Huddled Masses

Posts Tagged ‘Gadgets’

I have a funny story about politically correct toys. Well, cautious toys, anyway.

We got this “Word Whammer” from LeapFrog this week. They make these fridge toys that come with a bunch of letter magnets, and three slots that you can put the letters into. When you put a letter in, it reads it and pronounces it phonetically, like: “Eff! Eff says fuh, eff says fuh, every letter makes a sound, eff says fuh!”

Except the Word Whammer is special. It can pronounce whole words! Well, only three letter words, but still. If you put P-I-N in, it says: “Letter Pee, Letter Eye, Letter En. Press the three letters to hear your word” ... and when you do, it says: “Pee, Eye, En; Pin! Pih, iih, nuh; Pin!” and then encourages you to play some more … if you put C-A-T in and press all three letters, it says “Cee, Aeh, Tee; Cat! That’s one of my favorite words! Kuh, Ah, Tuh; Cat!”

What’s amusing is that LeapFrog is so careful not to offend people …

If you put G-O-D in, it doesn’t know the word, so it just says: “Gee, Oh, Dee; Guh, Oh, Duh” and then suggests that you do another word — now to be fair, that’s just the default behavior for words that it doesn’t know, but really, I mean, if you’re teaching it words, why would you leave out god?

It gets funnier if you put D-I-M in, it will say “Letter Dee, Letter Eye, Letter Em. Press the three letters to hear your word” and then you press them, and it says “Duh, Eye, Em, Dim! Great word, try another one” so you just switch out the I for an A, and it says: “Letter Dee, Letter Aeh, Letter Em; Let’s build a word! Put three new letters into the Word Whammer!” Yep, it won’t even phonetically pronounce it! Nothing you can do will get it to do so … all it will do is repeat the letters and then tell you to start over with three different letters.

Well, it looks like the days of Solid State Drives (SDD) are coming, and coming soon. Of course, if you’re a technology geek, you know that in some sense, they’ve already come. High end servers have been using flash-based drives with capacities of up to 100 GB for quite some time now, and they’re are much faster at reading data than regular Hard Disc Drives (HDD). However, this technology is just about ready to make it into the public eye and into the hands of your average Joe.

All of the major Flash retailers are now offering 32GB SSD drives, and with the arrival of Windows Vista, we have the first operating system which is natively aware of the needs of SSD cache management and able to take advantage of SSD capabilities to improve it’s performance. Since several of my friends have asked about flash discs after having read that they have short life spans, I figured it was worth writing down what I know about them.

The most important thing I can say about flash right now is that you should pay attention to the brand names. The most common flash chips have life-spans of only around 300,000 write cycles — you can read from them as much as you want, but if you write to the same block (that is, the same exact physical spot on the disc) it can fail after only 300,000 writes. However, my point is that not all flash is created equal, and the best flash chips can be rated as high as 1,000,000 write cycles per block.

On top of that, most flash drives nowadays use wear-leveling algorithms: since the wear is only on the write cycle, they swap data which is being written frequently with data that has exhibited a “read only” behavior … doing this can reportedly extend the life of the drive as much as 100 times the base life of the flash media.

This means that even if you read and write gigabytes of data every day, a flash-based SSD should last several years (experts claim the life expectancy of a conventional HDD can be as low as three to five years). On top of all of this, remember that with these bigger drives it is physically and financially feasible to add a DRAM cache into the drive which will not only make it faster, but can significantly improve it’s lifespan. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re interested in computer desktop software, or how metaphors apply in software interfaces, or in “cool” programs that wow your friends … you should check out BumpTop. The bad news is all they have is a slick little demo video, and unless someone hires them to continue working on it, there’s no guarantee this will ever be a product. The good news is that they have a mailing list you can sign up for if you’re interested in beta testing it.

Honestly, I think the icons need some work in this, they’re ridiculously generic in the version he’s showing off in the video (as in: no way to tell one PDF from another PDF), which for me would completely break the program. I would want a faster easier way to “open” the piles without waiting for the pile plugin menu to show up (and I’ve never been a big fan of fisheye menus). That said … the way the drag-select works, and animations for draggins groups of files, and the stacking and pile plugins … are very cool, and just the sort of stuff I’d like to add to the desktop.

So, the new Intel-powered Mac’s are here in laptop and iMac form. No real desktop model yet…

Edit: The funny thing is, Apple is not going to put the Intel Inside badges on them, apparently it messes up the aesthetics. Of course, that means they won’t get the money from Intel that everyeone else gets. Maybe that explains the prices.

Core Specs: 2Ghz Intel Core Duo processor. 2MB L2 Cache (shared betwen the two cores). 667Mhz Bus (is it just me, or did someone carefully boost that 1 extra Mhz?). Up to 2GB of DDR2 RAM. PCI Express ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card with up to 256MB RAM (very much mid-range … maybe they’re saving room at the top for something else?).

Extra Stuff: 17 or 20 inch screen on the iMac (built into the computer, remember). 15.4 inch screen on the MacBook. Built in 802.11g, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 2, web cam. 2 Firewire 400 ports and 3 USB2 Ports (1 and 2, respectively, on the MacBook). And of course, you get Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) and iLife ’06 …

I was going to do some comparisons ... Read the rest of this entry »

I hear oinking overhead…

Palm. We never knew thee.

When the Tokyo company ACCESS bought Palm Source (the makers of the Palm OS) there wasn’t a whole lot of fanfare, since it was just the latest bizarre twist in the saga of the company famous for its little handheld that never crashed …

But now, PALM is turning it’s back on the Palm OS in a move noone ever thought they would see: Palm SmartPhone meets Windows Mobile, Microsoft is practically cackleing with joy as their number one competitor in the handheld space suddenly becomes their best-selling partner and customer!

Just to be clear, the Mirra personal server is over-priced, but it’s a really cool solution, and really takes the work out of backups, as well as throwing in some slick extra features!

Basically, the Mirra is a small network-attached storage device which provides continuous, hands-free backup to multiple PC’s simultaneously. You run a client app on each PC, and every time you modify and save a file, it gets backed up over the network. In fact, you don’t just get backups of your files, you get version management, where older versions of your files are kept around too.

The thing that sets mirra apart is that on top of automatic backups of your files, (photos, documents, music, whatever) you get a secure web-server interface for both private access (enabling you to get to your files from anywhere you have web access) and sharing those files with family and friends. And hey, no monthly fees for file storage might just make the $400 for 80 (or $500 for 120, or $750 for 250) GB worth the cost if you’re paying for file-hosting.

Office Depot has this 19 inch KDS Flat CRT for only $177 dollars, with $80 of rebates … and if you go to EBates, they have a $30 Coupon … and of course, you get free delivery, and 2% back (through Ebates).

Of course, I get a couple percent back from my credit card, and Office Depot has a loyalty card that gives me around 10% back [:D] ... so it’s an even better deal!

So now, I have dual monitors again (I had to give up one monitor when I put together a second PC for my wife [;)]).

So, Microsoft has unveiled the next incarnation of their home of the future, and it seems tamer and more achievable than previous versions. Although it does sport biometric keyless entry, the focus is on networking.

The FCC finally cleared the way yesterday for broadband over power lines (BPL), the infamous “third wire.” This means that all of you who currently have a choice between your cable company’s broadband and your phone company’s DSL will (eventually) have a third choice: the power company! Here’s hoping the electric companies really embrace this (they already have in NYC) and become a contender, so we can see our rates drop a bit. The best news, however, is that although these current implementors are talking about DSL-like speeds, Ambient, the company providing the technology claims they can already deliver 20 megabits to the lamppost and will be up to 100 megabits by next year. This translates into 1.5 to 4 mbps for consumer use. And unlike DSL, it doesn’t seem to have that incredibly short range problem, so it could bring broadband to places it’s never been.

Of course, there’s a downside: Ambient’s website has this to say: “The ability to carry video signals suggests that there are opportunities in surveillance and security. Monitoring of remote, unmanned facilities and continuous transmission of security-related data … are obvious applications.” So, yeah, we could slap a video camera on every lamp-post and have an instant surveillance network.

In other news: the FCC also announced the deregulation of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), so telephone companies will no longer be the only ones allowed to lay fiber. While this may bring some competition into the market, it also means that companies can build high-speed fiber-optic lines to within 500 feet of customers’ homes without having to share the new lines with rival companies … so, if you’re lucky, you’ll soon have fiber-optic speed broadband potential, and if you’re really lucky, your street will be dug up four or five times by different companies laying seperate fiber optic lines … [ermm]

The former king of computer trade shows has been canceled this year. Yep, that’s right. Comdex, is a victim of the success of the Consumer Electronics Show and other, more consumer-gadget oriented shows. The organizers claim it will return next year, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. You can read about it’s demise on news.com