Category: Opinion

  • Tablets will be the story this holiday season

    The iPad has been out for a bit now, and it’s the tab­let that all the oth­ers will be com­pared against as they jockey for pos­i­tion going into the hol­i­day season. But over­all, I think this is the year that tab­lets finally start to make some head­way into the mar­ket­place; a mar­ket­place already crowded with…

  • Lots to think about when diagnosing a slow Internet

    Occa­sion­ally I get a tech ques­tion in the inbox that is quite com­mon. So much so that it makes sense for me to put and answer the ques­tion here where more can read and bene­fit from it.  By the way, if you’ve got some­thing you’d like to ask, feel free to drop me a line…

  • Turning science fiction into reality. How cool!

    A few years back my wife intro­duced me to an enter­tain­ing book called Earth­web; a sci­ence fic­tion nov­el set in the near future. The book intro­duced to me a couple of inter­est­ing con­cepts that are just being real­ized in our daily life today — the first is that of a social cur­rency or rat­ing sys­tem…

  • Spending good money on nothing, it’s not a new concept.

    Dis­clos­ure: I’m involved with an organ­iz­a­tion that has vir­tu­al goods and cur­rency  — and yes, you can exchange real money for vir­tu­al goods in it. The vir­tu­al eco­nomy is heat­ing up. GigaOm reports that Face­book Could Make $250M From Vir­tu­al Goods Next Year; make money from stuff that isn’t tan­gible. Stuff you can’t hold in your…

  • Protecting your tech

    When ever I get a new tech device, espe­cially one that’s small, port­able, and has a dis­play screen, I imme­di­ately look to pro­tect­ing that screen and device. I’m kinda clumsy at times, and any­thing that can pro­tect my hard­ware from *me* is a worth­while invest­ment. I dropped my iPod Touch down the stairs last year,…

  • Desktop, mobile or web app?

    Twit­ter is in the midst of rolling out it’s new, all-encom­passing inter­face, and I’ve been able to take a look at it in ‘pre­view’ mode. My ver­dict: quite nice, but it won’t replace desktop twit­ter apps for me, just yet. Tweet­deck and See­smic Desktop both offer great­er func­tion­al­ity than the new Twit­ter interface. Though I’ve not…

  • 4 Reasons I’m looking forward to Halo Reach

    Yep, it’s out today (at 00:00 hrs tech­nic­ally), and no, I don’t have a copy, yet. My wife and I have been big fans of the Halo fran­chise since we star­ted play­ing it co-op on the ori­gin­al Xbox years ago when it came out. Multi-play­er was nev­er our thing, but co-op, now there’s fun. So yes, I’ll…

  • Cute name. Cute scanner. Great value.

    I have two dogs, mini­ature Daschunds. They’re about 6 inches tall at the shoulder and about 14 inches longs. Wein­er dogs. Dox­ies. I now have a scan­ner, and it’s a Dox­ie too! It’s about 2 inches tall, and about 10 inches long. Appro­pri­ately named. But the name doesn’t do justice to the scan­ner itself. The Dox­ie is one cool…

  • One month with an iPad; some thoughts

    I’m two days shy of my first month with my 32GB 3G/WiFi iPad, and it’s time that I take a moment and jot down my thoughts about it so far. On band­width. Frankly I’m rather sur­prised at my band­width usage. My iPad is with me every­where, every day. I use it to keep in touch with…

  • Offline Life.

    The title of this post refers to some­thing that is kinda ali­en to me. Yet, it shouldn’t be. For the last 20 years or so, my life has been online, in one form or anoth­er. Yes, I’m a digit­al nomad, liv­ing in a digit­al world, con­fused by those who insist on stay­ing offline. As more people…

  • If it’s everywhere, is it special?

    Once upon a time, not too long ago, in the lat­ter part of the last cen­tury — say the 60’s and 70’s, con­sum­ing media was clumsy and cum­ber­some. It seemed that you had to make a spe­cial appoint­ment with your hard­ware to listen to the latest band or show some friends your latest pho­tos. You…

  • Kobo eReader updated — much better!

    Though it’s a great device, I’ve always been a little dis­ap­poin­ted with my Kobo eRead­er. Sure, I got the cool black one, and it will let me read my ebooks, but the read­ing exper­i­ence was nev­er that pol­ished. It’s almost as if the soft­ware run­ning the eRead­er was unfinished. Some of the things that annoyed…