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Scientific Blogging speculates on the role of “dark matter” in the formation of the Milky Way here.

It’s fascinating. I won’t even try to excerpt it.

Other Posts of Interest:

Reuters, citing the Wall Street Journal, reports that Dell is developing a pocket-sized internet device. Read the story here. Here’s an excerpt:

    The gadget would run on Google Inc’s Android software, the people told the paper.

    According to the paper, two people who saw early prototypes described the device as slightly larger than Apple Inc’s iPod Touch, which is similar to the iPhone but does not have cellphone capabilities.

Other Posts of Interest:

And, after the hoop-la dies down, things will just settle back down. Story here.

    Bing, launched on June 3 but available to some users a few days earlier, took 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, up from 7.81 percent for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 percent in April, said Internet data firm StatCounter.

    Google lost share slightly, dipping to 78.48 percent from 78.72 percent before Bing. Yahoo Inc, the perennial No. 2 in the market, rose to 11.04 percent from 10.99 percent.

My guess, based on entirely on complete and total ignorance: They’re taking market share from Cuil.

Other Posts of Interest:

Summer of Geekazine contest comes to a close - Summer of Podcasts starts right up. New Video intros being made - Wanna help? Where is my Staple Gun - the new studio.

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I - S.U.N. (Straight Up News)
Firefox 3.5 Released
Mind Reading Wheelchair - But not a mind of it’s own.
Back to the Walkman - Can old tech stand up to new?
Windows 7 Upgrades - SP1 means the end for XP.
Lenovo moves Delete - Time to Hunt and Peck again
Twitter through Flickr - What? Yahoo did something?
Maine gets 64,000 Apples - Schools must have some cash

BlogWorld & New Media Expo. use TWEET20 for 20% off any registration

II
What YouTube Will have to do - The iPhone 3GS phenom takes over.
PSP Cell Phone
Dell’s Android Gadget - But it’s not a phone.
Facebook Diplomacy - No wonders MySpace is dying.

QOTW - Are Universal Chargers a Good Idea?

III
Google Unified Communication - For World Domination
Universal Chargers - As long as they have a standard.
1941 Science Test - Shows how we changed

Extras:
Best Way to Photograph Fireworks
iPhone Projector
NES iPhone Dock
Wall Socket USB Hub

YouTubin
Is the iPhone 3GS Waterproof? - Watch what happens when it falls in a pool.
Thriller 64

HP Technology Forum Videos - Backchannel
CES Videos - Geekazine
CMSExpo Videos - SDRNews

The Geekazine Weekly Podcast is produced every week for distrobution on Wednesdays. Feel free to contact Geekazine for more information. You can also Twitter - Plurk - Myspace - Facebook Group - FriendFeed or Digg the Podcast. The Geekazine Podcast is under a Creative Commons no-deriv license

You might remember the products. You might remember the hype. Then, you are tooling down highway 41 years later and all of a sudden you think to yourself - “Hey, whatever happened to…”

Failed ideas. Maybe it was a great idea, but wasn’t made right, or design errors brought it down. Maybe it was just a bad product. Well, let’s take a stroll down memory lane and see if we cannot repeat these errors again.

Oh yeah, why 16? Well because we could.

The Computer Watch: Whether it was the Ruputer, the MSN Direct ‘Smart’ Watches, the Timex Data Link Watch or another gadget watch - BTW - I remember having a “Transformers watch”. It was awesome!

Still, the Dick Tracey style communication watches, the “Computer on a wrist”, never really hit it off. I even remember a watch that gave you directions. You would put in the paper tape and turn a little dial to indicate where you are and where you are going.transformers-watch

Read the rest of this entry »

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July 4th, 2008 - The company that used to be called “Ask Jeeves”, but is now Ask.com officially announced they acquired the Lexico Publishing Group. The LPG is a company that built a series of reference websites. Most notably Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com. The transaction was an all cash one, and undisclosed.

Other items in Tech history this week: Hotmail is launched, AOL buys Mapquest, the eBay Baby, in 2001 the P4 1.6 was released at $294 and a lot more in the Geekazine Quickcast

Bloomberg reports that Amazon is cutting ties to associates in states that are moving to up the sales tax ante.

The story is a little murky, but it appears to involve blog and web ads on third party sites.

I think this is what is going on: Say I have a blog in North Carolina. Someone visits my blog and sees an ad for an Amazon product and clicks through to the Amazon mothership in Seattle. North Carolina wants a piece of the pie, not because I live in North Carolina (I don’t), but because the ad I clicked on was in North Carolina.

Amazon thinks this is probably unconstitutional. I suspect they have a case. It’s like North Carolina’s charging me sales tax me for buying something because I happened to see it advertised on a billboard in North Carolina.

The full story is here.

Another take, that’s a little clearer on how the proposal works, is here. The second source confirms that the state wants to define a blog ad as a “physical presence” in the state (even though the blog ad is probably hosted on a server somewhere else entirely, maybe even in another country, and just embedded from afar).

Afterthought: It looks to me that, under this approach, if I lived in a sales tax state other than North Carolina, a retailer might be forced to collect and I might have to pay sales tax for both North Carolina and for my state of residence.

Then I fixed it.

The new laptop arrived Friday afternoon. I spend Friday afternoon and evening doing basic configuration and Saturday fine-tuning it.

Laptop on My Grandmother's Desk

Read the rest of this entry »

Busy Week
Thanks for coming to the site. We had another great week - busy week. It was a lot of fun and really productive.

Post - HPTF

Of course, we went to Vegas the week before to cover the HP Technology Forum Expo. Andy McCaskey, Kara Karsten and myself were working hard with interviews, product reviews and more. This week was planning to get some of the videos out to you. So far, we’ve posted the HP POD video on Friday and have a lot more coming soon.

Summer of Podcasts - Podcast Carnivale

This is what really took up the majority of the week. The last month I have been working hard in getting prizes together. Now it’s time to put a contest together. That is where the Summer of Podcasts comes in. Each week, Podcasters will be giving out codewords during their shows. We will be giving away a USB wireless VGA from IOGEAR (See the video below), a WebAround Web privacy screen and a lot more. The best part is a lot of prizes are from the Podcasters themselves. Caffination is giving some Coffee, Bageltech News gave a NYC canvas print, Bwana.org is giving Team Fortress 2 for PC and a T-Shirt, SDRNews is giving a MagicJack, Techpodcasts (Geek News Central) is giving an iPod Touch: there is a lot more.

Wednesday, July 1st is when the contest starts. Check out the site before hand to which shows are giving codewords for the week.

Bands

It’s summertime, so the band ramps up in it’s playing. It’s all well and good - I enjoy taking the trips and playing the gigs. This last weekend I played 3 shows and it wasn’t even Sunday. This afternoon is one more show. Next week is just about the same.

Interview

This last week, I was interviewed on the Isthmus - a local tabloid - style paper in the Madison area. The interview will be out next week, when that happens, I will post it.

PC/Mac Smackdown

Had lunch with Cal last Wednesday. He said - “Hey, why don’t you come on the show”. I said “Sure, why not?”. Therefore, I was on the PC / Mac Smackdown with Cal Davis and Rachel Baker.

Windows 7

Pre-Orders of Windows 7 means a significant discount. I have Windows 7 RC on my Dell D600 and really like how it works. What is even more interesting - Windows 7 works a lot better on that machine than when I put on Ubuntu 9.04. Ubuntu would lag when I was working - and I mean REALLY Lag. I would litterally select something, count to 5, then watch it execute.

I am really impressed with this OS, so I am excited this is coming out.

MJ, FF and EM AND BM

It was a sad week for a lot of people. Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson took the Trifecta this week as all three passed. Ed McMahon was the sidekick of Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show, Farrah Fawcett was the poster girl of the 70’s and of course, Michael Jackson was the King of Pop. While I was never a big MJ fan, I do appreciate his music and also how he let Weird Al Yankovic to make fun of his music.

I remember when I first heard “Eat it” 0n the radio. While I never listened to “Bad”, I did have the “Even Worse” album which featured “Fat”.

*Update - Just as I published this, the Internet found out that Billy Mays - the Oxy Clean promoter (as well as Mighty Putty, Big City Sliders, Kaboom and a lot more) was found dead at his  home. He was 50. I guess it’s more than a Trifecta…

Studio

This week was a lot of work with the studio. Only problem - I can’t find my staple gun. I had it, then it dissapeared. I am not sure where it went. AUGH!

Still, the new studio is doing well. I am hoping to record the first video there by Mid-week. My bedroom is getting cluttered with PC stuff and that needs to head down to the Dungeon. The door to that room is the main reason why I call it the Dungeon.

Looking at Phones

I have to admit, I have been looking at the iPhone 3GS. The one thing I like is I have fatter fingers. I was able to use the screen a lot better than with the 3G. For instance, when I hit the “N”, on the 3G, I would always miss and hit the “M”. However, with the 3GS, I have not done anything different and seem to be hitting the “N” key and actually getting an “N”.

I still have some tests to go. I am also looking at the Palm Pre, but in order to do that, I would have to switch to Sprint, which I don’t know if I am ready to do. Android is a possibility, but I really don’t want the G1. I am waiting for the Lenovo version.

—–

That’s pretty much it this week. Keep watching the site for more info on the contest. Of course if you want to give a prize for the contest, let me know.

Fretlight Guitars - Video Review

This week for TVazine, we go through a review that I thought was all but lost. A couple months ago, a hard drive crashed and with it - a few of the video reviews I did early on that were not published yet. However, I do back up systems, and found that this video was saved in a backup I did the month before.

It was a copy that I already edited down, so I couldn’t put it into 720 format, but I was able to do a little tweaking on it. I also am playing with some new title intros, so let me know if you like the new intro.

In the meantime, we review the Fretlight guitar - a special guitar that connects to the PC via USB, then lights up the fretboard to direct you on how to play certain songs. This guitar is great for learning and comes with software to help out.

We look at the guitar and where it stands as a musical instrument and a teaching tool.

Latest Geekazine Podcast

Weekly Podcast Ep 93 - 7-01-09 - Summer of Podcasts Edition..

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June 30, 2009 | Comments Off | Podcast RSS

Latest Geekazine Quickcast

Week in Tech History - 6-29-09 - Ask.com buys Dictionary.com..

The Quickcast is a podcast on various topics. Mon. - "Week in Tech History", Thur. - "5 minutes" & segments in-between.

June 29, 2009 | Comment | Quickcast RSS