Category: Computers, Internet & Technology

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

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.

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.

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.

“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.

$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.

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

Check out the graph of the relative prices of liquids.

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.

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.

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.

In a comment Jill said, “[W]e drove by this [Crazy Horse] memorial in 2002 and again in 2007, and now I see your photos from 2009 – and it looks exactly the same every time.”

I went to the closet and dug out a photograph I took there in 1995. Guess what? It looked the same 14 years ago, too.

So I plugged in the scanner to copy the photo, only to learn that HP (the Comcast of computer products) doesn’t have scanner drivers to support the new Mac operating system. HP didn’t have drivers for Mac Leopard either, but one could use a work around. Now that’s not even doable. And HP has no intention of updating these drivers.

This is the second time I have bought a high-end HP scanner specifically to scan photos and had it become a brick in a very short period of time. I will never, ever buy an HP product again.

Can anyone suggest a good long-lived photo scanner? Canon 8800? Epson V500?

Picasa 3.5 scans all the photos in your collection, identifies the ones with faces, and groups photos with similar faces together. It’s easy to add name tags to dozens of photos at once by clicking “Add a name” below a photo and typing the person’s name. Once you’ve tagged some pictures, you can make a face collage with one click, easily find all your pictures with the same two people in them…

Picasa Basics

Picasa 3.5 is a free download for Windows or Mac.

Today, I’m going to explain how RSS can help you live your best life online. 

We all have busy lives with very little time. Web surfing is fun but can take hours going to visit every single website and blog you enjoy. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if you could just get all the headlines of the most current stories from all your favorite websites and blogs in one place? 

Well now you can, and it is called RSS feed. 
. . .

So, to make RSS much easier to understand, in Oprah speak, RSS stands for: I’m “Ready for Some Stories”. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. How cool is that?

Back in skinny jeans explains RSS, which is a tool I consider critical to enjoying the web. Their Oprah explanation is three years old — and I know some of you don’t like RSS and some of you think Twitter is better — but for many of you it comes down to this: surfing or subscribing.

If you surf, you have to go to all your favorite websites (like NewMexiKen and Dinner without Crayons) and see what’s new.

If you subscribe, all (or nearly all) of your favorite websites will send what’s new to you (to your RSS reader).

It’s relatively simple and free, though some of the better RSS readers charge for the software. There’s even a free basic reader in your web browser.

“Intuit is buying Mint.com”

Felix Salmon explains why Mint users should be alarmed (and become former Mint users). It’s as if Best Buy bought the Apple stores.

“The cyberattacks Thursday and Friday on Twitter and other popular Web services disrupted the lives of hundreds of millions of Internet users, but the principal target appeared to be one man: a 34-year-old economics professor from the republic of Georgia.”

The New York Times has the story.