tend to assume that males have it made just the way things are now. Disciminating on gender to end gender discrimination is problematic.

Amazon wants permission to test its drones outside of current areas.

Cray Supercomputing lands a $174million contract with Sandia National Labs.

Acer improves the processing power of Chromebooks, but prices them outside what a Chrombook is supposed be.

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Saturday July 12, 2014

Apple spent $3billion with small business suppliers in the last year.

Government racing to the rescue again. The FCC approves a $2billion plan to bring WiFi to schools. Prediction: schools in rich neighborhoods will receive the bulk of the money. Those schools have the resources to apply for the Federal funds.

Apple starts a new blog where its engineers write about the Swift programming language.

Samsung missed another promised delivery date of its Tizen phone.

The unfortunate growth of government censorship of search engines happening in the US and Europe.

Big layoffs are predicted for Microsoft.

LeBron James is returning to Cleveland. Western civilization or something like it is safe again.

LG advances the state of the art in flexible displays.

Breach: a new, open-source web browser.

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Sunday July 13, 2014

With newer, less-powerful, and less-expensive processors, the Chromebooks could fall in price below $200.

Working through fear and writer's block.

“Expectations are resentments under construction.”

A handful of reasons to write something now. Good stuff.

"Tell me more about that." An excellent start.

Here are ways to earn money while travelling. These are real jobs with teaching being at the heart of many of them.

Some reasons why (just about) everyone should write a book.

One reason to write when you don't feel like writing: you are in a completely different mood. You will write completely different. Who knows what will happen.

One writer's biggest mistakes. Read them and learn.

Many writers have a special place they have built to go and write. I have been able to convince myself that I can write in just about any place. That has proven to be a good thing for me.

Of course I draw from my life when I write fiction. Sometimes I draw from the lives of others, but since my life is so familiar to me, the words seem to flow much easier.

Questions to ask yourself about your fictional characters. Then again, these are good questions to ask about any real person as well.

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