Technology

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Cell Phones In America: Can You Hear My Cow?

[ Comments Off ]Posted on July 1, 2010 by admin in Technology

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Why does American cell service suck so much, and why don’t we do anything about it?


Can you hear my cow? Steve Jobs
demonstrates the exact grip and physical
location that will allow your new
iPhone to function properly.

As a Verizon customer, I can’t wait until next year when Verizon finally offers the iPhone so I can have a piece of crappy overpriced hardware to match my crappy overpriced service. Just what is it with cellular service in America? We pay more than any other country for service that’s so bad that we need a need a wireless bill of rights to defend ourselves. Call service is worse than ever, billing and contracts are insane (even the government is finally saying so ) but sadly, the most effective consumer activism I’ve seen so far has been as a result of New York Times blogger David Pogue’s Take Back the Beep Campaign. So why don’t we as consumers take more action? My theory is that we can’t get anything organized because of the dropped calls. What do you think? Are you happy with your service & pricing? If you weren’t, would you know what to do about it? A couple of resources you might try would be the Consumers Union’s HearUsNow.org or the FCC web site’s directory or direct complaint form. Or if your complaint is specifically about the new iPhone antenna problem, you could try the solution below.

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And One Ring Shall Cool Them All: The Dyson Air Multiplier

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on June 25, 2010 by admin in Technology

Friday, June 25th, 2010

Looking for a cool way to stay cool? Check out the Dyson Air Multiplier.


Theremin players may be disappointed
by the sound quality of the Dyson

While sitting in a friend’s sweltering apartment the other day, I found myself staring mesmerized by his oscillating fan, wondering if anyone had thought about moving fan technology forward since I first did this at my grandma’s house when I was a toddler. Well, if you’re aware of how much James Dyson’s vacuums suck, you won’t be surprised to learn that his fans blow. I mean literally, because actually, they’re kind of, er, cool. And the 350 scientists and engineers that developed them might be offended at my calling them “fans”; Dyson actually has them trademarked as the Dyson Air Multiplier™. Although there are no visible blades, an internal motor rotates nine asymmetrically-aligned blades to pull air into the device, and then move it up the pedestal and into the precisely angled ring at the top. Then physics does the rest, through phenomena referred to as inducement and entrainment. It’s the entrainment part that helps eliminate the choppy breeze created by a conventional fan; as the air moves smoothly out of the Air Multiplier™, the surrounding air begins to move in a stable fashion as well. And this is the device’s main selling point, aside from its unique appearance. Which frankly caused me a little disappointment. Given the design, I at first secretly hoped the thing used some kind of electromagnetic force to move the air. Now THAT would be cool. In any case, the Air Multiplier™ is getting good reviews, although even Consumer Reports points out that 300 bucks is a lot for a fan. Perhaps if the reviewers had some pressing need to move a balloon around in circles (see video below) they’d be more impressed. My only criticism is kind of silly; how’s a kid supposed to make a robot voice by talking through the fan, or pretend he’s flying an airplane? Oh. Never mind. I guess we that that covered. Read the rest of this entry »

How To Archive Or Back Up Your Facebook Account

[ Comments Off ]Posted on June 19, 2010 by admin in Technology

Saturday, June 19th, 2010

There’s no single simple way, but there are some free and cheap tools that will do the job.

Been looking for convenient and easy way to archive your Facebook account? Well, tough patooties. There’s no convenient and easy way to do it, but we’ll outline a few methods you can try below. Like many users, I’ve been pondering how Facebook fits into my life, and how I feel about Mark Zuckerberg’s longstanding arrogant disregard for our privacy. I’m not alone; although Quit Facebook Day was a bust, according to a recent Soros poll 60% of users are thinking about quitting, and 16% already have. And although “How Do I Delete My Facebook Account” spiked as a search term in May, there are no numbers to indicate a mass exodus from Facebook yet. I personally won’t be quitting, but Facebook is no longer the more closed, verified network it was when I joined, and that was what I actually valued most about it. As a result, I’ve decided to change how I use Facebook a little bit until something better comes along, and part of that meant archiving and deleting my wall. I might have just deleted it all, but my friends are just too darn witty, and their comments just too precious and ginormously highlarious to click into oblivion. So how do you archive these sentimental treasures? Unfortunately, you can’t just go to “File > Save As” with your Facebook wall. Because of the fact that the site makes such extensive use of proprietary AJAX-like code, you can save a page, but rarely with the comment threads and older posts expanded. Even if you could do it this way, you’d end up with one massive, browser-crashing web page. So I put several tools to use, because each had its own shortcoming. The first thing I tried was the Firefox plug-in ArchiveFB. It’s based on another plug-in called Scrapbook, and allows you to fairly easily  Read the rest of this entry »

Star Trek Induced Tech Ennui

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on June 5, 2010 by admin in Technology

Saturday, June 5th, 2010

Sure, I’d LOVE to boldly go where no-one has gone before. But not only do we not have the technology, that’s a split infinitive.


Well, we’ve got the hardware worked out.
Now we just need to work on the billing.

I have a serious case of technology-induced ennui that I can only blame on Star Trek. Sure, iPads are nifty, and it’s really groovy that there are now affordable, terabyte-sized hard drives. Excuse me….*yawns*. I’m underwhelmed. I want some teleporation! And replicators! And a holodeck! And an android (no, not that android) friend that makes me feel more human with his/her mere existence. So, are we even getting close to Star Trek technology? Well, speaking of androids, many older cell phones look remarkably like the original Star Trek communicator, and they do essentially the same thing. Except I don’t recall anyone on Star Trek ever complaining about their horrendous monthly bill. Perhaps because they were (will be?) just as confused about economics as we are. And although we’ve teleported information (or rather, the Chinese have), it was only one bit, over ten miles. To actually transport a human, the data management requirements alone are mind-boggling. Just to store the information about the body being transported (assuming 10^28 atoms per body) would require 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 GB, or 1 Sextillion 100 Gigabyte hard drives. And then there’s the energy requirement, which (according to The Physics of Star Trek) is a trillion degrees of heat and the equivalent energy of a 100 megaton h-bomb, all in a controlled reaction. And holodecks? Well, the recent resurgence in 3D entertainment has been fun, but as we’ve pointed out before, things haven’t changed much since the 50′s in this regard. No, we have a long way to go before most of this technology is possible. Which is too bad, because even a dozen or so replicators would go a long way toward solving the global hunger problem. Note that I’m not quibbling with the plausibilty of any of these things. Although pragmatic, hard-nosed science types expend a lot of brain power blaming the writers of Star Trek for the “flaws” in Star Trek technologies, one of the biggest offences the writers committed was the split infinitive in the introduction, i.e.: “To boldly go“. So what’s a technology-deprived person to do? Well, there’s always cryonics. I could just put myself in a deep-freeze and wait, right? Oh fudge. We don’t even have that figured out yet. Read the rest of this entry »

Ergonomic Designs That Get To The Seat Of The Matter

[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 30, 2010 by admin in Technology

Sunday, May 30th, 2010

One could easily get the impression that the definition of “ergonomic” is “strange looking”.

You may be wondering why we’re featuring a photo of a guy’s butt resting on an HR Giger sculpture today. Well, first of all, it’s because of the fact that if we used a girl’s butt you’d think we were sexist. And second, it’s not an HR Giger sculpture, it’s an actual bicycle seat, called the Manta Saddle. The makers say it “changes the whole feel of being seated on a bicycle“. Which is what you would immediately think when you see it with no-one seated on it (see below). But in spite of its first butt-pinching impressions, it apparently eases pressure on the perineum, pudendal arteries, prostate, and nerves, minimizing biker butt. You may have noticed that “ergonomic” can usually be defined as “strange looking”. In spite of our bumpy, curvy bodies, we’ve designed an entire world out of hard angles, presumably because it’s historically been easier to fabricate things this way. Or do we just find it unsettling to the mind to surround ourselves with irregular, bulbous shapes? Who knows. Below are some images of other odd-looking ergonomic designs. Feel free to share if you know of more good examples. Read the rest of this entry »

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