Discus Maximus

Hello happy reader, On July 10th, Seagate “unveiled the industry’s first 1.5-terabyte desktop and half-terabyte notebook hard drives to meet explosive worldwide demand for digital-content storage in home and business environments.” Don’t need no explosive disk drive but, in the case of storage, more is better. The 11th generation Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB mechanism, “marks the single largest [...]

Gentlemen, start your engines

Hello happy reader, Today we’re talking about engines. Not the “hemi four four two” sort but other, more modern flavors…Before I get to my main rant today, that of so called “laser TVs,” I wanted to mention tweaking another engine, Amazon’s recommendation engine…I just finished shopping for some textbooks and ended up back on the home [...]

Pod Peopling the Friendly Skies

Hello happy readers, I just came across some PR regarding United Airlines, claiming to be the “first U.S. carrier to offer iPod & iPhone connectivity.” Though we don’t need to any additional evidence to support the claim that the iPod has changed the way content is created and consumed, I was glad to see my fave [...]

Babbage is Dead, Long Live Babbage

Hello happy readers…Sorry about the posting hiatus, had to do some maintenance…Today I’m writing a tiny bit about Charles Babbage, his protégé Ada Lovelace, and the antecedents of electronic computing. To start, consider the Industrial Revolution, when everything possible was being automated. Cloth manufacturing, a lucrative process that produced high value goods from low value commodities, was an early industry [...]

Ultra-WeirdBand

Hello, happy reader…For this entry, I wanted to update y’all on the current state of UWB as it applies to USB. Enough TLAs for you? :: OK, we all know about USB, the bus spec designed to replace PS-2 and other old school serial protocols for peripherals. So as to increase the amount of radio [...]

Big Red One

Sorry, no Sam Fuller here folks but, this time ’round, I’m talking about what Mr. Fuller called “pictures.” This past Saturday, I attended the inaugural meeting of the Northern California chapter of the Digital Cinema Society. The focus of the meeting was the RED ONE camera from the RED Digital Cinema Camera Corporation. :: For those who [...]

Turn Me On…

For those of you who’ve been locked in the studio with your smokin’ install of Sound Designer, I have a new gadget for you. The rest of you, move away from the computer as this could be tedious… :: OK, say you have a few peripherals, like a RAID array and a HUI, as well [...]

(Almost) No bones about it

Well, the rain has departed for a time and the temperature is creeping toward the 60’s. The sea has calmed, and the sunset is peach and blueberry sherbet…Which really does not put me in a mood to add one last (promise) MacWorld installment. :: This last go round wasn’t as rich a treasure trove of schwag [...]

Organics, Edible and Otherwise

Saturday turned almost sunny so I headed out to run some errands. In particular, I wanted to hit the Queen of Sheba, a nice market selling halal meat. On the way, I happened upon the local Tet or Viet New Year’s festival. This is a Rat year which had little to do with my need for [...]

Can you spell…CONSOLIDATION?

  Hello all, just got word that Amazon will purchase Audible.com for $300M. According to Amazon’s site, “Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Audible Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBL)…The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals, and is expected to close by the second quarter of 2008.”:: This, along with [...]