Archive for June, 2009

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

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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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:46 — 22.3MB)

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.

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Geekazine is proud to announce a new sponsor on Geekazine and TVazine. Eastbay and Footlocker.

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Therefore, check out the great deals we can give you on Eastbay and Footlocker.

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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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:12 — 14.7MB)

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

During the week, we learned about how HP has worked on putting a Data Center in a place you would not normally expect. A Shipping POD.

Shipping containers have been used for years to send items overseas. Cars, boats, heavy equipment, or if you’re packing your house, put it in a POD and move it. More recent PODs have been promoted as the next generation in moving. Instead of a moving truck, you load up the POD and call the the company to pick up and drop at the desired location. Even this year, I have seen local Fireworks tents have a POD next to them to lock up all the fireworks.

Yet HP has a different use for them in Datacenters. If your server room runs out of space, or maybe you are building or reconstructing. You could even use this HP POD in an emergency situation.

Andy McCaskey talks with Steve about what an HP POD has to offer.

So Cal and I were having lunch the other day and he says – “Why don’t you come on the show”. I say “Why not?” He says “Yeah, why not.” and I say “Ye… wait. I have to get more Pizza Hut Buffet Pizza.” Then we go get some more Pizza.

Nonetheless, that evening we got together and talked on many topics in the PC/Mac Smackdown. We talked about the iLiver, Morro and Netbooks.

Cal and Rachel do a great job in this show and it was a lot of fun. There was a lot of items we didn’t talk about on air, but you get the idea.

Also, you should Razz Cal about getting a Dell Mini 10v.

The July contest will be a little more involved than we normally do. However, it will be a blast as we are involving many different podcasters to join in to the Summer of Podcasts – Podcast Carnivale. Here is the official press release:

Summer of Podcasts – Podcast Carnivale set for Month of July

Podcasters are joining together to give away a lot of great prizes in the Summer of Podcasts – Podcast Carnivale contest. All you have to do is listen to win.

Madison, WI June 27th 2009  — Podcastmadness.com announces a new contest for Podcasters called “The Summer of Podcasts”. It will involve several podcasters during the month of July and will end on August 9th when we draw winners for the “Podcast Carnivale”.

On July 1st, head over to http://www.podcastmadness.com. We will give you a few podcasts to listen to. Within the podcast, you will hear a “Codeword”. Head back over to podcastmadness.com and enter in the codeword.

On August 9th, we will hold the first ever “Podcast Carnivale”, starting at 12 PM CST. It will be an open forum, a display of items, couple of reviews, a Techpodcast Roundtable (at 3 PM CST) and it will all wrap up with the drawing of winners at 6 PM CST. http://www.podcastcarnivale.com is where the event will be held.

“This is a great contest and I am proud to be spearheading”, says Jeffrey Powers of the Geekazine Podcast. “We have some awesome prizes from companies like IOGEAR, IVY Worldwide and Webaround. We also have some great prizes donated by the Podcasters themselves.”

Coffee, a $50 gift card to http://www.nba.com, a canvas print of NY city – As well as a Wireless USB VGA from IOGEAR, an iPod Touch from Techpodcasts.com and much more.

“We will also accept any contest donations during the month of July, so if you have a product you want to have added to the list, let me know”. Jeffrey adds.

About PodcastMadness:

Contact:

Jeffrey Powers, Geekazine

Geekazine
608-205-4378

http://www.geekazine.com

Geekazine is a part of http://www.jmpenterprise.com and a proud member of http://www.techpodcasts.com

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Press Release can be found at:

Press Release: Summer of Podcasts – Podcast Carnivale set for Month of July

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1,002.5KB)