Summary of this week:

Apple "Misunderstood" ad wins an Emmy
Microsoft is running away from win8 as fast as it can
HP shows its Chromebook killer at $200
Uber hires Obama campaign manager
Wal-Mart opens primary care units in rural stores
Wal-Mart cuts prices of iPhones again
SpaceX has a big flight test failure

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

Monday August 18, 2014

I guess today this needs some sort of official announcement, but citizens can video record public officials, paid by the public, in public locations, performing public duties. I don't understand the confusion on this item. Perhaps one day I shall.

In Chicago, our President's political hometown, private and public officials are indicted for payoffs that resulted in traffic camera sales.

A look back and forward to the Universal Serial Bus (USB). Somedays I long for the old serial interface with pins that I could meter and could make a null modem and...

Apple's Christmas "Misunderstood" ad won an Emmy. Good for them.

Microsoft, unable to run away from Win8 fast enough, will preview Win9 in the next 60 days.

A Win8.1 update brings the good old blue screen of death with it.

A look at how Amazon is making its own television series. I guess since this isn't for television, we'll have to find a good name for this form of recorded entertainment.

After a couple of better days in #Ferguson, the situation has become worse than ever. This is a great American tragedy where one of our government units appears to be the enemy of the citizens.

The right-to-be-forgotten continues to be the largest censorship campaign in a century.

The Washington Post has become one great big advertising machine for Amazon.

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Tuesday August 19, 2014

I love the opening phrase of this post's title, "Here's a Terrible Idea." That is the stuff of fiction. Just a small reminder that self-driving cars are programmable devices and the program can be adjusted for different criteria.

Home Depot wants to be in the smart home market. I wish they have security built in from the start.

Someone explains Snapchat to those old enough to be happily ignorant of it.

The Chinese government hacks US hospitals and steals information on 4.5million patients.

Google went public ten years ago; things have gone well for them since.

Steve Ballmer turns cheerleader for the LA Clippers. The millionaire players aren't sure what to make of it.

A look at Time and the disgraceful fall of the magazine industry.

The city of Munich may leave Linux and go back to Microsoft.

Check out this one: making the iPad work more like a typewriting.

What it was like to boot a pdp-11 in the old days when men were...well a bunch of cliches.

Algorithmia: trying to link algorithms from researchers to coders in the rest of the world.

The HP Stream 14: $200 laptop that runs MS Windows. This is a Chromebook competitor that runs an OS and apps.

Google offers a new service to help parents signup their kids for Google accounts.

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Wednesday August 20, 2014

A study by our Federal government says, the world would be a better place if all vehicle on the road communicated with one another. Gosh, who would have guessed such a thing? I trust we didn't spend more than $1Billion on the study.

In Washington, if you can't beat them, hire them. Uber hires Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. They should be treated much better now. Corruption? Naw.

The price of Apple stock hits an all-time high.

The ISO C++14 standard is finished.

New York City pays a man for an unlawful arrest when he photographed publicly paid public official performing public duties in public. Perhaps one day public officials will understand how all this in a country where public officials are limited in their authority by that piece of paper called the Constitution.

Thoughts on the race to zero in cloud storage. How does $1/TeraByte sound?

Delaware is the first state to guarantee heirs access to all digital accounts of the deceased.

Google made 890 changes to its search software last year alone. They have been making hundreds of changes a year for several years, but they are accelerating the change.

I tried Tom Hanks' Hanx Writer yesterday. It is fun. One annoyance is that when you copy all to paste somewhere else you only copy the current page instead of all your text.

Wal-Mart opens primary health care clinics in some rural stores. They have "nurse practitioners and physician assistants, who are fully qualified to diagnose illnesses and write prescriptions."

Comcast: hated by consumers, but the consumers keep sending in the money.

Researchers show that it is trivial to hack into the traffic lights.

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Thursday August 21, 2014

Wal-Mart cuts its prices on the iPhones again.

Stretches (yoga) that relieve the pains of a desk job.

Parallels 10 is here. Are there people who want to run Windows 8 on their Mac?

Apple opens a retail store in Dubai. It is the largest Apple store in the world.

UPS stores are hit with malware that is stealing credit card information.

Amazon continues working on its drone delivery system and is hiring notable expertise.

Birds are being zapped to death at California's solar thermal power plant. What do we want? Birds or energy?

NASA wastes money building an electric-powered vertical takeoff craft.

The US Digital Service is dressing down daily. That doesn't address the impossibility of their job.

The ever-growing performance and ever-falling price of processors will soon bring us $35 tablet computers.

Those body scanners that were pulled from airports are now used in courthouses and they still don't detect anything.

In Asia, tablets are getting cell phones inside them. I don't know why this wasn't always the case. I don't know why laptop computers aren't shipped with cell phones inside them.

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Friday August 22, 2014

Driving all day, so no Internet viewing.

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Saturday August 23, 2014

A SpaceX test flight failed and exploded itself. No injuries.

A study of which intern "job" actually result in real jobs.

A look at the very high salaries in Silicon Valley. This doesn't consider the very, very high cost of living there.

1970s gadgets. I owned an original Walkman and one of those Epson dot matrix printers.

Researchers find a single method of hacking into just about any laptop, tablet, or smartphone. It seems the apps don't behave as they should, and sloppy coding leaves all the operating systems vulnerable.

More on the terrible insecurity of the Internet of Things.

If you have the money to attend college in Europe, here is a bests list.

America's CTO is resigning to move back to California. One of the greatest inhibitors to having talented people in our Federal government is the location: the mid-Atlantic, the District of Columbia, and the Virginia and Maryland suburbs. They are nice places to live, but not to everyone's liking. Given today's telecommunications, distributing government facilities throughout the country should happen.

This is a big story of rural America: Family Dollar and Dollar General are not merging or taking over one another.

Our National Park Service bans radio controlled "drones" over the Appalachian Trail.

Here is a photo of Pandora's employees. Note that Pandora hires far more women than all the other "tech" companies.

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Sunday August 24, 2014

There is a trend in the return of delivery services.

The 25 most popular mobile apps in the US. Facebook is #1. This report shows app use by age group.

Wishing for a future where government will operate like Amazon. Keep wishing.

Microsoft has $90Billion in cash outside the US. It is there to avoid US taxes. It will stay there to avoid US taxes. It will not be used to create US jobs for tax-paying US citizens. Don't we have a wonderful US corporate tax system? (not)

Many writers prefer to stay at home and write. Still, there is a networking aspect to being a writer.

Five characteristics of people who write books. Then again, there are book writers who don't have these characteristics.

Thoughts on editing very short stories.

When stuck writing, write giberish or "blah, blah, blah." Just the motion usually triggers something.

Some people worry that writing slow or fast determines the quality of their work. The quality of your work determines the quality of your work.

Seventeen grants for writers.

Create a biography of your characters. That is a lot of writing that the reader won't read, but it may help to write a cleaner story.

Writing tips from J.R.R. Tolkien. Relax folks. Given his often-tragic life, we should understand that we are just making up stories that we hope are entertaining to someone out there.

Some of the benefits from writing everyday.

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