Category: Computers, Internet & Technology

Type “weather [any place, state or country]” into a Google search and get not only the links, but a graphic of the current conditions and forecast for that location.

From Wired News:

Checking out a new iPod now applies to more than shopping trips or web browsing. This week the South Huntington Public Library on Long Island, New York, became one of the first public libraries in the country to loan out iPod shuffles.

For the past three weeks, the library ran a pilot program using the portable MP3 devices to store audio books downloaded from the Apple iTunes Music Store. They started with six shuffles, and now are up to a total of 10. Each device holds a single audio book. …

In addition, the library has the potential to save a great deal of money. Latini said that most titles on CDs cost the library around $75, whereas in MP3 format, they range from $15 to $25.

From David Pogue:

Today’s time-killing waste of bandwidth: the Google Montage.

Type in a name or a subject, click Search, click Create Montage, and presto—a full-screen collage, built from Googled photos of the subject. You can point to one of the “tiles” to see where it came from, or click one to visit the Web site from which it came.

Most people probably start by typing in “Tom Cruise” or “Salma Hayek,” but you can come up with some pretty interesting, less obvious montages. Try “goatee,” or “daffodils,” or “Palm Tungsten.” It’s fun for the whole family!

NewMexiKen thought “Salma Hayek” was an excellent suggestion, but “Grand Canyon” proved good, too. “Grandpa’s Sweeties” was the best!

From The New York Times:

Paris Hilton is not alone.

According to a Los Angeles security consulting firm that went skulking outside the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood on Sunday, as many as 100 people who walked the red carpet were carrying cellphones vulnerable to the kind of privacy invasion that recently gained Ms. Hilton a new round of unwanted notoriety.

Three employees of the company, Flexilis, founded two years ago by four University of Southern California students, positioned themselves in the crowd of more than 1,000 people watching celebrities arrive at the Kodak Theater. John Hering, one of the company’s founders, wore a backpack in which he had placed a laptop computer with scanning software and a powerful antenna.

The Flexilis researchers said they were able to detect that 50 to 100 of the attendees had smart cellphones whose contents – like those of Ms. Hilton’s T-Mobile phone – could be electronically siphoned from their service providers’ central computers. The contents of Ms. Hilton’s phone, including other celebrities’ phone numbers, ended up on the Internet.

In a related privacy matter, the State Department is going ahead with passports that will include electronic data about the individual. These passports reportedly can be tapped by nearby scanners.

A fascinating list of The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time with photos.

Whether they’re strapped to our belts, sitting on our desks, or jammed in an overstuffed closet, we absolutely love our gadgets.

So it wasn’t exactly easy coming up with the definitive list of the 100 best gadgets ever unleashed. In the weeks we spent debating the entries, tempers were flared, fingers were pointed, chairs were smashed over heads, and feelings were hurt. But we emerged, like Moses from the mountain, with the world’s most authoritative ranking of the best gadgets of all time.

Walter Mossberg discusses “which types of users might find switching [to Mac] inadvisable.”

Sony introduces a $3,300 high definition camcorder. David Pogue reports:

All right, go ahead, ask it: “In whose twisted opinion does a $3,300 price tag make this a consumer camcorder?” Let’s put it this way: the next least expensive three-chip, high-definition camcorder costs about $40,000.

From The New York Times —

First, a confession. Since starting to write this article two hours ago, I have left my chair only once. But I have not been entirely present, either.

Each time I have encountered a thorny sentence construction or a tough transition, I have heard the siren call of distraction.

Shouldn’t I fiddle with my Netflix queue, perhaps, or click on the weekend weather forecast? And there must be a friend having a birthday who would love to receive an e-card right now.

I have checked two e-mail accounts at least a dozen times each, and read eight messages. Only two were relevant to my task, but I responded right away to all of them. My sole act of self-discipline: both instant messaging accounts are turned off. For now.

This sorry litany is made only slightly less depressing when I remind myself that I have plenty of company.

Google Maps

A fascinating look at the future of information technology Apple style from I, Cringely. He begins:

More than a century ago, King Gillette invented both the safety razor and a new way of marketing consumer goods. Before Gillette, men shaved with straight razors, which required skill to both make and use, and lasted almost forever. Gillette’s safety razor was mass-produced and required little skill to make OR use, but couldn’t be re-sharpened, so the removable blades had to be discarded when they became dull. His marketing breakthrough was selling the razor handles at little or no profit while making huge profits on the consumable — the blades. This same technique is used today to promote mobile phones and inkjet printers. And it is supposedly behind Apple’s success with the iPod music player.

But in the case of Apple, is the iPod a razor or a blade? In other words, is Apple a hardware company or a media company?

Don’t leave your Instant Messaging open while giving a presentation. Click to see what can happen. Place mouse on IM message on the screen to see what it says.

Link via Ed Bott.

NewMexiKen surely doesn’t miss hockey on TV or anywhere else, but those that do can watch European games on Winamp via SHOUTcast — or news from China, or Hungarian talk, or “Sports Center” from Turkey, or a Björk promo or more than 8,000 radio stations. Is life great or what?

By the way, the hockey I watched had no annoying announcers. You heard the skates on ice, the grunts, the crowd and the public address system. The ideal sports telecast in my opinion.

Personal Technology from The Wall Street Journal:

I’ve been testing the Mac mini under just that scenario for several days, and it does indeed work, quite well. I connected a mini to a Dell flat-panel screen and a Hewlett-Packard keyboard and mouse, all about three years old. The little Mac fired up and worked perfectly at every task I threw at it.

Google Software Downloads

From Reuters — Apple Says Up to 4-Week Wait for IPod Shuffle

There is a two-to-three-week wait for the $99 iPod Shuffle, which holds about 120 songs, while customers face a wait of three to four weeks for the $149 model, which has double the capacity, according to the Apple website.

From The Mossberg Solution:

I’ve been testing the new iPod Shuffle for a couple of days, and, in my tests, it fulfilled — and even exceeded — Apple’s claims for convenience, battery life and song capacity. Sound quality is so good you can barely believe the music is coming from something so small.

…

Apple puts the new player’s battery life at 12 hours on a single charge. But, in my testing, it did much better than that, lasting 15 hours and 44 minutes.

Similarly, I found that the iPod Shuffle could hold many more songs than Apple claims. By choosing manual mode to load the player, I was able to cram as many as 188 songs onto my 512-megabyte test model, rather than the 120 Apple claims, without reducing the audio quality of the songs. That’s because Apple’s calculation is based on four-minute songs, but many pop and rock tunes, especially those from the ’60s and ’70s, are actually much shorter than that.

It weighs less than an ounce.

The iPod Shuffle. Up to 250 tunes and smaller than a pack of gum. $99.

The Mac mini. 2.9 lbs. 6.5 X 6.5 X 2. $500 base price. $1000 fully packaged.

iLife ’05

iWork ’05

Update June 6, 2007: Apple stock closed at $64.56 the day the above was written. It later split 2:1. At this writing it is $123.00. So $1000 in Apple stock when the Shuffle and Mini were announced would be worth $3810 today.

Microsoft has a beta AntiSpyware download. (You can choose to not validate your copy of Windows and still receive the download.)

You should be running a spyware detection program. NewMexiKen has seen what can happen with spyware and it isn’t pretty. (Whatever you do, do NOT download Kazaa.)

NewMexiKen noticed a van (from a major American retailer which offers home maintenance service) parked in a unusual location behind my home this morning. Why would anyone pull over there I thought.

“To use my wireless network” I replied. “Nah, surely not. But let’s go turn it off and see.” (NewMexiKen lives alone and often talks to himself.)

I disconnected the modem from the router. Within a minute or so the van left.

Time to encrypt.

From Google —

Based on billions of searches conducted by Google users around the world, the 2004 Year-End Zeitgeist offers a unique perspective on the year’s major events and trends. We hope you enjoy this aggregate look at what people wanted to know more about this [past] year.

Zeitgeist Explained
zeit geist | Pronunciation: ‘tsIt-“gIst, ‘zIt | Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era

Check it out.

David Pogue on security experts have now unveiled an even more insidious hole. Phishers (people who try to intercept your Web passwords and private information) can now make any text they like appear in the address bar. They can, for example, make it look like you’re viewing the Web page of PayPal or eBay; when you “log in,” you’ll actually be sending your account information straight into the phishers’ databases.

So what should you do? If you ask me, you should switch immediately to the free, infinitely superior browser Firefox (if you use Windows or Mac) or Safari (Mac OS X). You’ll absolutely love its tabbed browsing, pop-up window stopper and other advanced features-and you’ll be safe from most of the security holes in Internet Explorer.

One feature (in addition to security) that makes Firefox better than IE:

But my favorite aspect of Firefox is tabbed browsing, a Web-surfing revolution that is shared by all the major new browsers but is absent from IE. With tabbed browsing, you can open many Web pages at once in the same browser window. Each is accessed by a tab.

The benefits of tabbed browsing hit home when you create folders of related bookmarks. For instance, on my computer I have a folder of a dozen technology-news bookmarks and another 20 or so bookmarks pointing to political Web sites. A third folder contains 15 or so bookmarks for sites devoted to the World Champion Boston Red Sox. With one click, I can open the entire contents of these folders in tabs, in the same single window, allowing me to survey entire fields of interest.

Walter Mossberg prefers Firefox:

Meanwhile, other people have been building much better browsers, just as Microsoft itself did in the 1990s, when it challenged and eventually bested the then-dominant browser, Netscape Navigator. The most significant of these challengers is Firefox, a free product of an open-source organization called Mozilla, available for download at www.mozilla.org. Firefox is both more secure and more modern than IE, and it comes packed with user-friendly features the Microsoft browser can’t touch.

Firefox still has a tiny market share. But millions of people have downloaded it recently. I’ve been using it for months, and I recommended back in September that users switch to it from IE as a security measure. It’s available in nearly identical versions for Windows, the Apple Macintosh, and the Linux operating system.

iPod My Photo.

Send in your photo and get it back as an iPod ad. Samples.

Or make your own video iPod ad as this guy did (video with music).

Google Suggest, a beta test, will now suggest terms as you type. Interesting.

Had to get all the way to K though, before it suggested NewMexiKen.

Link via Kottke.