Test your Broadband

As part of the National Broadband Plan, the FCC is providing tools to measure your connection.

The purpose of the Consumer Broadband Test (Beta) is to give consumers additional information about the quality of their broadband connections and to create awareness about the importance of broadband quality in accessing content and services over the internet. Additionally, the FCC may use data collected from the Consumer Broadband Test (Beta), along with submitted street address, to analyze broadband quality and availability on a geographic basis across the United States.

About the Consumer Broadband Test (Beta) – Broadband.gov

FCC Mobile Broadband Test for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store

Some might wonder at giving the government your address. Don’t be an idiot. Trust me, they already know where you live. You get mail don’t you?

Here’s the background.

Above image my results. Below my iPhone results, left wireless, right 3G, bottom Edge. Ugly!

Progress

I have a desktop computer I bought 12 years ago this month that I am finally getting around to recycling. I was checking through the documentation (to see if there was any personal stuff) and noticed the technical specs.

RAM: 48MB
CPU: 66MHz
Cache: 32KB
HD : 6GB
Modem speed: Up to 56kbps
Graphic memory: 4MB
Windows 95

By comparison, my newest computer, bought two years ago this month has:

RAM: 4GB (83X)
CPU: 2.4GHz (36X)
Cache: 3MB (94X)
HD : 200GB (33X)
Modem: Wireless 802.11n Up to 300Mbps (5357X)
Graphic memory: 256MB (64X)

The newer computer was cheaper, too.

MacHeist

The MacHeist nanoBundle has a week left to run. For $19.95 you get seven Mac software programs, each of which lists for $20 or more. And one-quarter of your money goes to a charity you designate (from among those listed).

A great deal for Mac owners; included are MacJournal, RipIt, Clips, CoverScout, Flow, RapidWeaver and Tales of Monkey Island.

Want to predict the Oscars?

There’s an app for that.

The internet, fascinating

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Computers aren’t all bad

Had a little money coming back, so I filed my taxes electronically last Thursday. The refund was deposited in the bank this morning.

132 years ago today

… Thomas Edison received a patent for the phonograph and ultimately music changed forever.

The phonograph was developed as a result of Thomas Edison’s work on two other inventions, the telegraph and the telephone. In 1877, Edison was working on a machine that would transcribe telegraphic messages through indentations on paper tape…This development led Edison to speculate that a telephone message could also be recorded in a similar fashion. He experimented with a diaphragm which had an embossing point and was held against rapidly-moving paraffin paper. The speaking vibrations made indentations in the paper. Edison later changed the paper to a metal cylinder with tin foil wrapped around it. The machine had two diaphragm-and-needle units, one for recording, and one for playback. When one would speak into a mouthpiece, the sound vibrations would be indented onto the cylinder by the recording needle in a vertical (or hill and dale) groove pattern. Edison gave a sketch of the machine to his mechanic, John Kreusi, to build, which Kreusi supposedly did within 30 hours. Edison immediately tested the machine by speaking the nursery rhyme into the mouthpiece, “Mary had a little lamb.” To his amazement, the machine played his words back to him. …

The invention was highly original. The only other recorded evidence of such an invention was in a paper by French scientist Charles Cros, written on April 18, 1877. There were some differences, however, between the two men’s ideas, and Cros’s work remained only a theory, since he did not produce a working model of it.

Source: Library of Congress

It didn’t look much like an iPod. Click image for larger version.

Best sometimes-even-satire-makes-a-key-point line of the day

Also worth considering: We charge $99 per year for a MobileMe subscription. Google gives you the same stuff and all they ask for is, um, permission to totally invade your privacy and to “monetize” (God I hate that word) your personal information. You think your personal information is worth less than $99 a year? Then you’re getting a hell of a deal with Google. The rest of us would rather spent $99 and keep the contents of our email to ourselves.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs

Google Chrome

I am becoming more and more impressed with Google Chrome, surely the fastest internet browser and with a nice, clean look.

Hey, that’s funny

When I am at home and check some websites there are ads saying Albuquerque mom make $567 (or some such figure) a week working at home. I am on the road tonight, far from home, and on the web there’s a photo of a woman making money working at home and she looks identical to the Albuquerque woman.

Must be her twin sister.

The techno-peasant’s computer

Slate’s tech writer Farhad Manjoo has slurped from the Apple tablet Kool-Aid.

The reader wondered whether that would ever change. “In short, when will the computer become an appliance?”

If we’re lucky, it’ll happen this week.

Later he continues.

So why should we expect Apple’s new tablet to set us free from all this? Because as Gizmodo’s Diaz points out, Apple already makes the one computer in the world that can be described as an appliance—the iPhone.

… Other than charging it, the iPhone requires no maintenance. Backups and OS upgrades occur automatically, and because all programs are approved by Apple (and because even third-party programmers aren’t given deep access to the phone), you never have to worry about malware. And look how easy it is to install a program: Choose one from the store, press “Install,” and type in your password to authorize the purchase—and that’s it. The iPhone doesn’t ask you where you want to put the new program, or how you’d like to launch it, and whether you’d like it to be the default program for doing a particular kind of task. It just puts up a little icon on the screen. To run the program, click the icon. To do something else, hit the home button.

Click for larger version.

An anxious world awaits

The BIG tech story this week is the expected introduction Wednesday of the Apple slate, essentially an iPod about the size of a piece of paper (and not much thicker) with internet connectivity. No one knows for sure. Word is that Apple’s Steve Jobs considers this the most important thing he’s ever done.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs (which, for the uninitiated, is a parody) tells us the backstory. Here’s an excerpt.

But I digress. Let’s talk about this new device.

Yes, it will transform the media business, and by “transform” I mean it will put me in charge of it, the way the iPod put me in charge of the music industry. Yes, it will destroy cable TV and utterly transform the 60-year-old television industry, and again, by “transform,” I mean I’ll be in charge, because I’ll be the guy from whom you buy your shows — I’ll be the guy with whom the consumer forms a relationship. I’ll be the guy who has your credit card on file. So the cable carriers are dead.

As for the broadcast networks? Well, um, for now we make deals with them to get their content into our store. But eventually we just hollow them out from the inside, until everyone figures out that there’s no reason for them to exist anymore. Because really, what purpose does NBC serve, except to be, in and of itself, a form of entertainment — a comedy of errors, like some movie where the Three Stooges get put in charge of a corporation.

Like all good satire, a lot of truth in the above. You should click the link above and go read the rest. Maybe the Apple slate will be an Edsel, but then it could be a transformational device; the iPod was, the iPhone is.

A Is for Amazon, B Is for Best Buy…

“Go to Google’s home page or browser toolbar and type a single letter into the search box. The search engine will then drop down a list of suggestions, based on overall search activity (you have to have ’show suggestions’ checked for this to happen in your toolbar). There are 26 sites that have the distinction of being the first suggestion for each letter of the alphabet.”

The Bits Blog has the list.

iPhone leather case with battery backup

$20.75

Read the review at TUAW.

Slide your iPhone onto the case’s 30 pin dock connector and the fit is nice and snug. Plug in a standard iPhone/iPod cable into the side and the light turns red until fully charged when the light turns green. The on and off switch activates or de-activates the battery backup. I can’t come up with a good reason to ever turn it off. The leather flip cover not only protects the screen, but also acts as a stand, when folded back a bit, holding the iPhone upright in either landscape or portrait mode. So much for those little flexible plastic holders. Another nice feature is that if you leave the switch set to on, you can charge both the battery backup and your iPhone at the same time using a standard 30 pin iPhone/iPod cable.

But, of course

In addition, the Nexus One, and other Android devices, still pale beside the iPhone for playing music, video and games. The apps available for these functions aren’t nearly as sophisticated as on the Apple devices.

Finally, the iPhone is still a better apps platform. Not only are there more apps, but, in my experience, iPhone apps are generally more polished and come in more varieties.

Walt Mossberg

HP Ink Costs More Than Human Blood

Check out the graph of the relative prices of liquids.

Interesting, very interesting

Comcast has about 62 million viewers (numbers are from July).

DirecTV around 47 million.

Time Warner about 34 million.

But guess what? Hulu has 38 million.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs

Fake Steve has a good “today’s-the-day” post about the AT&T protest he whimsically proposed that turned into a real event. Click if just to see the photo he has at the top of the post. My sentiments exactly about a lot of things.

Google Doodles

If you like the graphics Google has on holidays and others commemorations, you’ll enjoy Doodlewatch.

Elaine at Five Acres with a View had the link.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs

If you love Apple, but hate AT&T — and who doesn’t? — this is a must read.

It includes this:

Used to be, we [in this country] were innovators. We were leaders. We were builders. We were engineers. We were the best and brightest. We were the kind of guys who, if they were running the biggest mobile network in the U.S., would say it’s not enough to be the biggest, we also want to be the best, and once they got to be the best, they’d say, How can we get even better? What can we do to be the best in the whole fucking world? What can we do that would blow people’s fucking minds? They wouldn’t have sat around wondering about ways to fuck over people who loved their product. But then something happened. Guys like you took over the phone company and all you cared about was milking profit and paying off assholes in Congress to fuck over anyone who came along with a better idea, because even though it might be great for consumers it would mean you and your lazy pals would have to get off your asses and start working again in order to keep up.

What would Wolfgang think?

A phrase I never dreamed I’d see: The Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra.

Here’s the story.

There’s a video.

iPhone, best toy ever

Clicker

Katherine Boehret of The Mossberg Solution reviews Clicker. An excerpt:

This week, I’ve been testing Clicker, a free Web site that aims to be the TV Guide for all full episodes available to watch on the Web. It searches over 1,200 sources, so it can index some 400,000 episodes from 7,000 shows. Results include television programs as well as “Web originals,” or shows that are native to the Internet and are of broadcast quality. Clicker either plays the video on its site or links you to where this content is shown on another hosting site—like NBC or Hulu. If a show isn’t available online, Clicker tells you so you don’t have to keep hunting all over for it.

I like Clicker and found it to be a quick resource for finding all sorts of shows online.

Click above for the review.

Click here for Clicker.

Understand the iPhone/iPod backup

Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the iPhone/iPod backup and then some.

I’ve turned the backup off. It’s too slow and there’s nothing on the iPhone or iPod I can’t restore.

Guess how old Google is today