Editorials

Use Your Cell Cam, Go to Jail

Photo courtesy of ABC News© We don’t talk much about politics here at Gear Diary. It’s not our thing. We’re geeks and nerds here, not PoliSci majors. We like to talk about the positive side of tech. But every once in a while, tech news and politics do bleed into each other. One of the classics is Net Neutrality, of course. Gizmodo being raided by the police for purchasing an allegedly stolen device. Early in my career, encryption software being treated as equivalent to a munition was a hot topic. You get the idea. Since 9/11, a lot of the…

Editorials, Music Diary

The Democratization of Music in an iTunes Era

Say what you will about iTunes and the electronic age’s impact on music and the music industry but one thing is clear — they have been great about is giving talented people exposure long before they might come to the attention of agents, scouts and record labels. That’s the case with Applegirl, who caught the world’s attention with her rendition of Lady Gaga’s Poker Face performed with nothing more than a number of iPhones. Over three million views later she has a contract with a record company. Pretty neat. Then there is Ben, one of my students and an aspiring musician….

Editorials, Game Diary

New Dragon Age Patch Breaks DLC, the Solution? Patience!

There is nothing worse than starting up a game and getting an error message like the one above – you have done everything right, installed everything, logged into the account, even played before using all of this content. But now, you log in and cannot start the game, and are told that you are not authorized to use the content and that the owner of the content needs to log in. ARRGH! After doing all of the usual stuff – logging in and out of my in-game account, restarting the game, checking my online profile and so on … I…

eBooks, Editorials

Fear and Loathing in eBooks

Amazon announced this morning that they’ve struck an exclusive deal with literary agent Andrew Wylie. He’s acting as a publisher for several authors he represents and has agreed to give Amazon an exclusive on 20 titles. You can check out the full press release here, but the highlights are: Books available in the Kindle Store through Odyssey Editions include modern classics such as Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children,” Oliver Sacks’ “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” John Cheever’s “The Stories of John Cheever” and four novels…

eBooks, Editorials

Are e-textbooks the Next Big Market?

There’s no doubt that ebooks are taking market share from regular books, and the marketplace is getting very crowded with companies attempting to grab a slice of the action. e-Textbooks, on the other hand, have been a much tougher sell. The Kindle famously flamed out in various university trials, and it’s too early to tell if the iPad will be a success for studying. Still, it hasn’t stopped several companies from rolling out strategies to break into the textbook market. B&N has nookStudy, Macmillan has DynamicBooks, and now Engadget is reporting that Entourage (of the infamous dual-screened ebook reader) has…

Editorials

The No-TV experiment Diary

Last week my fiancée and I set out to do a no-TV week, and here are my quick thoughts on how it went! Day 1: Not terrible. The worst withdrawal symptoms were right after work, when we would normally flop down on the couch until it was time to hit the gym and be tortured by the personal trainer. Instead, we cleaned the kitchen. And we ate dinner at the table, instead of on the couch (shocking) and were extremely productive! So far the biggest issue is that we may need to get a helmet for the dog. He keeps…

eBooks, Editorials

Amazon Kindle DX Makes Difference In Centenarian’s Life

Here’s a great story about technology making a real difference in one person’s quality of life… My mom just turned 100 in June of this year. She says she has the mind of a 50 year old and the body of a 100 year old and in truth she certainly doesn’t look 100. But she is 100 (and has the Happy Birthday letter from the President to prove it) and, as a result, she has some physical limitations. Among them, she has macular degeneration. According to her eye specialist she won’t go blind but her vision has gotten so bad…

Editorials

Droid X Gets the Lockdown: Does it Matter?

There’s been a bunch of stuff going around the web about the Droid X and the fact that it likely will not be able to run custom ROMS and may even be hard to root. I’ll try to describe, in layman’s terms, what this may mean to a prospective Droid X buyer. What is this root and custom rom thing? First, having root is like having the Administrator user password on a Windows machine or the root password on a Mac OS X machine or Linux machine. It essentially gives you the right to modify anything on the phone. You…

Editorials

Fact Checking, Public Relations, and the Droid X Versus the iPhone

(image courtesy Newsrealblog) At Gear Diary, we receive a fair bit of unsolicited email pitching ideas. The originators of this email sent us such a boneheaded set of statements that I don’t feel it would be fair or right to post their names. However, I will post the five points they attempted to helpfully share, and why they are wrong…and let this be a lesson to any other public relations types out there-fact checking is your friend! The “helpful” email was trying to convince us why a Droid X was a worse choice than an iPhone: Five Reasons Not to…

Editorials

Thanks Amazon for Linking Me Up With Old Friends … um … I Think …

Before I start this story, here is a Public Service Announcement – if you use Amazon.com’s Wish List feature, be aware that unless you explicitly link each list to an address, it will direct shipments to whatever your default address was … WHEN THE LIST WAS CREATED! Please do yourself a favor and make sure your list isn’t sending stuff to that place you lived in 2002 when you created your first list for fun. OK, now back to our story … When I jumped at the possibility at writing for Gear Diary last year, one reason was that I…

Editorials

Apple Picking iPhone Reception Issues- A Gear Chat

Dan: The drama surrounding iPhone 4 reception issues moved up a few notches yesterday when Consumer Reports announced that they were reversing position and announced that they could not recommend the iPhone 4 due to a design flaw in their external antenna. Bear in mind that they seem to love every other aspect of the phone and give it a score of 76 out of 100 with the next highest ranked phones, the iPhone 3GS and the HTC Sprint Evo each getting a 74, but the particular antenna issue is, for them, a deal breaker. As the day went on,…

eBooks, Editorials

State of the eBook: Fight!

For this week’s “State of the eBook” I thought we should look at potential winners and losers in the ebook world. With competition and price wars getting fiercer, there’s a few major battles shaping up that may change the competitive landscape. One is (at this point) a slam dunk, while the others are subject to many variables. Without further ado, here are the matchups! Borders vs B&N B&N vs Amazon Amazon vs B&N and Spring Design Spring Design vs B&N Amazon, B&N, Spring Design and Borders vs the iPad Borders vs B&N Let’s start with what I think is just…

Editorials

Breaking the TV Habit

My fiancée and I watch a fair amount of television. It’s not the ONLY thing we do, but we tend to leave it on a great deal in the background during the evenings. In the summer, there’s not much we really follow, but somehow the TV still ends up on around 7:30, 8pm and stays on until around 10. So we’ve decided to go cold turkey. Just for one week, to see if we’re more productive if we’re not being distracted by reality TV and bad sitcoms. It also means we’re going to force ourselves avoid crashing out on our…

Editorials

Adventures in Customer Service FAIL … Jott Edition

A few months ago I canceled my subscription to Jott. Between Reqall’s powerful voice-to-text memory system and Dragon Dictation I found that I wasn’t using it all that much. After a time however, I found that I missed being able to Jott new appointments to my Google Calendar and new tasks to Toodledo so I signed back up. This time I opted for the plan that lets you record just 15 seconds. It is much cheaper and would work fine since I only planned to use Jott for quick tasks and appointments only. But there was a problem… Jott stopped…

Editorials, Game Diary

nVidia Optimus – Not Ready for (Gaming) Prime Time

It was supposed to be a great day … I had written first impressions about the original Alienware m11x and about how I was ordering the new one as soon as it became available. And while I was away on vacation my order shipped and arrived, so it was waiting for me upon my return. I was thrilled and couldn’t wait to get busy with it. After all, I loved so much about the original Alienware m11x (now called R1), including: – Near-netbook portability. – Better than netbook battery life (on integrated graphics) – True gaming laptop performance. – Better…

Editorials

Tech Infrastructure and Monopolies

When I was a kid, phone design was still pretty much in its infancy–the “Princess” phone was pretty much the height of technology then. It wasn’t bolted to the wall! The dial lit up! It came in colors other than black or beige! Eventually, it even had buttons instead of a dial! In those prehistoric days, everything ran across copper, and 99% or more of the traffic was voice–ARPANET was just getting going, and all we primitive creatures did was make one-to-one phone calls. (The concept of a many-to-many phone call–a “party call”–was almost insanely exotic to me.) So worry…

eBooks, Editorials

Is Borders Destined for Failure?

Oh Borders. I don’t want to wish failure on any entity, especially a company that taught me a great deal, but sadly, the Borders eBook strategy is going to fail. Spectacularly. I just don’t see how they’ll overcome the Amazon/B&N/Apple juggernauts with such scattered, messy, and honestly lackluster set of offerings. Head over to Borders’ site, and check out their ebook readers page. Be sure to look at their ebook comparison chart. In case Borders caught on to how bad it is and has removed it, here’s a screenshot: Hint to Borders-If your “comparison chart” illustrates how much better spec’d…

Editorials

Email, iPhones and Steve Jobs: a Cautionary Tale

Before you read this post I need to ask you to participate in an experiment with me. Seriously, thus isn’t a joke. The gist of this post will make more sense it you play along. Bookmark this post, do the experiment and then, when you have finished the task, come back and read on. Here is the experiment. 1. Next time your significant other, child or parent is really upset about something say the following to them… “Stop getting so worked up. Calm Down and Relax.” 2. Make a mental note of their response and how effective your “calming” words were….

Editorials

Why is Apple’s iOS4 Crashing Microsoft Exchange Servers?

I’m going to be honest, I really could care less about Apple’s current antenna/signal reporting woes right now. Businesses and users who use their iPhone with a Microsoft Exchange server are facing a much bigger issue that, by and large, is not being covered. The problem? Apple’s iOS4 crashes Exchange servers. What’s worse is that the problem won’t just impact iPhone or iPod touch users. It will impact everyone using ActiveSync on those Exchange servers. That’s right folks, right now Apple’s iOS4 will impact service to every Windows Mobile, Palm webOS, Symbian, Android and iPhone/iPod touch, bringing businesses worldwide to…

Editorials, News

Apple’s Statement On iPhone 4 Reception Issues Translated…

Apple just released a statement on the reported iPhone 4 reception issues. It is a rather long and complicated release so as a public service we have taken the liberty of sharing the entire release… and its translation, with all of you. All joking aside… a bunch of us who write for the site have iPhone 4s and… yes… we do love them.

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