Recently in Technology Category

I have been MIA lately. There's been a lot going on here with work, my personal life, and my move. That's right, I moved. With the move, I decided to upgrade my home theater to something a little more... well, a little more. I've already got a nice television, though there are nicer out there. What I did buy was new audio equipment, a PS3, and a TiVo HD. What I want to talk about is the TiVo HD and the setup.

First off, I am in the Boston area. I say this for the benefit of readers who find me with a search engine and are researching this purchase. That said, here's what I learned:

1. Comcast does offer cable cards in the Boston area. A TiVo HD forgoes the traditional use of a cable box in favor of this technology. This has two major effects (in my opinion).
a) Cable cards, obviously, use cable. This means that TiVo HDs kind of freeze out dish users. Sorry.
b) Cable cards are a one-way technology. This means that using a cable card forces you to sacrifice interactive features your cable provider otherwise offers. The most important features lost are the on-screen guide, which TiVo replaces anyway, and On Demand programming. I have also read rumblings that more programming will require two-way communication between your box and the provider later down the road. I have no way of knowing if this is true.

2. Comcast does offer multi-stream cable cards in the Boston area. A multi-stream cable card is a cable card capable of decoding multiple signals. This means you'd only need one cable card instead of two for your TiVo HD to be able to view and record two stations at once. This is a Good Thing(tm).

3. The reason multi-stream cable cards are such a good thing is financial. The first cable card is free from Comcast, so you don't have to pay a rental for the second card. That being said, the rental of a second card is only a few dollars at the time of this writing ($2.50 I believe), so don't be sad if your installer does not have a multi-stream cable card.

4. Your installer may not know what a cable card is or how to install it. Don't worry. The directions that came with the TiVo HD are thorough and good. Remember to ask for a multi-stream cable card. Your installer may not know what that is or if he has them. Mine brought up two multi-stream cards saying they were single stream. If it says M-Card on it, you've got a multi-stream card. When in doubt, your TiVo HD will detect the type of card and tell you what it is when you insert it.

5. Pairing information is important. Your TiVo may sit on a cable card status screen, but you'll actually need the pairing screen.

That's all stuff I had a little trouble finding information about when I was researching. I hope it helps someone down the road. And if not, at least I've got it documented for myself.

Several months ago I bought a roomba from iRobot. For those living under a rock, it's a robotic vacuum that wanders my apartment in search of dust, dirt, and cat hair, and sucks it up into its little bin.

A cursory search of this blog tells me I have not posted about this before, so I will say that I have been very happy with my roomba pet edition. It's kept my apartment's carpets in pretty good shape, and it helps get litter off the bathroom floor when my cat decides it no longer belongs in the box.

Unfortunately, this toy has attained the rank of a good thing that comes to an end. After about eight months, my roomba will no longer take a charge. It happened suddenly; my faithful robot trundled around the apartment one day and returned to its dock, never to recharge again. At first I thought it needed cleaning. I cleaned it. Then I thought it must just not be on the dock properly. Perhaps the terminals were messed up. But they were not. It seems the battery simply will not take a charge.

The batteries in the roomba have consistently been problematic. I know people whose roombas would take a charge but refuse to hold it, crapping out after just a few minutes. That's the biggest complaint I've heard.

I think my next vacuum will be a bagless upright. I wonder where I'll store it.

Lukas wrote an excellent post on how he uses online tools and his iPhone to live a truly mobile life.

I have a Sony DAV DZ100 and use it as both my DVD player and sound system here at home. I admit it's not the highest end unit on the planet, but the price was right when I was in the market. What's a little bit sad is that I never bothered to take advantage of the system fully - I laid the speakers out, but I never hung them or laid them out properly.

Tonight I did, and I have to say it's been worth the effort. Unfortunately the wires show. There's not a whole lot I can do about that in an apartment. Already I've learned that it's worth the effort, hands down. I would certainly prefer the wires not show, but that is not an investment I am interested making in an apartment. One benefit to my system is that it has a two channel stereo mode - something I would recommend making an absolute requirement if you're in the market for a system and live in an apartment. This allows me to disable the rear speakers with the push of a button, which helps me avoid annoying neighbors at night.

That said, in a condo or house I don't think I'd hesitate to purchase a nicer system and run the wires through the walls. Television and movies sound better and at a lower volume. This is great.

The Verizon Wireless LG8500 Chocolate has been marketed as a phone, travel companion, and mp3 player. They use the phrase mp3 player in their commercials. This begs a question - can it really play mp3s? All of Verizon Wireless's other phones have been crippled so they can play wma files only.

Just wondering.

I'm a little behind on this one but it's still blog-worthy. News.com ran an interview with Michael Mayer, CEO of Freescale Semiconductor. In this interview Mayer let out an important tidbit of information and rather than paraphrase immediately I'll just quote it.

From the interview: Weren't you there during the discussions when IBM convinced Apple to adopt the G5? Mayer: In my previous job, I ran IBM's semiconductor business. So I've seen both sides of the Apple story, because I sold the G5 to Steve (Jobs) the first time he wanted to move to Intel.

Five years ago?
Mayer: Yeah, that's about right. So I sold the G5. First I told IBM that we needed to do it, and then I sold it to Apple that the G5 was good and it was going to be the follow-on of the PowerPC road map for the desktop. It worked pretty well. And then IBM decided not to take the G5 into the laptop and decided to really focus its chip business on the game consoles.

And there you have it, folks. I don't think there's any need for me to say anything more than that.

Mac Rumors directed us at a ZDNet blog post in which the author states that, due to the lack of FireWire support in the latest iPod, he thinks Apple is poised to drop FireWire 400 support.

"Now I'm hearing that FireWire is gone completely from the new Intel iBooks that are coming next month, but its loss should come as a surprise to no one, given Apple's moves of late," says Jason. I strongly disagree. Removing FireWire 400 is critical for legacy devices - even legacy devices from Apple themselves. Remember the first iPods? I have a years-old iPod - third generation if I remember correctly - and System Info tells me that it's a FireWire 400 device. Are you honestly going to tell me that Apple is going to revoke support for their own devices? Their own devices using a technology they invented in the first place? I think not.

Now to be a bit more speculative, because I can. If you think about it, Apple has historically strived to be ahead of the times. They dropped floppy disk support early, their network cards went gigabit early, their wifi standardized at 802.11g early. Perhaps they were trying to be ahead of the times with FireWire, attempting to set that as the new standard with their earlier iPods. Perhaps going back to USB is simply their realization that USB isn't going away just yet and they might as well take advantage of lower costs involved in selling USB devices. .

And one final note: Apple is still supporting FireWire 400 devices that they've sold under AppleCare. The technology is not that old. If they ever drop FireWire 400 it's not going to be while they're still supporting devices that use it. That's just asking for a support nightmare of epic proportions.

Sorry, Jason, but I'm not buying this one. Then again, I'm not calling the move to Intel a "deal with the devil" either so I suppose we'll just have to disagree.

I work as a systems administrator. That job brings great responsibility and some good work times. I do pretty well separating my work life from my home life, but being on call four days a week means a little reduced freedom. To combat this I am in search of a data cable for my mobile phone which will allow me to use it as a USB modem. With a dial-up account, my laptop, and my mobile phone I will be set to get online from anywhere, and that, my friends, will be a good day.

But alas, it's not going to be an easy trek. To start with Verizon does not bother to support Macs, and as we all know I am a Mac user first, a UNIX user second, and a Windows user last. So with that in mind I went on the hunt. It turns out that most of these phones will work on a mac even if they say they won't. That's great! But I did say most.

I have a Nokia 3589i, and according to Nokia's technical support, well, see for yourself.

We understand you are interested in finding a data cable and software that will allow you to connect your Nokia 3589i phone to your Macintosh computer and are happy to assist you.

At this time Nokia does not manufacture any hardware or software that is compatible with the Macintosh operating system. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Pretty easy to see their protocol, isn't it? Restate the question, tell you they're happy to assist you, spit out the stock response.

Anyhow, I've done some research and discovered that there are only two phones that Verizon Wireless offers which Apple says will work with iSync. They are both very expensive (by my standards), both flip phones (which I don't particularly like), and both Motorola (which means I'll need a new car charger et al). This is not going to be a pleasant experience if I end up making it work.

Everyone seems to be in such an uproar about this court decision to let people read your e-mail. Oh the tragedy, oh what a terrible invasion of privacy! How dare they?

Wait... you mean to tell me this has been going on for years? Meet carnivore, or whatever they're calling it these days. E-mail wiretapping has been around for a very, very long time, whether people want to admit it or not. Just because this is the first it's been in the news for a while doesn't mean it hasn't been happening. The FBI has been doing it for years.

This is pretty cool. Rendezvous is a technology implemented by Apple in iChat. It basically allows for things like real-time chat (instant messaging) without having to connect to an actual server / service. It works over a LAN. Seems that Apple will be releasing this for Linux, UNIX, and Windows. That'll make intraoffice communications a little more interesting.