Posts Tagged ‘phone’

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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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.

I use Twitter a lot. I wanted to stay informed, especially from friends. I decided to port all direct messages to my cell phone. That way I didn’t have to install a Twitter client. At first that was great – I could respond to people I need to talk to.

That has all changed with the Twitterbot.

Now, if I “Follow” the wrong person, I get a direct message:

Thanks for following me. I hope to talk to you, but in the meantime: here is a free gift hllp://i.am.spamming/you.

I am not impressed – In fact, I am downright annoyed. You want to get unfollowed by me? Then all you have to do is send me a bot like that. I’ll unfollow you in a heartbeat.

I don’t mind @replies. But the direct replies are the ones that go to the cell phone too. I am glad someone is trying to open communication, but this is redicuous.

So what can be done to change this?

Twitter could block directly direct messages – Maybe set up a blocker to direct messages until the two have conversed or a 30 day grace period has passed. Maybe even an

“Allow this person to DM you” option. Just because I want to follow them doesn’t mean I want them to spam me.

DM Karma – If your Karma is below a certain level, you cannot DM anyone.

In the meantime, I am going to have to turn off the option to SMS me for direct messages. I guess what was a good thing last year might not be so much this.

Within the second Podcast of the Madison Podcaster Group, we discuss hosting of a podcast or video cast. The biggest issue in hosting is bandwidth – since a podcast can get pretty large in size.

Within, we talk about Amazon S3, Blubrry network, PodBean, Libsyn and many more services. For Video, we have YouTube, uStream, Mogolus and blip.tv.

During the recording, a phone was a little close to the recording apparatus, in which some GSM noises came into play. While it is present at times, it does not interfere with the podcast. Chalk that one up to experience….

*Next Meeting – April 7th *

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (33.4MB)

A 14-year-old girl gets a $298.00 ticket and has her cellphone confistcated for texting in class. In other words, she has been charged with a crime.

Read the full story here.

There is, as any parent would know, much more to the story.

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You’ve been working at your job for years. You’ve made lots of money for the company and are the most loyal employee they know of. Yet, tough times are ahead and the company decides you are one of the 10% they have to let go to stay afloat. It’s a frustrating thing to have happen, but what are you gonna do?

Now let’s flip that: You are at your job and survive the cut, but now you are in the position to take up a part of that person who was laid off.

As companies like Intel and Google are looking at trimming the fat, it makes the average consumer wonder – what will our customer experience be without 10% of the workforce?

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (3.1MB)

Wow. It was about a year ago I asked for people to send in thoughts as to what to expect in 2008. I also made some Technology predictions. But the real question was – How far off was I?

This is actually part 1 of a 2-part story. This first part reviews the predictions I made last year and how far off I was. Part 2 will have this years predictions, including predictions from CEO’s CTO’s TechPodcasters and even a Psychic.

So without any further ado, let’s pick apart my idiocy from last year:

OLPC will have some growing pains. The first part of OLPC will be the easiest. Maintaining the machines will be the trick. Microsoft coming onboard will muddy the water, but they might be able to do things like offer a better support network to third world countries.

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I got to play with a Developer Android G1 on Sunday (Thanks Abraham!). It was an interesting experience and something totally different from the iPhone. Here is what I saw:

Layout – Slider screen The phone only slides the screen to reveal the keyboard. That leaves the button layout on the right side (in landscape mode) in the way. I was able to palm a button while working on it, which ultimately took me out of what I was doing.
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This week’s LIVE Show, we invite Peter Radizeski – http://www.rad-info.net/ and Jaki Levy- http://www.arrowrootmedia.com/. We talked about cell phones, the data on them, elections, Yahoo email, the Palm Nova and a whole lot more.

About 10 minutes into the show, the ustream connection reset. Therefore the 1st video is introductions, while the 2nd video is the show.
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This week on the LIVE Show, we talk about the new Blackberry Storm. It came out this last weekend in the US and it brings up the discussion of Smartphones all over again. We talk about contracts, other phones and availability.

We do touch a bit on Justin.tv, but I point everyone to the article I did earlier in the week. We also talked a little about Windows 7, CES and a lot more.

Hour 1
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Last year we had one of the weirdest news stories come out. A man was thought to be killed by his LG phone battery when it exploded in his shirt pocket. There was a lot of controversy over this issue at the time – whether an item that is pretty volitile should be regulated and monitored more closely. It was then discovered…. well, you’ll have to listen to the Quickcast to find out what happened next.

Also, Microsoft is first spoken of, Fortran 2003 is released, Ken Jennings looses, Roxio buys Napster and so much more on the Quickcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (6.8MB)