Items I happen to view each day. Science, Technology, Management, Culture, and Writing

    This is my day book for this week. It is a log of things I see on the Internet.

This week: 3-9 January, 2022

Summary of this week:

• Apple reaches $3 Trillion in value
• CES happens with 1/2 attendance but plenty of announcements
• China's governors fall off the deep end and are killing their tech industry
• 5G deployment slowed by FAA
• We have a good old fashioned vaccine for the virus

Monday 3 January 2022

The Consumer Electronics Show is this week. Expect many new product announcements.

This is the first Monday after New Year's Day. In non-panic times (er, I mean pandemic) it was the day that the earth resumed spinning on its axis. We shall see this year.

In China, the rulers have ruled that video games are out. 14,000 video game companies are out of business.

Meanwhile in America, Twitter (our new arbiter of truth) bans a member of Congress for disagreeing with a popular theory.

2021 was yet another record financial year for Apple. Strong rumors of new products in 2022.

All those new chip factories coming to America will require people to work in them. Well-paying jobs for those areas and those willing to relocate and work.

Tips on decorating the home office. Remove all clutter. Hire a professional photograph and model to make images of it to make your co-workers jealous.

Someone at Samsung has a brilliant idea. The Frame TV. When not watching shows, you have a work of art displayed in a fitting frame.

I like this post from Godin on "hobbies" and "generative contributions."

Telecommuting, the "Zoom Towns," and rising cost of homes. Our kids can't live here!

A few dozen writing tips from Stephen King. I really like this one, "Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around."

Here are four templates for different types of articles.

Some thoughts on "good" writing.

I like this post on journal writing. Writing in a journal is one of the few practices I recommend for everyone.

Formatting books and manuscripts and all that. It is harder than you might think.

Tuesday 4 January 2022

Strange tale. A Russian IT expert went to Switzerland. Big mistake. He was arrested and extradited to the US. Big problem for him and the Russian governors. He may reveal "all the secrets" of the Russian operations in the 2016 election. Lying and double lying to follow real soon now.

The access to technology by the disabled has not improved much. The tech is available, but companies are not building the systems.

Apple reaches $3Trillion (with a Tr) in value on the stock market. This is a first.

Cell telephone providers give in to pressure from our FAA to slow their deployment of 5G.

LG shows new REALLY BIG OLED TVs. 90+ inches. Something for the ... well I don't have a room in my house big enough for one of these.

An era ends, again. Netflix is about to be surpassed by YouTube in streaming streams that we stream.

This is an excellent example of bad data leading to bad conclusions and also of using old terms for new items. The reaction to the Wuhan virus will be studied for decades as it provides excellent material for bad practices in systems science.

Our Secretary of Defense has tested positive for a variant of the Wuhan virus.

Excellent cartoon summarizes one affect of the reaction of politicians to the Wuhan Virus.

Wednesday 5 January 2022

Even in its diminished form, CES is upon us with many product announcements.

(MUCH) Better late than never: Baylor College of Medicine develops a COVID vaccine using traditional methods (not mRNA). They give the formula to the world free. No charge. Production begins. The is GREAT NEWS!

Maybe this will work: a nasal spray that prevents dementia. We can hope for this.

TCL updates its wearable second display. "Connect" to your laptop or mobile and see more screen space in your eye glasses.

AMD shows a new line of processors for laptops. They are 6nm process.

Nvidia shows several new lines of graphics cards. Here come better, faster, cheaper portable gaming machines.

Intel shows 30 new processors for the desktop and laptop. This is the 12th generation.

Intel claims that their new processor is faster than Apple's and is the fastest processor for laptops ever from anyone.

Intel and Qualcomm are working together on the future of AR glasses.

Samsung shows a smart home controller. It is only available in South Korea.

Humans continue to beat AI in predicting the weather.

Electric vehicles collide with reality on a cold day on I-95. They are not good in the winter.

We set some kind of record for quitting our jobs in November.

Thursday 6 January 2022

BMW shows a car that changes its paint color at the push of a button. At this time, it is just a stunt. Black, white, and gray only, and not for sale.

ASUS shows a tablet with a 17" screen that folds in half.

Google is making it easier to connect Android devices to all other devices wirelessly.

The Brave browser is growing its group of users. It has doubled users five years in a row and now has 50million daily active users. The definition of success has changed.

It seems that we are now all playing wordle. At least it is a language puzzle.

Beware of the cameras as they are everywhere. And we have another case of facial recognition catching criminals.

Let's put this one under the hashtag what-do-they-think-they-are-doing. The governors of China are killing their own tech industry.

The definition of success keeps changes. Amazon has now sold 150million Fire TV gadgets.

Friday 7 January 2022

You may have heard of the trouble in Kazakhstan. It has also closed the #2 crypto mining country in the world. $$$

LinkedIn moves into hosting live events.

Amazon shows its Sidewalk Bridge Pro by Ring (what a name?) to extend radio networks to farms and factories and the Internet of Things.

GameStop tries to enter the NFT and crypto currency market.

We go nuts over the new Chevy electric vehicles. Those folks haven't heard about the I-95 winter traffic jam and how electric vehicle simply ran out of juice.

Law enforcement is using AI tools to create fake persons on social media. Somewhere out there is a line that crosses into the 4th Amendment to the Constitution.

Stars may form 10x faster than previously thought. Hmmmm, perhaps the "old earth" theory falls apart?

Perhaps this will become something. If so, it will speed typing entry by orders of magnitude.

The pendulum swings back as top processor designers return to Intel from Apple.

Here we go again: conferences and conventions are switching back to online only.

"Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed a mathematical model to understand why popular baby names keep on changing." How about, "Researchers at CMU have too much time on their hands."

Saturday 8 January 2022

Good information here for programmers and others who build systems. Brevity and clarity in documentation.

The prolonged year of the virus continues to be very rewarding for tech companies as Samsung expects a big jump in its coming quarterly financial report.

How Meta (Facebook) is building a massive data center in Holland.

HP shows its Elite Dragonfly G3 (what a name). Laptop computers are coming with better microphones, speakers, and cameras as well as software to make those ZoomTeams meetings look and sound better.

Google is behind work in tiny radar systems that can detect presence and motion with using microphones or cameras. This is good for privacy in some respects. It has not been good for profits, yet.

Here is one summary of last week's Consumer Electronics Show.

The World Health Organization says that the latest virus variant is not mild. It is destroying all of us (or maybe a tenth of 1% of us).

Early rumors about the 2022 upgrade to the Apple MacBook Air. Thinner, better display, and a new M2 processor.

Sunday 9 January 2022

For the second year in a row, TIOBE says that Python is the top programming language.

Our FAA lists 50 US airports which will ban 5G systems in their areas. Seems our FAA and our FCC need to sit and chat a while.

Ford "bans" resale of its new electric vehicles. Not sure you can do this legally.

Musings on the future applications of Ultra Wide Band (UWB) technologies.