Dwayne Phillips ' Day Book

Items I happen to view each day. Science, Techonology, Management, Culture, and of course Writing

This is my day book for this week. I have modeled this after science fiction and computer writer Jerry Pournelle's view, or as he calls it, his Day Book. I encourage you to see Jerry Pournelle's site and subscribe to his services.

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This week: December July 28-August 3, 2014

Summary of this week:

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

Monday July 28, 2014

The emergence of the app that runs on all platforms, especially on the presumed-dead desktop computer.

Several of the most-edited Wikipedia pages concern religion.

There is some hope that NSA reform will happen real soon now. (Did I hedge that enough?)

Researchers at Stanford may have a breakthrough in lithium-ion batteries. Perhaps one day something will come of this.

Here is an excellent short list of Google search tips.

A tutorial on the promise of 5G. Speed is not the most important thing.

Samsung to build a research center in Silicon Valley and attempt to hire everyone.

Amazon Web Services had a mildly poor financial quarter.

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Tuesday July 29, 2014

The USMC is getting a self-driving or self-following vehicle to carry supplies.

Narcotics may be fueling all those 48-hour work sessions in Silicon Valley. Few want to admit it, but the intellectuals are using performance enhancing drugs just like the professional athletes.

Stowe Boyd on Workspace as a Service.

Apple updates the processors and memory in its MacBook Pro portable computer line. 

If the iPhone were a company, it would be as big as McDonald's and Coke combined. That is an amazing fact.

An online dating site experimented on its users without their knowledge. This is also known as lying, and people who lie are known as liars.

The Wintel team releases a $300 single-board computer. It is sort of a Raspberry Pi competitor.

The homemade radios that are bringing news into North Korea.

Chattanooga has the fastest broadband speeds in America due to a broadband over power line network. They could extend this to the rest of the state, but law prohibits that. What was that last sentence?

A book of tweets from writers who are tweeting while writing books.

NVIDIA discovers how to stack low-res display panels to make very high-res displays.

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Wednesday July 30, 2014

Google continues to separate Docs and such from Drive on the Internet.

Ford Motor Company will issue 6,000 iPhones to its employees.

It seems that the Chinese government hacked the Israeli government's Iron Dome missile defense system. I am surprised to see the Israelis compromised. I await the Israeli counter attack. It is coming.

Hoboken, New Jersey cancels its school laptop computer program. The students were learning much, but not what the adults wanted them to learn. Such is education and learning.

The UK will allow driverless cars on public roads in January of 2015.

Re-thinking the bicycle.

Martha Stewart uses a drone to manage her farm. Farmers are the biggest group of potential users of domestic drones.

Good intentions, silly law: our House passed a law require all government websites to be secure. Well, if they say so, then it must be so. Surely someone in the House can see the silliness of this?

The big Internet companies like the Senate's NSA reform bill. There is a long way to go before it becomes law.

Something for the home from LG: a $117,000 105-inch 5K televisor.

This is a clever website for musicians and composers: write music in pencil, it transforms that to print.

Considering most if not all of the costs of government surveillance of citizens via companies.

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Thursday July 31, 2014

It seems that Apple isn't revolutionizing TV this year. Cable companies won't sign on.

A little portable battery that snaps around your existing iPhone charger.

A look at how Google is doing medical research.

85% of recent smartphones sold run Android. It is the world's most popular computing platform.

Remember this name: Movidius. They make they vision processor for Google's experiments with Tango.

Sales of tablet computers at Best Buy have crashed.

Nine wearable computers you can buy now. They don't have any hearing iads in the list. Hearing aids are the most powerful and most used wearable computer in the world.

After all these centuries, we decide that the moon is not round. Remote sensing is quite difficult, yet people claim to measure the temperature of the earth to a tenth of a degree three hundred years in the past.

The Lytro Illum is the camera of the future(?).

A look at the white hat hackers at Citizen Lab.

Our Veteran's Administration has been running scheduling software installed in 1985. Only in government would such stupidity exist.

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Friday August 1, 2014

Teaching the Touchscreen generation (my grandkids) to program with ScratchJr.

Preventing carpal tunnel syndrome in writers. This post claims that wrist braces are necessary. I doubt that as I have neither the braces nor the syndrome.

Apple has built a content delivery network that is much bigger than it needs hinting at great expansion.

The Google barge has been dismantled—a reminder that not all Google experiments lead to success.

LinkedIn has a better-than-expected financial quarter.

Our Dir of CIA reverses past statements and admits that the CIA spied on our Senate. Someone must go to jail over this. This is a terrible ocassion for our country. More on this horrible story.

Award-winning photos taken with the Raspberry Pi and its descendants. I repeat calls for a Nobel Prize for the creators of the Pi.

A US Judge believes the US to have authority over servers that are in other countries. Sometimes I wonder about some people.

HP produces a high-priced, style smartwatch. They may have it right as watches are jewelry, not medical monitoring or computing devices.

Microsoft's Surface Pro 3 with new processors now ready to not be bought by anyone.

Health Care dot Gov cost American taxpayers $840million. This is a new monument to some kind or other of stupidity.

Our Department of Agriculture is still trying (in vain) to bring broadband access to rural America.

Once again, Americans can legally unluck their phones—any phones.

This happens in all acquisitions: Apple lays off lots of Beats employees. And is always hurts people.

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Saturday August 2, 2014

Shouts of glee can be heard worldwide: Flappy Birds is back.

Twitter is testing a feature that will explain the hashtags people are using.

Somehow HP overcharged the Post Office $32million. The flip side is the USPS overpaid $32million.

We now have 43Tera Bytes Per Second over a single optical fibre.

NASA has built a game-changing engine for space travel. At least they say they have. Independent verification is lacking.

Hydropower has been overcome in the US. We outlawed it because we like fish more than electricity or at least some of us do.

A programmer? Learn JavaScript.

Football players will wear RFID tags so we can measure just about everything they do in a game.

How can you spend $40million writing a report on a project that cost a tenth of that? Ask the CIA and the Senate to do it, that is how.

The Great War began 100 years ago today. Have we learned much since then?

The HP SlateBook 14, running Android, is now shipping.

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Sunday August 3, 2014

ooops, thousands of email addresses and passwords for Mozilla developers were exposed.

Chinese apps are moving international and bringing their government policies of censorship and surveillance with them.

For the appropriate generation, the history of how the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles appeared.

Windows XP still has a 25% market share. Windows 8 is, well, just call it Vista 2.0.

It appears that the Internet of Things is full of security holes.

For writers, direct publishing may not be enough as direct marketing may be what we need.

Reverse publishing techniques for writers.

Be specific and be a better writer. The advice I heard every single day of class as a freshman in English composition was "be precise, concrete, and specific." That was good advice.

Yes, writers can learn by reading classic novels.

"Imagining is the job of the fiction writer." Well said, enough said.

Thoughts on training yourself to find the time to write.

One person's experience with meeting famous writers. Those writers seem to be nice people.

The task of maintaining focus while writing. I seem to be able to focus well. I suppose that is an odd attribute.

Before a major writing project, find the premise.

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