Category: Computers, Internet & Technology

From Gizmodo:

The Boardbug is a watch-like baby monitor that has two distinct modes. In the first “baby” mode, the devices work like a traditional baby monitor, broadcasting audio from the child’s unit to the parent’s and even sounding a warning buzzer if the baby outsmarts the latch and takes the unit off. Plus it has a built in thermometer to monitor temperature levels in the baby’s room.

The “toddler” mode takes all those features and adds on a proximity-based “safety range” and a panic button, which sounds a startling klaxon so you can easily determine which freeway your child is playing in, but sadly does nothing for the periodic anxiety attacks that come from realizing you’ve got 16 more years of this shit.

From Wired News Furthermore:

IT folks used to advise leaving computers on all the time to avoid wear and tear. But components are much more reliable now, and new research shows there’s no reason not to go green and turn PCs off when not in use. Tests at the University of Waterloo in Canada indicate that current computers use about 110 watts of electricity while booting up and 60 watts when idle; a 17-inch CRT monitor uses about 75 watts. PCs in sleep mode draw about 35 watts, roughly equivalent to three clock radios. Multiplied by hours of standby time and millions of PCs worldwide, that adds up to a big drain. Infineon Technologies estimates that a 1 percent decrease in U.S. standby power use would save 360 megawatts — equivalent to a medium-size power plant.

Incorporating the fabulous Apple Click Wheel that was first introduced on iPod mini. Offering up to 12 hours of battery life. Weighing in at just 5.6 ounces. And getting slightly thinner with each new generation. iPod continues to define the perfect digital music player for Mac and Windows. You can now purchase a 20GB iPod for $299. Or a 40GB iPod for $399.

Check ’em out.

From the Raleigh News & Observer —

Duke University freshmen will get something even more trendy than a Blue Devils T-shirt when they arrive next month: a free Apple iPod digital music player.

On Monday, the university announced a deal with Apple to distribute 1,650 of the hand-held gizmos to first-year students. Duke will get a discount and give them free to freshmen — for keeps.

The iPods generally are used to store and play music; the 20-GB model, which the students will get, can hold up to 5,000 tunes. But the Duke students, being brainy and all, will use the iPods mostly for academics.

Or so Duke hopes.

Link via Boing Boing.

Stuff like this makes Boing Boing a fascinating web site.

(Not that I’d trust my camera to this thing.)

NewMexiKen wonders if you couldn’t do this with five Altoid tins and have home theater surround sound.

Link via Kottke.

NewMexiKen is pretty certain the problem with the laptop discussed here last week is a heat/fan problem. If it were a PC I’d dig right in, but a laptop…

For now, I have a borrowed machine to keep me going.

Thanks to those who offered suggestions.

NewMexiKen’s laptop is acting very peculiar. After a cold boot it works normally for about 45 minutes, then seems to freeze up. I can still move around and click on icons, but nothing happens. Web pages say they are loading, but the frame turns grey. Ultimately all I can do is turn the computer off and restart it. And then the cycle repeats itself.

This is annoying to say the least, worrisome to say more. Any ideas anyone? (Other than backing up, which I have been doing.)

Once again, NewMexiKen would like to encourage you to consider Mozilla Firefox (now version 0.9.1 of their newest browser) or Mozilla (version 1.7 of the browser) and Thunderbird (version 0.7.1 for mail).

NewMexiKen uses a relatively new and perfectly adequate Windows laptop, but the new Apple OS X v10.4 Tiger is looking mighty attractive.

The world’s most eco-friendly ice-cream freezer — from Popular Science.

Slice, The Best Pizza Weblog in the World, has something for your iPod — a Field Guide to New York City Pizzerias you can store with your music.

Firefox 0.9 is available. NewMexiKen has been using Firefox as my primary browser since February. No pop-ups. Tabbed browsing. Fast.

TBogg had to call Dell tech support — always good for a funny story.

As an early user of Google’s Gmail, NewMexiKen now has three invitations he can send to others who might want to try the service. To whom should I dispense these precious gems?

South Knox Bubba has fun with technology:

I was just wondering where the heck a package was that was supposed to be delivered today. I called the company and got a tracking number and looked it up on the Internet. The carrier said it had been delivered to my door. I looked on the porch and sure enough, there it was. How pathetic is that?

AirPort Express with AirTunes

Enjoy your iTunes music library in virtually any room of your house. Share a single broadband Internet connection and USB printer without inconvenient and obtrusive cables. Create an instant wireless network on the go. Extend the range of your current wireless network. How many devices do you need to do all this? Just one.

Wired News: My Left Arm for a Gmail Account.

NewMexiKen has a Gmail account. Make me an offer.

David Pogue reviews Gmail (Google’s upcoming free email service). He concludes —

Otherwise, Gmail is infinitely cleaner, faster, more useful, more efficient, less commercial and less limiting than other Web-based e-mail services. Once Gmail goes live, Hotmail and Yahoo won’t know what hit them.

The only population likely not to be delighted by Gmail are those still uncomfortable with those computer-generated ads. Those people are free to ignore or even bad-mouth Gmail, but they shouldn’t try to stop Google from offering Gmail to the rest of us. We know a good thing when we see it.

Sound advice from Walt Mossberg —

I would never run a Windows PC without a good, constantly updated antivirus program, period. Unless your ISP is supplying software like this that resides on your PC, rather than on its servers, I urge you to hasten to a store or a Web site and buy an antivirus program immediately. Install it right away, and make certain you keep it up to date. Do not procrastinate on this. There is an international group of vandals and criminals whose sole purpose in life, every day, is to unleash viruses and other malicious programs onto your PC.

The only exception might be if you own a Macintosh. Windows viruses can’t run on the Mac, and I know of no viruses that do run on the Mac’s OS X operating system and that have spread to the public. I still advise running an antivirus program on a Mac, just in case. But it’s a much less urgent matter.

According to a story in The New York Times today, in the Google data centers “every part in the system that can fail is mounted with a Velcro fastener, so that it can be quickly and easily removed when necessary.”

What, no tiny Phillips-head screws to mess with?

NewMexiKen installed Thunderbird last week; it’s the free email program from Mozilla.org. It took a little time to understand and configure, but I’m liking it better and better. Its spam controls are easy — and fun. If you enable the junk mail feature, when spam gets through you just click the Junk icon and the the program is trained to recognize that type of message as junk — and the message is deleted — all in one click.

Importing an address book from Outlook Express was fairly straightforward as well.

Mozilla Thunderbird for Windows or Mac OS X.

By the way, as reported earlier, Mozilla Firefox is an excellent browser. No pop ups. Tabbed browsing. NewMexiKen only uses Internet Explorer when necessary to see these pages as 75% of you see them — with a bug-ridden browser. Firefox is also free, as is Mozilla 1.6.

iTunes has a software update.