HARDWARE: Meet Wu and Kong

Sunday, November 20, 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vkk8kMm08cA

Ping pong robots
Written by Lucy Black
Friday, 11 November 2011 13:00

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Meet Wu and Kong – the latest in ping pong playing robots. They may not achieve exciting matches at the moment, but the fact that they can do the job at all is an indication of how fast things are moving.

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Hmm, seems like their nerds are ahead of our nerds. Except that they have a nerd girl!

Guess one should NOT plan to specialize in anything a robot can do!

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HARDWARE: VERIZON DVR and EAS incompatible

Thursday, November 17, 2011

In a recent test of the Emergency Alert System, the Verizon DVR stupidly assumed that there was a new recording of a series. So I lost LMAD and VARNEY. The test was at 1053. SO I now have a few minutes of recording of each show. I only save one on the theory of if I don’t watch it within a day, I won’t get to it. Except for power failures and EASs. Argh!

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TECHNOLOGY: The Vikings mysterious crystal

Saturday, November 12, 2011

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2056479/Vikings-used-mysterious-sunstone-sat-nav-sail-America.html

Sunstone satnav: How Vikings used mysterious crystal to guide them to America
Norse warriors located sun through clouds with Iceland spar crystal
By SIMON TOMLINSON
Last updated at 12:44 PM on 2nd November 2011

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Ancient legends of Viking mariners using mysterious sunstones to reveal the position of the sun on a cloudy day may well be true, according to a new study.

Before the invention of the compass, Norse adventurers travelled thousands of kilometres across the oceans toward Greenland and most likely as far as North America centuries ahead of Christopher Columbus.

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Fascinating stuff. And, that the knowledge and wisdom was lost for centuries.

Why?

That’s even the better story.

And, what else have we lost?

Also, could this “trick” be useful today? It’s not like no gets lost.

How else can we use it? How did these “primitives” explain it to themselves and what does that tell us?

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TECHNOLOGY: $7k car with 80 mile range?

Friday, November 11, 2011

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/11/05/0041259/streetscooter-the-7000-open-source-modular-electric-vehicle

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“A consortium of eighty companies and developers have developed the StreetScooter, a modular electric vehicle developed in a year using open-source methodologies. With a top speed of 74mph and an 80-mile range, the vehicle is expected to cost $7000 and be available in Germany in 2013.”

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And, apparently no Gooferment money involved?

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SERVICE: LISTSERV shutting down

Saturday, November 5, 2011

AOL To Discontinue LISTSERV

by Soulskill

alphadogg writes “On December 1, AOL will shut down its free LISTSERV-based mailing-list hosting operations, the company has told mailing list administrators. ‘If your list is still actively used, please make arrangements to find another service prior to the shutdown date and notify your list members of the transition details,’ an email notice sent out by AOL stated. At the peak of the service’s popularity in the late 1990s, AOL was the third-largest provider of mailing lists, serving more than a million users.”

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Still want to bet on “the cloud”?

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TECHNOLOGY: Email isn’t always needed?

Sunday, October 30, 2011

http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Irishman-sent-a-message-in-a-bottle-as-the-Titanic-sunk-132847328.html

Irishman sent a message in a bottle as the Titanic sunk
Jeremiah Burke from Co. Cork sent his family a note of farewell
By JORDANA KOZUPSKY, IrishCentral.com Staff Writer
Published Saturday, October 29, 2011, 10:41 AMUpdated Saturday, October 29, 2011, 10:41 AM

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And the message wound up on a beach near his home and it got through.

Amazing?

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TECHNOLOGY: Yet Another “Digital Public Library of America”

Saturday, October 29, 2011

http://dp.la/

The DPLA Steering Committee is leading the first concrete steps toward the realization of a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all.

About | Elements of the DPLA | Secretariat | Steering Committee

The DPLA planning initiative grew out of an October 2010 meeting at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, which brought together over 40 representatives from foundations, research institutions, cultural organizations, government, and libraries to discuss best approaches to building a national digital library. In December 2010, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, convened leading experts in libraries, technology, law, and education to begin work on this problem; a two-year process of intense grassroots community organization, beginning in October 2011 and hosted at the Berkman Center, will result in a realistic and detailed workplan for launching the DPLA, as well as unveiling of a prototype of the system with specially digitized materials.

The vision of a national digital library has been circulating among librarians, scholars, educators, and private industry representatives since the early 1990s, but it has not yet materialized. Efforts led by a range of organizations, including the Library of Congress, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive, have successfully built resources that provide books, images, historical records, and audiovisual materials to anyone with Internet access. Many universities, public libraries, and other public-spirited organizations have digitized materials that could be brought together under the frame of the DPLA, but these digital collections often exist in silos. Compounding this problem are disparate technical standards, disorganized and incomplete metadata, and a host of legal issues. No project has yet succeeded in bringing these different viewpoints, experiences, and collections together with leading technical experts and the best of private industry to find solutions to these complex challenges. Users have neither coherent access to these materials nor tools to use them in new and exciting ways, and institutions have no clear blueprint for creating a shared infrastructure to serve the public good. The time is right to launch an ambitious project to realize the great promise of the Internet for the advancement of sharing information and of using technology to enable new knowledge and discoveries in the United States.

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What about the Internet Archive, Google’s book capture, and the myriad of other such efforts?

I guess time will sort it all out.

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TECHNOLOGY: Publishers on the road to perdition

Friday, October 28, 2011

http://www.impactlab.net/2011/10/20/amazon-signs-up-writers-pushes-out-publishers/

October 20th, 2011 at 10:55 am

Amazon signs up writers, pushes out publishers

in: Business, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

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Readers have been taught by Amazon.com that they do not need bookstores. Now Amazon is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers.

Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. It is a striking acceleration of the retailer’s fledging publishing program that will place Amazon squarely in competition with the New York houses that are also its most prominent suppliers.

It has set up a flagship line run by a publishing veteran, Laurence Kirshbaum, to bring out brand-name fiction and nonfiction. It signed its first deal with the self-help author Tim Ferriss. Last week it announced a memoir by the actress and director Penny Marshall, for which it paid $800,000, a person with direct knowledge of the deal said.

Publishers say Amazon is aggressively wooing some of their top authors. And the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide.

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Publishers caught a glimpse of a future they fear has no role for them late last month when Amazon introduced the Kindle Fire, a tablet for books and other media sold by Amazon. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the company’s chief executive, referred several times to Kindle as “an end-to-end service,” conjuring up a world in which Amazon develops, promotes and delivers the product.

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The days of the “publisher” are over. “Dead Man Walking”.

I “LULUed” (i.e., self-published) “CHURCH 10●19●62”. Just by getting it listed on Amazon, I was automagically invited to ebook it for the Kindle. I gave the OK and they did all the work. And, then did it for Europe. Translation and all. (Wish I read German just to see how good a job it did on ½ a million words. It can’t be good, but it might be funny.)

Then, with their KINDLE DIRECT PUBLISHING program, you can get content out there for the KINDLE and get 70% of the proceeds.

It’s amazing. It’s transformative. It’s destruction and disintermediation!

Too bad for the dinosaurs.

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HARDWARE: IPAD and PROJECT GUTTENBURG

Thursday, October 27, 2011

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37800

GIVEN: There’s a lot of good old content for youngsters on PROJECT GUTTENBERG.

FIND: If it was on the IPAD, then maybe the child would read it.

SOLUTION: Overlooking the issue of content selection for the moment …

I found an appropriate text — at least appropriate to this fat old white guy injineer — so I fowarded the link to the appropriate Mommy for approval.

(Our Girl’s Rule #1 for dealing with children: “Everything must be mommy approved first!” Boy, I miss her.)

So while awaiting approval, and being the grumpy old techie skeptic, I sprung to my IPAD — okay, so “sprung” is an exaggeration — for a test.

Fired up the safari browser, punched the link for the “book”, and what to my wondering eyes do appear … an error message about “FRAMES interrupted”.

(Nothing is ever as easy as it should be when it come to technology.)

So remembering how I got my novel “CHURCH 10●19●62” on to my IPAD, before Amazon listed it for the Kindle, …

I downloaded the illustrated epud format file to my mac.

Created an email with and attachment and sent it to “fat old white guy injineers ipad @ reinke dot cc”. (That’s an email address defined on the iPad.)

Open the email on the iPad.

Double tap on the attachment.

Select open with iBooks.

Voila!!!

It is there like a “real book”.

As a follow up, I’m going to ping an apple fanboy that I know for his interpretation of this story. (I’m sure it’s something like “tap the bezel while temporarily suspending Angry Birds, then with your left thumb stuck … in your right ear, while humming any Sousa melody for Dragon, poke your right eye out with the stylus. And it’ll work perfectly. You shouldn’t have reset the yada yada yada. And, that’s why Steve Jobs should be canonized.)

YMMV

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SERVICE: FOURSQUARE allows someone else to be mayor of my house?

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

https://foursquare.com/v/ferds–fremont/4c59d05b2091a593f7d65dd0

And, interesting rant about software, how is someone else the “mayor” of 51 Fremont?

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