Thor’s Trials & Tribulations

Thursday, January 26, 2012 by Dick.

Google Latitude showed my friend Liz Arden near the Howland and Baker Islands, off Papua New Guinea the other day.

Cool.

Except she was in California, about three blocks from the Googleplex itself at the time.

I tried to enter my own address. Google puts me in Elfrin, FL. Or in Marathon. Or, after I put in the exact street address, city, and Zip three times, down the block at 150 Abblesnaffy Road, South Puffin Beach, FL, 33040. Their map and satellite imagery are right for that location but not for 920 Abblesnaffy Street, South Puffin Beach, FL, 33099.

And when it shows my location, it won’t show Liz Arden’s which strikes me as pretty useless. After all, I know where I am.

Latitudes and attitudes.

Posted in Business, Tech Toys, Dick's Dumps | 4 Comments »

Chester Gould Would Be Proud

Monday, August 1, 2011 by Dick.

Dick Tracy, eat your heart out!

Chester Gould created the hard-hitting, fast-shooting police detective who used forensic science, high tech gimmicks, and his wits to track down the bad guys Sunday after Sunday. There have been many (not terribly successful) incarnations of Tracy’s famous two-way wrist radio and his later two-way wrist TV.

Cell phones, particularly the push-to-talk varieties, may have outshone that clunky cartoon version but Skype is the real Amen, boys, hitch up two-way wrist TV.

Amsterdam has about 20 times
the average Internet speed of North Puffin.
Hold that thought.

I really didn’t want to Skype. See, I didn’t much want to put on clothes just to answer the phone. I never understood why women in my mother’s generation checked their hair in the hall mirror before picking up the receiver.

The patio stone deliberately has no built in web cam, so I bought a video cam when I needed to pack up the seven tons of astro gear Rufus left in my little house in South Puffin. I got a deal, see, on a pair of [famous brand] clip on bugs that sit atop my monitor. The two of them, in OEM packaging cost a little less than one good one from anyone else. And the quality wasn’t too too bad once I figured out how to turn the darned things on.

No, I don’t use them both at once for 3-D. I have one each in North and South Puffin.

The more we Skype, the more I’m liking this Skyping thing. I’ve been hanging out a bit.

Skype is addictive. On Saturday, I watched Liza Arden eat a Bagel-Shaped-Object as we puttered and hung out and Skyped the morning away.

Skype is addictive. The mobile app works on both Android and iPhones. Unfortunately, the fine print shows it restricts U.S. users to Wi-Fi only calls. Naturally, a developer hacked the app within days of its release to work over 3G. Still pretty clunky there.

Skype is addictive. Seventh graders in Calgary, Alberta, participated in the year-long “Cigar Box Project.” The kids learned Canadian history by using technology to blend historical images and artifacts into their own creations. And they Skyped with National Museum curator Sheldon Posen.

Skype is addictive. Berkshire Healthcare Foundation Trust in Reading, England, is working on giving the people the option of using Skype to speak to their relatives in hospital rather than visiting them each day. The next best thing to being there and, so far, bacteria haven’t figured out how to travel over fiber-optic cables.

We’re sorry. Your Internet Connection Speed
is too slow to support decent video.

Ms. Arden and I have experienced that pop-up recently as her cable provider switched her from her previously rocketing reach to dial-up speeds. She put in a trouble ticket but our North American infrastructure lags the European fiber-optic networks with their gigabit speeds. The company Level 3 now has ultra-low-latency routes with circuit speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second on some city-to-city cables.

Facebook has announced the launch of
video calling in partnership with Skype.
Can Google Plus be far behind?

Skype is addictive but does Skype — now the face of Facebook — toll the end of social networking? Whether we FOOF or FOOG, the “normal” use of those pages is slightly delayed conversations between a potentially big number of peeps (how many FB friends do you have?). The social part works because we can time slice a little piece out of our other activities to stay in touch.

Video conferencing is real time in a way a traditional phone call never has been.

I’ve written before that time is a finite resource. Balancing expectations remains the hardest part of our juggling lives.

“I do enjoy seeing what we’re doing, but find it tethers me too too much,” Rufus said. “It (can be) a good, clear connection, but I prefer being able to move around and do other stuff while we yatter, so hanging out doesn’t eat into my ability to get other things done.”

The next great addition to our communications arsenal may be a (wait for it) cordless phone. Actually it will be a cordless remote for the computer-with-the-Skype-connection that makes at least the talking and listening from afar easier. Or Skype on the tablet. Or on a two-way wrist TV.

And a faster Internet connection.

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Glossary:
FOOF /v intransitive/: Faffing Off On Facebook
FOOG (formerly “GOOF”) /v intransitive/: Doing the same on Google Plus
Gigabit /n/ Really really fast. For now.

Posted in Tech Toys, Society, Geekery, Random Access | 8 Comments »

Premte Peeves

Thursday, June 23, 2011 by Dick.

I didn’t like Firefox’ new display skin on 3.6.x and I didn’t like losing ImgLikeOpera so I bit the bullet and installed Firefox 5.0.

Version 5.0 for Windows has a new look,
super speed, and even more awesomeness!

I don’t like Firefox’ new display skin but I have ImgLikeOpera back.

Firefox reported that FeedFilter (the lovely Facebook fixer) is incompatible with version 5 despite the Mozilla add-on page indicating it works fine. I updated directly from Russell Gilbert’s delicious Chocolate Software. The Skype extension doesn’t work but I don’t care, as long as Skype works.

The big issue is a small one. Firefox changed the display on 3.6.x so the default page display (images, fonts and so on) is T-I-N-Y. Emphasis added. The menu bar, bookmarks, and other operating controls are all smaller, too. Like 4pt in 1920 x 1080 resolution. That’s T-I-N-Y.

I hoped that was a quirk and that moving to Tuesday’s release 5.0 would take me back. Nope. And to make it more interesting, the implementation plunks a second and third icon on the task bar when the program is running and you open a window or two. I just ended up with three copies of FF open.

There is undoubtedly a way to fix all that but I haven’t found it yet.

It is wise to fix things that are broke. It is unwise to fix things that aren’t. Word.

Posted in Tech Toys, Dick's Dumps | 1 Comment »

Prempte Peeves

Thursday, May 5, 2011 by Dick.

!@#$%^ Windows.

I disable automatic updating on systems I own or manage. Day before yesterday, I manually updated a single Windows 7 component because it offered a new feature I needed. Microsoft also installed a trial version of Office 2007 and, unbeknownst to me, turned automatic updating back on. It tried and failed to update itself that night so yesterday morning, I explicitly turned off “install updates automagically on shutdown.” Again. Windows began installing 81 updates automagically when it shut down yesterday.

“Do not turn off this computer” it told me when I went to bed.

I left it running and went to bed. It apparently turned itself off when it finished; at any rate, the screen was black when I arose.

This morning, it spent 10 minutes trying to configure Windows, failing, and “reverting changes.” Naturally, I found more M$ Office components installed this morning. This ain’t a Private Foulup or even a Captain Foulup. This is a Major Foulup. Major.

!@#$%^ Windows.

---

Rufus reminded me to “be glad it ain’t a General Foulup or, worse yet, a Kernal Foulup!”

Posted in Tech Toys, Dick's Dumps | 2 Comments »

Religious Argument

Tuesday, April 26, 2011 by Dick.

Religion! religion!
Oh, there’s a thin line between Saturday night and Sunday morning.
Here we go now.
Alright, altar boys.

Mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa
Mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa

Where’s the church, who took the steeple
Religion is in the hands of some crazy-ass people …
[thanks to Jimmy Buffett for Fruitcakes]

“Once you go Mac, you’ll never go back,” my friend Nola ‘Fanny’ Guay told me.

Microsoft is for Repuglicans because they like the illusion that they can change their desktops.

Apple is for Demorats because they are used to having the government do everything for them.

Posted in Extras!, Tech Toys | 2 Comments »

Premte Peeves

Thursday, April 21, 2011 by Dick.

Pandora radio adds about 100,000 new users every day on mobile devices like smart phones. Pandora knows your age, gender, ZIP code, and type of music. They target their ads to that. And more.

See, the Pandora smart phone installer does more. It can maraud through your phone, linking the GPS information and your Facebook postings into a seamless picture of who and what you like, buy, eat, and take orally at bedtime.

I shop at the Cost Slasher grocery store downstreet every week or so. Every Sunday, I voluntarily plug in my zip code on the Cost Slasher website to get this week’s grocery flier. That’s a good thing.

Thanks to Pandora and other similar data miners tapping into iPhone’s™ newly discovered iTracker™, though, Cost Slasher could already know that.

My iPhone already knows more about me than I do. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to give every other grocery store within 50 miles of my instant location that advantage whenever I listen to the “radio.”

Posted in Tech Toys, Dick's Dumps | 3 Comments »