Musings, Commentaries, Photos and Reviews

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Great stuff found on Google+ by my buddy. Worthy of a Re-Share:

We share a cell phone. It's dumb and has a keypad. You punch numbers into it and you can speak to people with no wires. That is pretty amazing if you think about it, but eventually I guess I will need to get a "smart" phone with apps and cool stuff. Friends and family will wait for hours to get the latest iPhone and now I know why:

Remember those SNL routines that went on forever? The ones that weren't funny? Lots of new features coming to Facebook. The timeline is interesting but I have no idea how much control you'll have over the information that is posted. It might be a wonderful boon for identity thieves. However the addition of Spotify for music is a boon for all music lovers. It now shows as an app for your "timeline" on the left side of your profile.

I want one! Of course the REAL one looks even better

It’s always sad to hear about an air disaster. One way to advance air safety is to review data recovered from the onboard flight and voice recorders. Unfortunately in this crash these devices may never be recovered. I was wondering if anyone has considered uploading a stream of data of each flight to a terrestrial server? Storage and bandwidth are cheap these days and current speeds should be sufficient to move significant data.  The idea would be to get a recording of each flight for analysis.  The data could even be analyzed for fuel efficiency and predicting component failure. My model is some of the more sophisticated servers that keep data of disk errors, temperature spikes and CPU utilization. When something goes or failure seems imminent they issue an alert that is sent to a monitoring program. Perhaps each flight can be “recorded”. If an event or accident occurs the “tapes” can be reviewed. Just my idea.

'I’m not very good spokesman, but I am happy with my new WebCam. I’m not as excited as that ShamWow guy, but this thing has a Carl Zeiss lens and is MUCH better than the old Intel ones that used to come with Gateway machines. Of course, to be useful, both parties need to have one of these things. It even worked on my Vista machine, truly miraculous.

So many distractions can be found on the internet. This one answers the question "What time is it anyway? This came my way via Twitter, Send me a " tweet ".

Let’s face it, we don’t build stuff anymore. Our economy is in free fall but we are really only good at finding ways to be distracted. I’m as open to distractions as anyone else so I’m onboard with all the micro-blogging tools (as well as traditional blogs and forums). I tweet, blog, set facebook status, chat, GTalk, Communicate with Communicator, but I no longer Jabber. I’m LinkdIn, connected to my Facebook friends, EONS bound, but no Classmates for me… they ask for $$ So how does one deal with all this? Obviously you need a social aggregator program. I’m using Digsby . The CEO of Twitter was on CSpan last night. He did not inspire awe. The audience looked comatose. I bet they were twittering each other. He mentioned that Twitter has a good search function but it is difficult to find. Can’t search for the search, amusing isn’t it? So what does a techno-geek do? Add more software of course. I now have TweetDeck running besides Digsby and Skype. Tweetdeck has search, TwitPic a...

Computer scientist Ka-Ping Yee makes a compelling case for using open-source software for computer voting machines. He created the prototype voting machine software he calls Pvote . The idea is that if software can be seen by everyone, flaws and security holes can be brought to light. Watch the short video on the Science Friday website http://www.sciencefriday.com/videos/watch/10157

I like the look of Vista on my new computer but there are a few stupid "features" that have been implemented. What is with the defrag tool? In 2000 and XP you could analyze a disk before committing to running a lengthy defragmentation. In Vista they want you to schedule a defragmentation even if you don't need to. How silly. Bring back the 2000, XP backup that lets you CHOOSE what to backup. In Vista you can backup "images" and "music" and you will get every icon and sound on the stinking computer. I wish there was a way to actually see what is in the archive. I just backed up my entire music library by doing a simple copy, it was much faster and I know what is there. When I delete a large archive or directory, it takes a long time to analyze it to determine that it is too large for the recycle bin. Just give me a popup stating "Are you sure"... so much easier on us. These are just the complaints. The good is that I can run a Raid 0 disk arra...

I recently attended a yard sale being held by the Mason NH Conservation Commission. They were selling the contents of the home/workshop of Mason resident and inventor Bronson Potter. Bronson died in 2004. Bronson was a bit of an eccentric and was quite well known for various "stunts" including flying a plane under the Greenville NH Train trestle. As expected there was quite a selection of unusual items. I picked up a solar panel which unfortunately seems to be defective, a fire extinquisher (which hopefully is not defective) and a pair of what appear to be high power rectifier stacks. I thought it would be a trivial matter to look up the rating of the rectifiers on the web but thus far I have been unsuccessful. The Rectifier stack is marked as model 4JA7011FX182 and the diode is marked GE A74FX197 . I assuming that it is a high current device because of the presence of a large heat sink. I don't know why I purchased this stuff. I already have my own collection that my p...