Category: Computers, Internet & Technology

NewMexiKen is ready to go strictly cellular, but why can’t I buy a device so that when I’m home my cellular service will work through my existing home telephones? Who wants to go from the relative convenience of six phones to one? According to The Mossberg Solution, it’s coming but it’s not here yet.

The other needed device is one that will enable me to play music from the computer on the home music system or show photos from the computer on the television without a lot of cables and effort. According to Fast Forward, “Multimedia Sharing Just Isn’t There Yet” either.

Type “miserable failure” into Google and be surprised — perhaps — by the result. Choose the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.

The Internet is changing everything.

A pleasant little techie tale from David Pogue.

I took last Thursday off from writing this column, and you took last Thursday off from reading it. But I have a Thanksgiving thought to share, even though it’s about something that happened two weeks ago.

I was in London at a computer conference. I was jet lagged, on the verge of a cold and — after nearly a week away — missing my wife and two young children.

Following a talk, I asked some stragglers in the auditorium if there was anywhere I could get online to check my e-mail.

A young man named Tim Haigh offered to show me to a coffee shop a few blocks away that had wireless Internet access. Tim and I paid our $8 for the hour, bought fizzy lemon sodas, popped open our PowerBooks and began to surf. As we chatted, he mentioned that he often sat in this very coffee shop and conducted video chats with a buddy in the States, using an Apple iSight.

The iSight is a compact, tubular, high-quality video camera, about the size of a Hostess Ho-Ho. It has a built-in microphone and lens cover. It has no power cord of its own; it connects to a Macintosh with a single FireWire cable. As long as you both have broadband Internet connections, you and another iSight (or camcorder) owner can conduct a videoconference.

The quality is excellent: smooth motion, full screen if you like and very little delay. It’s absolutely nothing like the crude, jerky, stuttering, massively delayed video you may have tried with cheap Web cams.

In any case, I perked right up when Tim mentioned his video chats, because I had an iSight, too, perched on my screen back home. I had no idea you could use it across the Atlantic.

Indeed you can, Tim said — in fact, he carries his iSight around with him.

“You mean you have it with you right now?” I exclaimed. “Can I borrow it?”

It was about 5:30 p.m., meaning that it was 12:30 p.m. at home. On the chance that my wife was at her computer, I fired off an e-mail to her, suggesting that we try out an intercontinental video call.

It took a few minutes for me to explain to her, by furious back-and-forth e-mail messages, how to open iChat and start up the video link. (Most of the time was spent with me, a color-blind husband, imploring her to click the “orange camcorder icon,” which turns out to be green.)

And then, suddenly, there it was: My wife Jennifer’s live image and her voice, transmitted in real time 3,500 miles across the globe — instantly, crystal clear and, by the way, free. I paraded around the coffee shop with my laptop and the iSight, showing her the local ambiance. (Jennifer, grinning: “Hey, buy me one of those chocolate croissants!”)

Maybe I was just overtired and sentimental, but it was an almost overwhelming experience.

She rounded up the kids. They didn’t seem to grasp the full scope of the technological miracle before them, which I found tremendously reassuring; I could see for myself that none of the traveling dad’s worst nightmares had come true.

We caught up for awhile; I told a silly bedtime story to the kids; we showed each other how it was dark out in England, but still bright at home. Finally, after about 20 minutes, we “hung up.”

There’s a lot of junk in technology, a lot of hassle and frustration, a lot of disappointment. But this moment was like a TV commercial. It was an emotional, powerful, simple, perfect example of how technology can change a moment, solve a problem, and despite the gulf of time and distance, bring you face to face with the people you love.

The Internet is changing everything.

NewMexiKen had a visit earlier today from a computer in Iceland.

From PC Magazine

During its first few years of life, instant messaging was a trivial technology used in trivial ways. Offering little more than e-mail without the lag time, services like ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) were popular mostly with computer-savvy high schoolers and college students—a new way to exchange late-night gossip.

All that has changed: Today, IM delivers far more than just text chatting. Consumer IM software now lets you swap files, share applications, and interact via streaming audio and video. You can use it to send text messages to cell phones and pagers, as well as to make voice calls to telephones. You can even play games and trade digital greeting cards. E-mail minus the lag time was only the beginning.

The real news is how enormously popular IM has become. In 1998, according to research firm IDC, more than 63 million people held IM accounts. By the end of last year, that figure nearly tripled to 174 million. Somewhere along the line, instant messaging went mainstream. All sorts of people, not just Internet-mad teenagers, saw IM as a welcome alternative to more conventional means of communication.

Like a telephone call, an instant message gives you real-time interaction. Yet like e-mail, it feels less personal and more detached than a phone call. You can easily engage strangers—and just as easily cut them off. But this is only part of IM’s appeal. Unlike any other communication tool, IM tells you whether someone is waiting to be contacted before you try to contact them by indicating whether they’re on- or off-line.

As to which IM software is best, PC Magazine says, “It was a close call between Yahoo! Messenger and Microsoft’s IM product, but MSN Messenger delivers the slickest interface and the best integration.”

Everything you need to know about Home Computer Security from the Carnegie-Mellon Software Engineering Institute.

From Alexa Web Search, an Amazon.com Company.

Basics on digital cameras. “How many megapixels is enough? What picture format is best for your needs? A look at some of the fundamentals and trade-offs in digital photography.”

Comcast is having a lot of problems today. Solar flares I’m sure. Ha!

Brian Allen, Director of Corporate Security at Time Warner Cable, speaking before a Tennessee legislative committee as reported by HobbsOnline A.M.:

Prefacing the next statement by saying “This isn’t why we’re here, but,” [Allen] mentioned hypothetical situations where a kiddie-porn addict would pull into the driveway of a Wi-Fi user, download a bunch of pictures, and drive away, leaving the law-abiding citizen to wait for the SWAT team to descend on him. He also said that terrorists could stand outside Wi-Fi user’s homes with laptops and coordinate their attacks over the Internet without being traced.

Eugene Volokh comments on Amazon’s new search:

How quickly we take things for granted: Kevin Drum (CalPundit) praises amazon.com’s book search feature (“I am now willing to worship the ground that Jeff Bezos walks on”) but notes:

However, at the risk of seeming churlish about this gift from the gods, it turns out there are a couple of hiccups. First, Amazon has available only 120,000 books so far. This sounds like a lot, but when I started experimenting by typing in random titles from my bookshelf, it took me nearly a dozen tries to finally find one that was searchable. When they get up to a million books or so, it will probably be more useful.

Yes, he’s right. Yes, he acknowledged that this is still a very cool feature. Yes, it’s my reaction, too.

But still, think about it: “Amazon has available only 120,000 books so far” for full-text searching. Only 120,000 books so far. Until 10 years ago, the Internet in its current form didn’t really exist. Until a few weeks ago, we couldn’t even search through one book in full text, unless it was one of the relatively few and generally quite old books (a few thousand, perhaps) available on some computer archives, which weren’t always the easiest things for people to track down, search, and read on the screen. Now we can search through bleeping 120,000 books. From our bleeping living rooms. For bleeping free. And we still complain (don’t blame Kevin, you know you thought that, too) that they haven’t gotten it up to a million books or so.

No wonder it’s so hard for humans to be happy.

Amazon.com has an extraordinary new feature. You are now able to search words/phrases in the text of books and be referred to the actual pages (scanned from the original).

“Below some of the search results, you’ll see a book excerpt with your search terms highlighted, which indicates that the book’s text is searchable. You can either click to see a list of all references to the term in that particular book or click on the excerpt’s page number to read the entire page on which the excerpt appears. Once you’re on a reader page, you can browse forward or back two pages within the book, or you can search the book for other terms.”

So far, you can browse 33 million pages worth of material from 120,000 books.

David Pogue of The New York Times writes:

You can’t pick up a newspaper without reading about the escalating battle between music companies and their customers. The recording industry believes that its decline in CD sales stems primarily from music pirates who download songs from the Internet. All kinds of loopy behavior has resulted, including lawsuits against everyone from 12-year-old girls to 80-year-old grandmothers.

Now, Hollywood believes that it’s next, that before long, we’ll be tossing illegally downloaded movies back and forth on the Internet with abandon. Surely, they think, all of these crazy college kids online will send all of the mighty distribution empires to the poorhouse.

Good thing they don’t know about a well-organized, tightly run organization that routinely distributes brand-name DVD’s and music CD’s to all comers, for free — an institution that hasn’t even raised an eyebrow at the music and movie companies.

It’s called the public library.

From David Pogue of The New York Times:

You already know that individuals and businesses worldwide are struggling to fix e-mail. The spam, the viruses, the irrelevant forwarding, the insipid joke mailing lists . . . whatever productivity gains e-mail once offered are rapidly being offset by the time we spend weeding through the chaff.

So far, though, nobody has gone as far as suggesting that we’re better off without e-mail entirely. Until now. John Caudwell is the millionaire head of Phones 4U, a chain of high-end cellphone stores in the U.K. Last week, in a move that’s causing shockwaves among, well, just about everybody, he banned all internal e-mail among his 2,500 employees. (They’re still allowed to correspond with customers, suppliers, their repair division and so on.) Mr. Caudwell says he wants his company to conduct their transactions by phone or face to face.

“Management and staff at HQ and in the stores were beginning to show signs of being constrained by e-mail proliferation,” Mr. Caudwell told reporters. “The ban brought an instant, dramatic and positive effect.”

How instant and how dramatic? He says that he’ll save three hours per day per employee, and over $1.6 million per month. That’s a huge productivity boost by any company’s standards.

Still, my first reaction was that Mr. Caudwell is, well, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. E-mail does sap away time, but it also saves massive amounts of time. You can conduct an e-mail transaction in a fraction of the time you’d need for a phone call — meanwhile, you get a permanent record of the exchange, one that you can search, sort and share with people who weren’t present.

But then I began to wonder. Have we reached the tipping point, where the time we save and the time we waste are canceling each other out?

I couldn’t help but fantasize about what I’d do with two free hours a day (that’s about how much time I spend on e-mail, and I’m still thousands of responses behind). I could spend more time with my kids, do a better job of staying fit, get more sleep . . . I could be a better man! I could lead a better, longer life!

But that’s only the beginning. E-mail is a real productivity sapper, sure, but what about the telephone? Talk about time-wasters! It takes you ten times as long to say the same thing, plus you’re spending it with only one person. What an incredible time drain!

Ban phone calls too, I say. Mr. Caudwell would save another three hours a day per employee.

And don’t forget about computers. Good heavens, in the time we spend learning them, debugging them, backing them up, maintaining them, installing new patches and drivers, we’re losing billions of person-hours a year. Get rid of them, too! There’s another three hours a day saved.

And while we’re at it, get rid of the TV’s. Let’s take back the billions and billions of hours we lose to television. And cars — who wouldn’t rather reclaim the time we spend hunting for parking and sitting in traffic?

And fax machines, and PalmPilots, and the Internet!

Just kidding.

Listen, if you really want to save time and productivity, ban meetings. Now you’re onto something.

The project is called PlanetLab, and within the next three years, researchers say, it will help revitalize the Internet, eventually enabling you to

• forget about hauling your laptop around. No matter where you go, you’ll be able to instantly recreate your entire private computer workspace, program for program and document for document, on any Internet terminal;
• escape the disruption caused by Internet worms and viruses—which inflicted an average of $81,000 in repair costs per company per incident in 2002—because the network itself will detect and crush rogue data packets before they get a chance to spread to your office or home;
• instantly retrieve video and other bandwidth-hogging data, no matter how many other users are competing for the same resources;
• archive your tax returns, digital photographs, family videos, and all your other data across the Internet itself, securely and indestructibly, for decades, making hard disks and recordable CDs seem as quaint as 78 RPM records.

From David Pogue of The New York Times:

Last week, for example, I mentioned that an anti-virus program is a necessity these days if you use Windows. I grumbled that that meant forking over money (plus an annual subscription) to companies like McAfee and Symantec, two companies that are not known for, ahem, customer-support excellence.

But dozens of you called to my attention a number of free anti-virus programs from other companies. “I have been using the version of AVG that’s free for personal use,” wrote one reader. “It has stopped all viruses without fault. And Grisoft has never sent me a single junk mail or distributed my information — a refreshing thought indeed.”

I tried AVG, and it’s great. (Other readers recommended free and cheap anti-virus programs like Avast, F-prot, Sophos and NOD32 Anti-Virus.)

Information from The New York Times on removing applets that slow down Windows operations. Proceed carefully.

“This might be a good opportunity to repeat the most important Office tip ever: If you press Ctrl-Z or Backspace (in Windows) or Command-Z (on the Mac) immediately after Word auto-does anything, Word restores what you typed.” From David Pogue, The New York Times.

Suggestions for the New Version of Microsoft Office from David Pogue of The New York Times.

“When the rivets start coming loose and the sub [in Das Boot] starts breaking apart all around, that’s when people really understand the importance of all of those speakers….”

Fine-Tuning the Sound in Your Own Cinema

NewMexiKen’s laptop has a 15-inch monitor, meaning of course — as all you followers of Pythagoras know — that it is actually 12 inches wide and 9 inches high. The screen has four resolutions: 800 X 600, 1024 X 768, 1280 X 1024 and 1600 X 1200 (the numbers represent pixels). On my 15-inch laptop, the lowest resolution, 800 X 600, has 4,444 pixels per square inch. The higest resolution, 1600 X 1200, has 17,778 pixels per square inch. Everything is four times sharper with the higher setting, but one-fourth as large.

Many, perhaps most individuals keep the resolution at the lowest setting. That’s all there was a few years ago and that’s what they’re used to. When I acquired a 17-inch monitor I increased the resolution to 1024 X 768. I was pleased with the increased clarity. On the bigger screen everything was still large enough to read easily. My laptop has a flat display described as a “TFT active matrix.” I don’t know what the means, but it has outstanding resolution. Even though the screen is 28% smaller than the 17-inch monitor I was used to, I was able to set the resolution to 1280 X 1024 and make up in clarity what I lost in size. Each of these changes did take some getting used to.

All of which is to encourage you to experiment with the resolution of your display. With Windows that is usually done by right clicking any empty space on the Desktop (the main window). You should get a dialog box with a few tabs (Screen Saver among them). The right most one should be “Settings.” Open Settings. There should be a slider to let you adjust the screen resolution.