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.

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.

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.

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.

Blu-Ray: It may have won the battle, but it never won the war. For all of 2007, we wondered whether it would be HD-DVD or Blu-Ray that would be the next generation of discs we could get from Blockbuster and Netflix. Who would have thought that the winner would also be the looser?

While I do admit that Blu-Ray is superior to DVD, it behooves me to think “Will there ever be a day where you say ‘Nah. It’s good enough’?” Could there even be a product that is so sharp and so clear that it could hurt our eyes?

- When I was in the airport returning to Vegas last week, I saw an old lady in a wheelchair using one. She was checking her email. BTW - Other airports should take a lesson from Las Vegas: FREE WIFI.

Anywho, technically the OLPC is still producing. However , with all the hype that it had, we should have seen this computer more than once in a Vegas airport.

Now, the old OS interface - Sugar - is being retrofitted on older computers. It might spawn a life of it’s own, while One Laptop Per Child continues to flop around like a fish out of water.

Gizmondo: Two handheld game consoles made the list. This first one was brought out in 2006 by Tiger while the Gizmondo 2 was suppose to come out in Dec. of 2009. Well, the first one didn’t really dent the market. While it had some great games from companies like EA - not to mention the size of today’s cell phones - People didn’t seem to get behind it.

As of right now, Gizmondo 2 is still slated for November 2009, but don’t be surprised if this turns up on the Vaporware 2009 lists.

nGage: I remember when I got my Motorola Razr that this device was coming out and I contemplated waiting for it. I decided I needed a new phone that day (it was a moral imperative). I guess it was a good thing that I didn’t get it, because it didn’t last. And oh yeah, it didn’t have a camera.

It was suppose to rival the Gameboy Advanced while being a mobile phone. While the nGage name still lives on in a smartphone, the handheld gaming system is part of the “Free” box at the garage sale.

Tamagotchi: There was a craze for a while, then… well, that was it. My brother had a Tamagotchi. I thought it was pointless because I wanted a REAL dragon. Never got one, though.

The Tamagotchi was the pet on a keychain. You would have to feed them and take care of them or else they would die. But heck - it’s an electronic wonder, so that’s OK. It was the technical version of the Pet Rock except you had to actually take care of this pet rock.

While the Tamagotchi was pretty big in Japan, it was only a small fad for a little while in the states. Tamagotchi is still around, but not in the same way. I suppose though you could find one at Goodwill or something.

DreamCast: Sega’s next big system was going to be the best system in the world. Then Xbox came out. Then Game cube. Suddenly Sega wasn’t seeing any profit out of the DreamCast. Finally Sega said they were getting out of the market and solely working on games.

Amstrad E-m@iler Telephone: I know - It looks like a cash register. Actually, there were a few different “Email appliances” out there. You would dial in to your ISP, send and receive email, then disconnect and read, then write.

It does have some decent applications to it. It would make a good TTY phone and it does have video capabilities. Still, if you are living in an analog phone world, this would be perfect. Otherwise, you could just do all that from your computer and Skype.

Apple Newton: At the time, we were getting a handle on PDAs. Apple was in a downward turn after John Sculley replaced Steve Jobs and the Newton was going to be the new wave. There was a small following, but it never really hit big.

When Steve Jobs came back, he discontinued this product. However, the Newton was not a total loss - the original iPod OS was based on a version of the Newton OS.

Microsoft Bob: What can we really say about Bob? Well, did you remember Clippy? Think about that on a Desktop level.

The Bob program took over your desktop and made it more “Fun” while putting productivity at your fingertips. However putting an interface over an OS on a computer can take even more resource. Bob became a cumbersome program and really wasn’t working as well as they thought. Windows 98 marked the end of Bob.

There are companies still trying to do alternate interfaces. Like we stated earlier - Sugar is an overlay OS. While it is not graphically intense as Bob, it still does the same thing.

DiVX: This was a failure on one level, but a success on another. Divx used the MPEG-4 format since the start and the system was impressive at the time. It became an underground sensation as people would rip DIVX movies and shows. Of course there was also an issue of piracy.

Those still using Divx, you should thank the now Defunct Circuit City for pushing this format.

Syncronys SoftRAM: SoftRAM was the ability to double your memory in your computer. However, in order to do it, it needed more hard drive space. But back when you had your 486 computer and memory was $40 a meg, this was a cheap way to help with your computer.

Nobody said it was faster, though.

There was an issue by the FTC that brought forth a question of if SoftRAM was misleading and fraudulent (since you could manually do the same thing SoftRAM did). While no prosecution was done, SoftRAM fell into the night - especially when memory became cheaper to buy.

PointCast Network: I had Pointcast Network. It was called “Push” technology. Basically, it would get news and information, then when the screensaver turned on, it would show that news, weather and a lot more.

Pointcast was always in deliberation over it’s sale. When it finally did find a home, the system was in it’s downward spiral. It was discontinued in 2000.

Iomega Zip Drive: I remember buying my Zip drive. I had the rebate coupon. Never got that check. I also had a rebate on the disks I bought that I never saw. I lost big on that.

While Iomega had a great run, it never really did what it said - replace the floppy disk. In fact, nobody replaced it. I still believe it was because nobody offered it to manufacturers for a low price or Open source. See, if you would have made the drive Open to redistribute, you could make the money on the disks.

CD’s did have the advantage with the CD-R being really cost effective. If you watched the boards, you could get 100 CD-R’s for 20 cents a disk. Still, if Iomega would have opened up their technologies, they might have stuck around a little longer.

DigiScents iSmell: Well, it’s exactly what it says. You plug it into the USB port and certain smells would come across depending on which website you visit. Give you a new sense on browsing. You could also seal scents in an email if you wanted.

Could you imagine what would have happened if that took off and it was part of the iPhone? The iFart app would have taken on a whole new idea.

WebTV: Once again, this was a great idea and perfect for those who couldn’t get cable and didn’t want a computer. You basically hook up the box to the TV and surf the web and email right from your living room. Of course technology got past the box. MSN rebranded the system and you can still get it as MSNtv, but why wouldn’t you want to get a computer, or even an XBOX?

So do you remember a gadget or gizmo that didn’t quite make it? What is it? Tell us about it!

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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.

It came with Ubuntu 8.10. I made sure it worked; the wireless, the webcam, and everything else worked flawlessly.

It did not come with a restoration disk, though it did come with a Ubuntu disk and a sofware disk, which I haven’t even bothered to look at I. It did come with a utiity to burn a restoration disk, so I burned two copies and copied the restoration *.iso over the network to another box.

Then I broke the computer.

I was toying with the idea of putting Debian on it, so I did (I have a minor quibble with how Ubuntu handles the su logon). The wireless didn’t work. I knew I could get it to work, but I decided it wasn’t worth the effort, so I restored the manufacturer’s image from one of the DVDs I had burned.

Here’s the box with the Ubuntu load (the background is a picture I took at the meditation area at the A. R. E.)

As soon as I got Ubuntu working again, it wanted to update itself from v. 8.10 to v. 9.04, which took about an hour and a half, because it was a major revision change.

There was no big change to the interface, but lots of updated programs. The logout menu got moved from the “System” menu on the left to the right; other than that, there was no pointless tinkering with the menus to convince you that you had something new unlike Micros–oh, never mind.

Once that was done, I copied my backed up files from my file server. I included my hidden configuration files for the Pan newsreader, the Opera browser, OpenOffice, and Fluxbox. Putting them in place ensured that, once I installed those programs (none of which, except for Open Office, are part of the Ubuntu’s out-of-the-box version of the Gnome desktop), I would have my mail and newsreader logons and databases, my wordprocessor templates and preferences right there without having to do any reconfiguration.

Most of the programs I wanted I could find through the Synaptic Package Manager. I checked the box, told the computer to install them, and there they were (by the way, you don’t have to reboot a Linux box after installing programs). Some of the free but non-open-source programs, such as Opera, were not in the repositories (”repos”); I had to download them and install them manually (I know that could sound impressive, but it really isn’t; it’s sort of like downloading an executable to a folder on a Windows box and double-clicking it and then following the directions).

I could not find Fluxbox, which I planned to use for day-to-day computing, in the Ubuntu repos; that I had to compile from source. Again, to someone not familiar with Linux, that might sound impressive, but it’s not–it’s just a matter of following directions.

Once I installed Fluxbox, it automatically appeared on the “Change Sessions” menu which can be accessed on the login screen. When I have to do something (primarily administrative stuff) that might be easier in Gnome, I can easily change interfaces.

I’m still tinkering with stuff–the Samba networking needs tweaking and LISa has been decrepated in this version of Ubuntu, so I need to find a substitute for it. But it’s pretty much ready to go with Fluxbox. Here’s a picture of the webcam under Fluxbox; the background picture is the sky over Virginia Beach, Va. on a unsettled day:

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.

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.