Month: June 2006

The D: All Things Digital

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date June 19, 2006

The Wall Street Journal released their report from the Walt Mossberg’s CEO love-in from a few weeks back.

(FYI – “The D” is a small conference for executives from large companies and essentially is a series of discussions and interviews conducted by the Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.)

Interviews include Bill Gates, “who showed off a dramatic new version of the dominant Office software, took shots at search rival Google, and declared the network-TV business dead,” Robert Iger (Walt Disney CEO), “who didn’t agree with him,” Sir Howard Stringer (Sony CEO), who was indicted by Martha Stewart for cluttering her life with wires, and Barry Sonnenfeld, (Movie Director) who thinks the movie to DVD release window is too short.

Much of this year’s conference was devoted to the changing media landscape and the disruption that technology is creating for old business models.

If you have a WSJ subscription, the D conference report is essential reading. I’ll provide some highlights in subsequent postings.

Read

Links

Thursday Links

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date June 15, 2006

Nike+iPod available for pre-order [via TUAW]
Nintendo launches DS Lite – [via GigaOm]
Grand Theft Table Tennis? – Rockstar Games Table Tennis debuts.

General

Difficulty posting?

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date June 14, 2006

I’m trying to figure out what the heck is wrong….

[Update] Posting should work fine now. I think there was something wrong with the Ajaxy fanciness I had going on, so we are back to our old, faithful Stewtopia UI.

General

Wednesday’s Links

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date June 14, 2006

Engadget and the WSJ have the scoop on MusicGremlin’s Gremlin, a WiFi enabled portable WMA player. Just don’t feed it after midnight.

CinemaNow has added Fox movies and (old) tv shows to their lineup. The first season of 24 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have been announced so far.

Google Browser Sync for Firefox keeps links, tabs and passwords synced on different machines. It’s a little slow, but it gets me closer to using Firefox full time.

Wireless

Ow! That Hz

I heard this story on the NPR Story of the Day podcast a couple of weeks back and then a friend sent me an article from the NYTimes yesterday.

The gist is, in the UK, “inventor Howard Stapleton” discovered that teenagers can hear frequencies that many adults can’t and so he decided to turn those frequencies against them. Dubbed the “Mosquito teen repellent,” the frequency would be emitted at irregular intervals and would prove to be really irritating to teenagers and they would leave the premises.

The twist, however, is that teenagers have turned this invention on it’s head and are using it to send text messages undetected in class to one another. Most teachers can’t hear the tone and the virtual note passing is successful.

I thought I was done with the story until I ran across this while surfing tonight. Blogger Ochen K has the original mosquito sample as well as a series of test frequencies for your listening (ear shattering) pleasure.

For me it stops hurting at around 20,000Hz, whereas my wife is fitting in perfectly with our over-30 demographic.

What frequencies can you hear?

Site News

I’m back

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date June 13, 2006

for now. After a little hiatus, hopefully you’ll be seeing more posts in the not-too-distant future. Hope you didn’t miss me too much.

Google

Google Sketchup = Bee’s Knees

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date June 13, 2006

Wow… I had seen Sketchup at MacWorld Expo this year and thought, wow, that’s kind of neat, another 3D drawing tool that I may have some use for, but not $200 some odd-dollar use for. Along comes Google shortly after Macworld and scoops up the company and makes the program free… for Windows.

Well, laddies, get your drawing pencils ready. As of yesterday, the free version of Google Sketchup is available for Mac OS X and boy is this program cool. Most CAD or 3D programs have been expensive and fairly difficult to use, not so with Sketchup. Take the 10 minute video tutorial and you’ll be up and running fairly quickly. You’re not going to releasing the next Pixar movie with this app, but you will can make some 3d representations of objects pretty darn fast.

Call me lazy, but I’ve always wanted a program like this to layout a room or space to get a sense of what it might look like before I do all the heavy lifting. This app is so easy to use, my back thanks you, Google.

Download