Posted on September 7th, 2008 in tech | No Comments »
A good friend sent me a link to this New York Times article on social networking. While the focus is on Facebook and Twitter it’s broadly applicable across the myriad of similar sites and services. The piece refers to a social science concept called “ambient awareness”; it’s an interesting idea but I’m still going to un-follow people on Twitter if they continually tweet crap like “just made cheese sandwich” followed by “eating cheese sandwich”, etc.
In case you haven’t heard the buzz about Ubiquity yet, you might check it out and see what you think. It’s a new project from the Mozilla labs, and while it’s still in a prototype state it looks really intriguing. The project’s goal is to allow you to interact with the browser (and by extension the web) in a much more language-driven, connected fashion. There’s a short video on the site showing how you can create “user generated mashups”. While it’s still very early stage it looks really promising. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.
I just signed up for Leo Laporte’s TWiT Army Page. It’s an interesting use of microblogging (e.g. Twitter, for the uninitiated) for a community rather than the public at large. Only problem: I’m now signed up for way too many of these things to keep up with. I’d love to hear what John Dvorak has to say about this one…
Rockstar Games is set to release the next Midnight Club this October. The game is set in Los Angeles and looks like it will be a blast. According to reviews it’s an open map, so players will be able to drive through LA at will, although they have changed some of the geography of the city. For those of us who spend way too much time stuck in SoCal traffic this promises to be a lot of fun.
Lifehacker is reporting that Google Calendar now supports CalDAV, allowing you to sync iCal with GCal. This was already possible, but only via paid 3rd party tools from what I could determine.
I really like Google Calendars, since it’s available online and lets you create multiple shared calendars. However, while it may be a bit old-school I prefer a desktop client to the web interface, and like to have a local copy when I’m offline. I’ve been using Thunderbird’s Lightning extension, which is OK, but I really need to be on iCal so that my blackberry will sync appointments.
I just set up the sync on my macbook pro and it seems to work great. I’ll update with another post once the blackberry is brought into the mix.
I purchased a Canon G9 a couple of weeks ago and have been very happy with it. It is essentially a prosumer grade point-and-shoot digital camera. It’s about the size of a 35mm P&S, making is much larger than something like the Canon SD1000 (which is about the size of a deck of cards). However, it is a whole lot smaller and more portable than my DSLR (a Nikon D70) and so far I’ve been extremely happy with it. You can put the camera into full manual mode, which gives you control over aperture, shutter speed, etc. It’s got a macro mode, let’s you manually focus, shoots a very decent video clip, and has a hot shoe in case you want to attach a small flash. It’s certainly not for everyone, but if you’re looking for a small / portable alternative to a DSLR that gives you all the controls in a much more compact package, the Canon G9 is great. Check out this review for more info.
So I’ve been getting a bunch of emails from Sonicwall telling me that my “subscription services” are about to expire. I just bought the thing a month ago, and it has a number of add-ons (e.g. content filtering, spam filtering) that you can subscribe to annually. I don’t need any of that and basically ignored the emails. I finally got a call from a sales rep who explained that all of the firmware and software upgrades would no longer be available unless I renewed my support. This was pretty disappointing and a very surprising; hard to believe that you buy a piece of hardware and it only comes with 30 days of firmware upgrades. I’ve been very happy with the performance of the firewall so far, and it is very full featured. However, anyone who’s considering it as a purchase should know that you’re going to be paying at least another ~$50/year if you want to stay current with firmware and security patches.
I’ve just registered for the New Media Expo in Las Vegas. It’s being held at the convention center from August 14 – 16. Should be tons of fun; some very well known podcasters and new-media luminaries are presenting. Only downside: as it’s the middle of August in Vegas it will probably be about 145 degrees outside…
