Technology

Destroyer of consumer electronics

To paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, who was himself quoting the Bhagavad Ghiti: “I am become death, destroyer of consumer electronics.” An exaggeration perhaps, but not my much.

As Melanie points out, I am tough on my gadgets. In the time that she has known me, I have left in my wake one broken videocamera, two still cameras, two iPods, a TiVo, along with keyboards and mice and other lesser products that I haven’t bothered to enumerate. The latest casualty was the Canon point-and-shoot camera that my in-laws kindly gave us for Christmas 2006 after I broke the display on our previous point-and-shoot. New cameras of comparable quality are not expensive—about $150 on Amazon.com—but with an impending move and my recent purchase of an iPod touch (to replace the dying iPod mini I gave to Melanie for her birthday 3 years ago and co-opted for my commute when my iPod starting dying last summer) we couldn’t justify even that.

Incidentally, the videocamera died during our wedding ceremony, reception, and honeymoon, rendering the footage unwatchable. And the TiVo, which was admittedly six years old, started rebooting on its own, messing up the recording schedules.

So on Wednesday I was taking a cute video of Isabella playing with bubbles in the kitchen sink when I turned away and lost control of it, dropping it onto the kitchen floor and breaking it so the lens would no longer move in and out. And with Sophia’s baptism this weekend, the timing couldn’t be worse.

Fortunately, my friend George, a professional photographer with more than 25 years experience, lent me a spare camera for the weekend. It’s such a nice camera, a Canon digital SLR, and I was able to take some great shots of Melanie, Isabella and Sophia this afternoon. Oh I wish I had one of these. But through the generosity of a friend, I do for the weekend. I promise him I will be extra careful.

But eventually I will have to select my next victim, er, camera. I’m buying the service plan next time.

Cardinal Pell on exciting technology in use at World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney, Australia

It’s a bit of a commercial for Telstra, the Australian government communications monopoly, but it’s still good information on the cool mobile phone and Web 2.0 social networking plans that the World Youth Day organizers in Sydney have planned for this July.

You too can have a mystery castle

I’ve always said that if I ever build my own home, it must have a secret passageway, like you see in old movies. I think it would lend an air of mystery and fun to the house, especially for kids. Now I’ve found just the company to do it: HiddenPassageway.com. For a price—a pretty penny too—they will build a sliding bookcase or spinning fireplace or whatever else you desire.

This is no slapdash fake door, but real working bookcases and cabinets and staircases and cabinets and more, built to extremely tight tolerance, even using the latest technology like biometric scanners and pinhole cameras. It’s so cool!

Go to the site (sorry for the auto-play music; I hate that) and click on “Media”. Then click on “Videos” to see demonstrations of some of their products at work, as well as how one of their hidden doors was used in a house in “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.”

I think what I want is similar to what you find in Salem’s famed House of Seven Gables—a secret passage with several entrances throughout the house and leading to secret room in the attic with a window seat and fun places to hang out and read and be private. Awesome.

Bugatti Veyron at top speed

The world’s fastest production car--faster than any Formula 1 or NASCAR Sprint Cup car--taken to its top speed. It’s awesome.

2001 called and wants its web site back

Went to this site today. It’s associated with my health insurance company, a major regional company with millions in revenues every year. They probably have dozens of people working on their web site.

And yet this is the warning message I get when going to their site using the latest version of Firefox, a browser used by millions of people every day.

Also note the browsers they do claim to support. You can’t even download Netscape Navigator anymore.

Not enough boredom … or leisure

My liturgy and sacraments professor in college, Fr. Giles Dimock, OP, used to bemoan the lack of silence in our daily lives. We move from noisy homes and offices—many people leave the TV on in he background as they move about doing other things— to cars that have their radio on already when we turn then on. He made these remarks in relation to the need for moments of silence during the Mass, saying that at times the silence was almost as important as what was said.

Looks like the secular world is beginning to see what effect a world with constant stimulation is becoming.

Increasingly, these empty moments are being saturated with productivity, communication, and the digital distractions offered by an ever-expanding array of slick mobile devices. A few years ago, cellphone maker Motorola even began using the word “microboredom” to describe the ever-smaller slices of free time from which new mobile technology offers an escape. “Mobisodes,” two-minute long television episodes of everything from “Lost” to “Prison Break” made for the cellphone screen, are perfectly tailored for the microbored. Cellphone games are often designed to last just minutes — simple, snack-sized diversions like Snake, solitaire, and Tetris. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook turn every mundane moment between activities into a chance to broadcast feelings and thoughts; even if it is just to triple-tap a keypad with the words “I am bored.”

Are we oversaturated with communication? On the one hand, while some bemoan the isolation caused by hordes of iPod-wearing commuters on buses and trains, all caught up in their own aural worlds, on the other hand, it’s not like commuting before iPods was a gabfest. Talking to strangers on the T was cause for people to sidle away from you warily. (Maybe that’s just the big city.)

So, I’m not sure I agree with the writer’s assertion that “boredom” is a good thing, per se. Maybe it’s a problem with the word. It’s not boredom that we need, but leisure. We need to turn away from the world for a time and recollect, re-create. We open ourselves in a conversation with God, by turning away form distractions. We retreat.

Compare this with the modern vacation, tied to the office via Blackberry and laptop so that you’re never really disconnected. And if it’s not work, it’s a video game or a music player or some other gadget or gizmo or television or something. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, perhaps less the worst, but not as good as the best.

But my dream vacation, the one I bring to mind whenever I sit back and contemplate, would take me far away from all that: a ship of sail, a deep blue sea, sun and sand, my family surrounding me, and no clock, no cares, no distractions. Just time to live in the moment, a preview of the beatific life of the eternal now that awaits us in heaven.

As much as I enjoy gadgets and gizmos and the great river of information that flows past my screen and over my iPod every day, I do love to unplug once in a while and get away. Mmmm, maybe it’s time to start planning our summer vacation.

I wish I were in Steubie

Fr. Roderick Vonhogen, the Dutch priest of the Catholic podcasting network SQPN is going to be in Steubenville, Ohio, next week, along with other Catholic podcasters and media folk for a conference entitled “Media and Faith:Engaging the Culture.” It’s being sponsored by the Communications Arts department at Franciscan University.

I really wish I could go, not just to meet Fr. Roderick and the Willits and the other speakers and attendees, but also to go back to my alma mater. It’s been more than 10 years since my last trip to the Ohio Valley and — it surprises me to say this — I miss it. Something about that place gets under the skin (cue coal and steel pollution joke here).

One of the co-hosts of the conference is Dr. Wayne Lewis, who was the faculty advisor when I was editor of the student newspaper The Troubadour. We had a great time producing the paper and I’m proud to say we won “student organization of the year” the year I was editor. Our April Fool edition was a classic for the ages, especially since a mercifully unnamed board member almost called then-Cardinal Ratzinger because of it. Oops. I may have to find it to scan it and put it online for nostalgia’s sake.

Anyway,the conference sounds great and I would love to participate in many of the talks, especially the podcasting and Web 2.0 ones. I know I have plenty of opinions in those areas and would love to share ideas with the panelists and others on them.

But I will have to pine from afar, curb my jealousy, and hope that I can eventually hear audio or see video (streaming online, anyone?) at some point.

One request though: Please, someone take Fr. Roderick to Drover’s and have him sample the hot wings. And make sure he records the event. That would be worth listening to.

Mac tip: Using iPhoto smart albums to build a better screensaver

The latest version of Mac OS X, 10.5 aka Leopard, includes a nifty screensaver setting that makes one of those mosaic patterns. It starts off with you looking at one photo and then zooms out to show dozens of other photos and then when it zooms out enough you realize they all make up another photo. And then it continues ad infinitum.

I’ve had this set to a smart folder in iPhoto that gathered all my pictures of Isabella based on the keyword of her name. And that worked well until Sophia came along and I wanted to include her as well. Now, I know I could have gone through an re-tagged all my photos of Isabella with a new tag like “my kids” and then tagged all of Sophia’s with the same and then created a smart folder for that tag and made the screensaver run from that … but that sounded like too much work.

Instead, I decided to use nested smart albums. Except, I found to my chagrin, iPhoto doesn’t supported nested smart albums. What do I mean by nested smart albums? Smart albums are photo albums constructed not one by one, but automatically by the program based on criteria you give it, such as keywords, dates, ratings, etc. What I was hoping was that one of those criteria could be whether a photo was in another smart album. Unfortunately, that’s not possible. Thus, plan B.

I created three smart albums: “Isabella”, “Sophia”, and “Isabella and Sophia”. The critera for each were:

1. [Isabella] Match all: Keyword contains “Isabella”; Date is after “5/17/2006” (the day before Isabella’s birthday); and Keyword is not Sophia (i.e. photos of just Isabella alone)


2. [Sophia] Match all: Keyword contains “Sophia”; Date is after “3/3/2008” (the day before Sophia’s birthday); and Keyword is not “Isabella”.


3. [Isabella and Sophia] Match all: Date is after “3/3/2008”; Keyword contains “Isabella”; Keyword contains “Sophia”

So now, I have smart albums of the two girls alone and then together. Now I just drop those in a folder called “The kids” and in the Desktop & Screensaver Preference Pane, I point it at this folder and voila!

Just don’t ask me what I’ll do when the third child comes along. Maybe by then Steve Jobs and Apple will have added nested smart albums. Whew!

Synchronizing your Mac’s iCal with your Blackberry’s calendar

One feature I’ve wanted for some time is the ability to reliably and easily synchronize the calendars I keep on my Mac in iCal with the calendar in my Blackberry so that I have the information in my pocket when I need it. The problem is that Blackberry does a poor job of supporting Macs and even the third-party software, such as Mark/Space’s Missing Sync, is unreliable at best.

So I set out to find a better solution and I did, even if it’s not exactly a free solution. The key is to use Google Calendar (Gcal) as the intermediary. Gcal is free to use and it has the benefit of allowing you to share calendars with others (like your wife, so you always know when her appointments are or when the kids have things scheduled).

The first step—and the part that’s going to cost you—is to download and install Spanning Sync. This product is a Mac OS X Preference Pane which as 15-day demo period. If you decide to keep it, you can sign up for a one-year $25 subscription or buy it outright for $65. I opted for the latter, because I’m betting I’ll still be using it in three years.

Spanning Sync simply allows you to synchronize your iCal calendars with your Google Calendars. The interface is clear and you can synchronize any number of calendars on both sides. It’s best to set them up with the same names on both sides, but if you’ve already got a Google Calendar, you can choose to sync some or all of your calendars no matter what they’re called. Just follow the instruction included with the software and you’ll be good to go.

From this point, by default, your iCal and Google Calendar will synchronize every hour. Now to set up the other half of the equation.

Using your Blackberry’s web browser, go to mobile.google.com and then either click “Download All” if you’d like the other Google mobile products too, or just the “Sync” link. The program will download and install.

When it’s done, click on the “Sync” icon that should now be on your phone’s screen. Open up the menu, and chooe “Sync Now” to initiate the first synchronization. Thereafter, depending on how you set your options, it should sync every hour.

That’s it! From now on your Mac’s calendar will always be handy in your pocket and changes you make to your phone’s calendar will automatically appear in your iCal. Worst case if you set them to synch every hour is that your phone and iCal won’t be synchronized for a maximum of two hours. That’s not bad considering you don’t have to do anything else.

Sandy, Jott, and OmniFocus: Helping me stay efficient and productive and on task

Back in December I blogged about the web site IWantSandy.com, which is a kind of electronic personal assistant that keeps track of anything you tell it in plain English. To quote myself:

For example, I can tell Sandy, “Remind me to stop at the grocery store today at 5pm.” And then at 4:45, you receive a reminder. But that’s just the beginning. While you can give Sandy instructions from the I Want Sandy site, you can also send her instructions via email or even through Twitter.

I wanted to update a little on how I’ve further adapted and expanded my use of the Web application to help me remember my to-do list and actually get things done. My mind is like a sieve sometimes and if I don’t record something important as soon as it occurs to me or is told to me, it’s almost guaranteed to drift off into the dark recesses of my brain almost immediately.

Thus, Sandy helps me to record everything. But what if I’m away from a computer? That’s where Jott comes in (which I’ve mentioned before in another context). Jott is a voice-recognition system that interfaces with the Internet. Once I’ve set up an account, I can call Jott’s phone number, 1-866-JOTT-123, and it will ask me who I want to “jott”. I can jott myself or or someone else I’ve entered in the system, or more relevant for this post, another Web service like… IWantSandy.com.

Continue reading...

For the latest news on Sophia

I mentioned a couple of days ago that friends and family who want to be among the first to know the latest news about the impending arrival of Sophia Therese should sign up to follow me on Twitter since I can post to Twitter from my cell phone.

I should also mention that I will be posting to my Facebook page too and putting photos on my Flickr account. All possible from my cell phone.

Don’t you just love the 21st century?

China planting Trojan horses in US electronics?

Computer security experts warn that a very sophisticated computer virus originating in China has been found in US consumer electronics, including some digital photo frames sold during Christmas.

An insidious computer virus recently discovered on digital photo frames has been identified as a powerful new Trojan Horse from China that collects passwords for online games - and its designers might have larger targets in mind. “It is a nasty worm that has a great deal of intelligence,” said Brian Grayek, who heads product development at Computer Associates, a security vendor that analyzed the Trojan Horse.

They say it’s particularly nasty because it hides so effectively from anti-virus software. In fact, the researchers say that this is no “script kiddie” exploit, but a very professional piece of engineering.

So who is behind this? I have to wonder whether it’s the Communist government. Did you know that back in the early 90s, the CIA implanted a virus in a computer printer that was sold to Saddam Hussein’s military in Iraq that when activated took down a major portion of their anti-aircraft defense system?

What if, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union had been our major source of consumer goods. Do you think they would have hesitated for a moment to leverage that advantage? Well, we’ve given China that advantage.

I doubt the Pentagon is sourcing laser printers from China, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that a hostile government would want to lay the groundwork for communications and economic chaos in the US, should that become necessary. And don’t doubt for a moment that the People’s Republic of China and its People’s Army see the US as its enemy, regardless of how we view them.

Consider for a moment how much of all the electronics you own are made in mainland China. That new iPhone? China. Lenovo notebook computers are Chinese. Computers, printers, automotive electronics, cameras, iPods, and, yes, digital photo frames, among scores of other products.

Now think about this: What if, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union had been our major source of consumer goods. Do you think they would have hesitated for a moment to leverage that advantage? When Carter cut wheat shipments in response to the invasion of Afghanistan, do you doubt that the Politburo would have considered activating its secret weapon? Well, we’ve given China that advantage. Perhaps this virus is the first glimpse of the result of that decision. Something to think about.

Commuter Feed: Good idea, not ready for prime time yet

At first glance Commuter Feed seems like a good idea. It harnesses the power of Twitter to get regular commuters to update traffic conditions in real-time as they travel from their mobile phones.

Big companies like Smartraveler have been doing this for a while using their own sensors and observers and police reports, but Commuter Feed is supposed to harness the power of “the social”, i.e. the great cloud of Web users.

Here’s the flaw though: It relies on people typing out messages on their phones while driving. This is a problem. There are enough inattentive drivers out there talking on their phones, we don’t need to add texting to the mix. Just recently we had a case locally of a guy who hit and killed a 12-year-old boy because the driver was texting on his phone.

Okay, if you’re stopped in traffic that’s not moving, it’s one thing, but if you’re moving even at a couple miles per hour, you’re too likely to be distracted enough to bump someone around you.

You could use a voice-to-text system like Jott, which I’ve used with success for note-taking and other application several times recently, but it’s not easy to follow the exact Twitter format that Commuter Feed demands from a voice prompt. I’ll have to experiment with it.

Commuter Feed is a good idea, but I would recommend that if you can’t use it with a voice-to-text system that you leave it your passengers or only send in the notice after you’re in the office. It’s too dangerous otherwise.

N.B. I have left feedback for the developers asking them to add integration with Jott.

Hi-Def San Francisco

Very cool, high-definition time-lapse video of San Francisco. 24 hours in 2 minutes.

A lightning sale at the Apple Store

One of my siblings (they get annoyed when I identify them by name on the blog now for some reason) had a lightning bolt hit the telephone pole outside their house in the middle of the night last night. It fried their computer, the wireless router, and the DVD player, at least. Perhaps other stuff they haven’t found yet.

So today they were at the Apple Store buying replacement equipment (the homeowner’s insurance should cover most of it), but it could have been worse.

Their neighbor had everything single piece of electronic equipment blown out: plasma TV, home theater system, computers, everything. Ouch.

N.B. Great thing about the Apple Store. Bring in your old Mac and they’ll transfer all your data and applications to the new computer for you for a small fee. They’re doing it for my sibling even though the motherboard is fried by taking out the hard drive and putting it in an external case.

So now they replaced their several-years-old eMac with a new Mac mini running the latest OS and everything. Good for them.