Category: Technology
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NASA Beams The Beatles into Deep Space
From the “wow that was cool department,” NASA transmitted The Beatles song Across the Universe into deep space earlier this month. It was aimed at the North Star, Polaris–located over 430 light years from Earth–and will travel at 186,000 miles per second through the cosmos. It was transmitted on February…
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Netgear Fails to Connect on First Impression
In a previous post I wrote about a great out-of-the box customer experience I had with an Olympus E-510 SLR digital camera. Of course for every great experience there is likely to be one not so great. I think you know what’s coming. Very recently I opened up a new…
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Olympus Gets the Quick Start Guide
The holidays are probably a dim memory, with most of us having been sucked back into the rock pile. That makes it an ideal time to look back on a customer experience I had with one of my electronic gadget gifts, an Olympus E-510 digital SLR camera. My primary digital…
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Disney’s DVD Fast Play Technology Isn’t Fast
If you have kids you know what I’m about to describe. You have wiped the fingerprint smudges from a Disney DVD, loaded it in the player all while your kids are screaming to see it. On comes the FBI warning, then the Interpol warning (sometimes in French, that’s really helpful),…
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Sonos Solves Leopard Issues and Delivers a Great Customer Experience
I’m a huge fan of the Sonos music system. As posted a few weeks ago I was unable to get it to work with Mac OS Leopard. In that post I called for Sonos to develop a new version of their desktop controller software that would be compatible with Leopard.…
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Internet Appliance for the Nuclear Family
As computing evolves, networks expand and technology converges, we are seeing an explosion of new appliances hit the marketplace designed to help consumers remain connected to their new webbed world. There are lots of them that do many things, but the designers who think about culture and society alongside technology…
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Extra, Extra, Click All About It
Subscriptions to newspapers are down. Newsstand sales are down. Most people get their news from the web (or Jon Stewart). This what we are hearing. But I would posit that we need both the analog paper and the online interactive edition found on the web. I have been a regular…
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A WiFi Alarm Clock, But Will it Help You Remember Your Dreams?
Chumby is an alarm clock, music player and news reader. For less that $200 you can put one on your nightstand, connect it to your WiFi network and launch dozens of wizards to display on the 3.5″ screen. It runs on Linux and since it’s open source, I’m sure dozens…
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Did Leopard Kill My Hard Drive?
Early on in my computer life I was told by a friend to back up my data in preparation for the inevitable day when my hard drive would fail. “All hard drives fail,” he used to say. I’ve been using computers since 1986 and have never had a hard drive…
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I’m a PC and I’m a Mac: Enough Said
They do a lot of things right in Cupertino. In Redmond, well let’s just say they do a lot of things. Size does matter, but design ultimately wins the day.
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Speed, I am Speed
Is it just me, or have you noticed that things are moving much faster than they used to? Of course I’m getting older (we all are by the way), and everyone knows the older you get the faster time seems to pass. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m…
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The Next Web
The Web. Let’s review. First there was the Informtion Superhighway. A very gray place that would ever so slowly appear in a window on something called a browser. I think it was made by Netscape. But, it had something called hypertext. Suddenly underlined words could take you to an entirely…
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The Problem with Passwords
We all struggle with it. Password for this, password for that. All systems seem to have different rules. Only numbers, only letters, numbers and letters only, don’t use special characters, must use special characters (what makes them special anyway?). The length of the password you can use also varies. The…
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iPhone: After the Honeymoon
Yes I was one of the first ones to get an iPhone. On June 29th at 7:30pm I went to Northbrook Court located on the North Shore of Chicago, and much to my surprise found a very short line. Before 8:00 I walked out of the Apple store with an…
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