Several months ago we bought a Sony BDP-BX2 Blu-ray player. I duly upgraded my Netflix account to send us Blu-ray disks. A couple of months later I switched it back to DVD-only rentals.
I had two reasons to move back to DVDs:
- Blu-ray just isn’t that much better than DVDs. Maybe I’ve ruined by eyes with decades of watching NTSC television and computer CRTs, but I just don’t see enough improvement to justify a change.
- The Sony player is awful. It’s slow. It requires an Internet connection (!!). It doesn’t play all DVDs correctly.
In a way I’m relieved. I have a huge collection of DVDs already and I didn’t want to have to replace them.
Continue reading 'Blu-Ray will be a niche market'»
About ten years ago I discovered that I couldn’t use more than one HP product on my computer at a time. I had an HP printer and I’d bought an HP scanner. But the driver software couldn’t co-exist on the same computer. At least, HP declared they couldn’t, and they didn’t care.
They still don’t care about customers, except as a revenue stream. This is again clearly highlighted by their plan to send spam to newer HP printers (Computerworld). They’ve outfitted the new printers with Internet connections, presumably to provide automatic support and updates. They’re also planning to use the link to automatically print advertisements on these printers.
As noted in Slashdot, they send the ads, collect the income, and we pay for the paper and ink.
Continue reading 'Yet another reason to shun HP products'»
OK, no, the Star Gazette newspaper is still there. At least, we’ve received recent issues. But the Star Gazette on-line version has gone through a misguided makeover. I remember being to reach articles just by clicking. It doesn’t work any more.
Clearly this is a recent change. The site has a FAQ section that shows just how much trouble customers are having. So it’s not just me.
Continue reading 'Losing the Hastings Star Gazette'»
There’s an article in Atlantic about the decline in the news industry and the rise of Google, news and all. The article, like most Big Media coverage of the topic, focus on the risk to Big Media news operations, like offices in Kabul or investigative pieces on government waste and coverups.
When I look at Google News, what I most often see are 1,200 copies of locally-published articles that are in fact Associated Press stories. These are classic “straight news” reports: announcements by officials describing crimes, legislation, accidents, celebrity activities, and so on. It is in fact rare for Google News, or any other news source, to produce the sort of in-depth reporting that might vie for a Pulitzer.
Yes, the traditional funding sources of such things are drying up. Yes, they play an essential role in self-government. But somehow we’ll find a way to pay for these things. Maybe Google will trip over a new business model as they blunder about, or maybe someone else will.
Continue reading 'Saving the News'»
Slashdot pointed me at a fascinating article on the deforestation of the planet: Peak Wood: Nature Does Impose Limits | Miller-McCune Online.
I hadn’t appreciated the role of forests in causing relocation of native American settlements on the US east coast. Or the role of wood fires in making traditional Christian teachings of Hell sound like nonsense (where would they get enough trees to keep everyone in Hell burning forever?).
My daughter in law, with her recent graduate degree in environmental policy, may already be aware of this sad story. The rest of us should read it, too.
Continue reading 'The Peak of Woods: a Foretaste of the Oil Peak?'»
Fox News quoted its darling, Sarah Palin, who claims that Rand Paul is getting the same treatment she did. That’s nonsense. Rand Paul is being criticized for honestly voicing the logical implications of libertarian beliefs. Sarah Palin was criticized for her lack of any accomplishment beyond a mean sort of glibness.
At least Paul understands what he believes, whether the rest of us agree with him or not.
This is a review of a few fine points about the free Blackberry and Macintosh versions of Amazon’s Kindle, with an eye towards reading MobiPocket format ebooks.
I do a lot of reading on my smart phone, since it has tons of text storage space, and Gutenberg has lots of free ebooks. They now offer everything in MobiPocket format. Amazon took over management of the open-source MobiPocket Reader and has apparently killed it with apathy. Meanwhile, the Kindle will happily read MobiPocket format files if you put them in the right place.
So here are my thoughts on Kindle for the Blackberry and Kindle for the Mac. I’ve also included comments on the “free” books currently offered by Amazon for the Kindle.
Continue reading 'Free Kindle Software for the Blackberry and Mac'»
I’ve been taking my first trip with my Blackberry Storm 2. I’ve battled through the challenges of synchronization. I’ve got my couple of indispensible apps. So I’m all set, right?
Wrong.
It seems incredible, but the Blackberry, the machine that became the archtype “smart phone” has never, ever, figured out how a calendar is supposed to work. Instead of handling dates and time in terms of local time zones, everything is in Greenwich time.
In practice, this means you type more information to schedule something on a Blackberry than you do on normal phones. Specifically, you must always give a time zone.
This is just bad interface design.
Continue reading 'The Blackberry Calendar is Broken by Design'»
Last fall, Alex warned me that Apple was dropping their support for the Palm Treo. I couldn’t upgrade to Spotted Lynx, or whatever the latest OS-X is called, until I switched phones. While I had been hoping to hold out for a Verizon iPhone, my patience ended a couple of weeks ago. After a weekend with a Droid, and a brief flirtation with the Palm Pre Plus, I settled on the Blackberry Storm II.
Aside from the built-in contact list and calendar (oh yes, and the phone) I rely on a smart phone for two other things: an ebook reader and a password manager. And I also want to feel some comfort for the phone’s security model. And, oh yes, I need easy access to contacts and calendar on my desktop, presumably through a sync feature.
I didn’t warm to the Droid because it’s too much like having a laptop on your pocket. And since the Pre Plus was a complete rework, I figured it wouldn’t be that similar to the Treo in practice. There was a period of suspense after acquiring the Storm, since I wasn’t sure it would in fact do all I wanted, but things eventually worked out.
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Blackberry, Droid, ebooks, eWallet, IBM 360, Ilium Software, Palm, passwords, PDP-1, Pre Plus, smart phone, Storm 2, wallpaper
I read a lot of ebooks on my smart phone, and they all come from Project Gutenberg. In other words, they’re all free. When I recently migrated from my venerable Palm Treo 700 to a new phone, a good ebook reader was a high priority.
In fact, finding a good ebook reader was deal breaker – I wouldn’t keep a phone that didn’t have a good reader. I settled on a new Blackberry Storm 2 and Amazon’s Kindle for the Blackberry. While not perfect, the Kindle software serves its purpose well. And I still haven’t had to pay for a book.
Continue reading 'Reading ebooks on the Storm II'»
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