Articles by Michael Anderson

iPad Game Review: Treasure Seekers II: The Enchanted Canvases

Given how much I enjoyed the Mystery of the Crystal Portal games, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to review Treasure Seekers II: The Enchanted Canvases. Like the Crystal Portal games, Treasure Seekers is a hidden object game with a story that keeps you engaged as you go along. But aside from that, how is the game? The Hype: Help Nelly find and save her brother from a mysterious Romanian castle! Dive into the castle’s magical pictures and discover the secrets of the Philosophers’ Stone. Use your Hidden Object skills in Treasure Seekers: The Enchanted Canvases to break the…

Music Diary

Music Diary Notes: Grammy Awards, Esperanza Spalding, and More … !

Photo courtesy of JAE C. HONG of the Associated Press The Grammy Awards, like most self-congratulatory industry events across the various media, are an interesting study in how they like to ‘tell a story’ framed by performances, themes, and the awards they give out. There is a mix of artists having major sweeps of categories, some years the awards are spread around, and there is even the occasional ‘surprise’ – which generally means the difference between two similar sounding pop stars from the same label and management team. Make no mistake on my opinion – I believe the ‘Awards’ at…

News & Features

The Valentine’s Day Gift Arms Race

Let’s face it – by this time if you are still deciding on Valentine’s Day gifts you are pretty much in deep trouble with the object of your intentions. This isn’t meant as gift-giving advice. Nor is it a curmudgeonly rant about the ‘Hallmark Holiday’ – while the card-maker and your local florist certainly profit from February 14th, the celebration has historical ties. No … this is about the seeming ‘arms race’ in gift-giving. Initially I had started pooling loads of images from every email I had gotten over the last month touting the ‘perfect Valentine’s Day gift’, with the…

News & Features

Check Out Larry Greenberg’s New RunAroundTech Site!

One of the great things about writing for a site like Gear Diary is the crew – I love reading all of the different insights and viewpoints and interests. Former editor Larry Greenberg contributed some really cool things – his Apple on TV, Smash or Trash, YouTube reviews, destructive reviews, and other fun things have always been a blast to watch & read! Larry has maintained his active YouTube site, and now Larry has a new tech site of his own Here is his welcome: Welcome to Run Around Tech. We’ve been chasing down the technology you crave behind the…

Music Diary, News & Features

Music Diary Quickie: Attend the Worlds Largest Guitar Lesson with Steve Vai on March 3rd!

If you list out the most amazingly talented guitarists working today, Steve Vai is sure to be near the top of that list. Now look at the best places in the world to get a musical education, and you will certainly have Boston’s Berklee College of Music on your short list. Now Berklee and Steve Vai are teaming up to put on the ‘world’s largest guitar lesson’ on March 3rd. Check out the official site for more details, and if you are so inclined tune in and help them make history! I know I will be there with my kids!…

Music Diary, News & Features

Music Diary Notes: Dear Sony-BMG … ENOUGH ALREADY!

We all know that a company will milk a property for cash so long as people are paying. Last fall I wrote about the excellent 40th Anniversary edition of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. There were two different editions, each containing additional live material ‘never before released’. Both contained a Copenhagen concert DVD from November 1969, and the ~$100 Collector’s Edition also had the complete Tanglewood concert from August 1970. This is in addition to the OTHER 1970-ish shows like the Fillmore East dual CD release from several years back. The release note from AllMusic.com: Before looking into the musical quality…

Editorials

#1 Reason the Motorola Xoom WILL Fail (But Shouldn’t)

Everyone seems to be freaking out about the recently revealed pricing for the upcoming Motorola XOOM tablet. On the surface that seems silly: the XOOM has a dual-core processor, a 1280×720 10.2 inch touch screen, two cameras (a 5MP rear camera with flash and a 2MP ‘webcam’), as well as the latest Android 3.0 operating system. On paper it seems like the XOOM completely blows away the iPad, but as we have learned with the fictitious Samsung Tab sales numbers, having better specs means little. An article at eWeek lists 10 reasons why the XOOM is overpriced, but there was…

Gear Bits, News & Features

GD Quickie: It’s Getting to be THAT Time of Year

I keep professional contacts with loads of folks in different industries all over the country, and after a couple of years of them being divided between ‘I’m happy to still have a job’ and ‘oh crap, I no longer have a job’ … this is the first year folks are starting to discuss raises. Having talked to several people in the last few weeks I have found a few basic themes: there are ~1% companies like Google who are saying ‘we had a great year – here, have some money’. Then there are the companies that are still struggling –…

Gear Bits

Grammar R Us: Facebook Drama Battles!

In a text I sent yesterday I inadvertently used ‘here’ when I intended ‘hear’ … but of course, once it is gone you can’t edit it! Now we have a Facebook battle celebrating an even more epic battle: the use of ‘your’ versus ‘you’re’. Just in case you were wondering … Emma has it right, and we love her for her patience and diligence trying to help her friend. Source: Buzzfeed

Game Diary, Reviews

PC Game Review: Majesty 2: Battles of Ardania

Majesty 2: Battles of Ardania was released just over six months after Majesty 2: Kingmaker and only a year since of the original Majesty 2, long enough for me to have played loads of games … but soon enough that playing the new expansion Battles of Ardania feels like returning home to see an old friend. The Hype: When there is peace in the kingdom, and nothing has happened in a month, any good King would itch for war. And even if not a full scale war, then at least for a skirmish; and if there is no skirmish, then…

Gear Bits

Here is Every Password You Will Ever Need!

Someone at Gear Diary recently had one of their personal accounts hacked, which should be yet another reminder to everyone that you never know when or why one of your accounts might get compromised. Last year I had an issue with my Facebook account, and several years ago my Steam account got hijacked. It can happen to anyone, anytime … but the passwords you use can help keep you more secure. Last week there was a interesting infograph about the 20 top passwords of all time. Here is a snip from the graph: Amusingly this week there was an article…

Gear Bits

GD Quickie: Pay No Attention to the ’60 Minutes’ On Your Flip Mino HD

I love my Flip Mino HD, I really do. Since getting it I have used it extensively, capturing tons of our kids’ activities and so on easily and without any fuss. There are no accessible settings – you just record and use the digital zoom. But until last week I never really pushed it. Sure I have had it run out of time on me, but that is after capturing a bunch of different clips, usually during the holiday school concert season. But last week both of my kids had lead roles in the middle school play. Based on last…

Gear Bits, Music Diary

Music Diary Quickie: The Music of Super Bowl XLV!

Generally there are two reasons to watch the Super Bowl: the game and the commercials. But some folks look forward to the half-time show as well. But there is even more music, and last night we had two pre-game songs including America the Beautiful as well as the National Anthem. Was any of it tolerable? Here is my quick take. Lea Michele sings America the Beautiful Gleeks know her well as the talented but full-of-herself Rachel, but she is also becoming known for her ‘diva’ like behavior in real life, such as when she snubbed a fan who just happens…

Gear Bits

GD Quickie: The Continuum of Caring

I just heard someone say ‘I could care less’ … and for some reason it drives me insane! So, as a public service I am putting this up as a reminder: ‘I could care less’ means that you could, in fact care less. I couldn’t care less, on the other hand … The image is one I always have at hand since I found it a long time ago … sort of like ‘Captain Obvious’ and the tin-foil hat ‘conspiracy’ guy.

Music Diary, Reviews

Music Diary Notes: For the Love of Drumming – Bill Bruford Autobiography

I have been reading drummer Bill Bruford’s autobiography lately after reading an article announcing it at AllAboutJazz. I had thought about doing an actual review, but the WAY in which I read the book told me I should do it differently. This is a true autobiography – not like one of those unattributed, ghost-written Sarah Palin books. The style varies between academic, allegorical, conversational, formal and casual. The writing won’t have you shelving your James Joyce (I had actually just finished re-reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man … so there was a bit of a difference). But…

Gear Bits

GD Quickie: Politics and the Power of Image Cropping

What is going on in Egypt is powerful and scary stuff, and I don’t seek to demean it in any way. Nor do I seek to diminish or trivialize anything that happened or is currently happening in Iraq. However this contrast of images is simply stunning. The image above is a split of top down pictures of supposed ‘democratic revolutions’, one in Egypt right now, the other from 2003 in Iraq. In the upper left of the lower image we see the focus on the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein – this was the widely shown image at…

Gear Bits

GD Quickie: Can You Guess Who Is Buying Google’s Priorities?

When I first heard that Google wasn’t going to auto-complete searches for Bit-torrents and other file sharing methods I was pleased. But then it became clear that it was less a matter of taking an anti-piracy stance, and more about satisfying the corporate interests of those who feed Google loads of cash. So this image was very telling – and it also shows where the priorities are at Google … if you have the cash, you get to set the moral compass. Source: Techi via Buzzfeed

Gear Bits

GD Quickie: Yeah, it IS That Kind of Day!

For a large part of the country, this image pretty much sums things up. It is from the stretch of I-93 on the New Hampshire side – 93 runs from Southern NH straight into downtown Boston and is one of those infamously clogged highways. For more images, check out page at BuzzFeed!

Music Diary, Reviews

Music Diary Reviews: Trey Gunn and Nik Bartsch Produce Two of My Favorite 2010 Recordings

Welcome to another edition of Music Diary Reviews! Since I started doing these reviews I have simply collected up stuff from a time period and reviewed it all. For the last few I have separated Jazz, Pop and Re-issues. But still it is just whatever comes along reviewed as it comes along. Don’t get me wrong, there are some awesome releases in there like Mary Halverson’s Saturn Sings. But there were also a couple of recent releases that struck me so much for one reason or other that I simply needed to look at them apart from everything else. So,…

eBooks, Editorials

Tough Call: Is Apple Being Draconian & Greedy … or Is Sony Trying to Pull a Fast One?

If you track technology, you have likely seen the NYTimes article or one of the echo-articles declaring a shift in how Apple operates the app store, citing the rejection of the Sony Reader app and a vague quote from a Sony Rep as evidence. There is a lot of speculation there, but it ultimately comes down to the interpretation of two sections of a single sentence: The company has told some applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access to purchases they have made outside the App…

Editorials

Samsung Tab Afterglow Reality Check: ‘Quite Small’ Sales, Quite Large Returns

If you are like me, you love the iPad but were thrilled to see Samsung doing well with the Galaxy Tab. I wrote back at the beginning of December how the Galaxy Tab had sold 1 million units in two months, and Doug wrote about more mainstream attention being paid to the wonderful little Tablet. Personally I think we all benefit from competition – just look at the huge things Nintendo has done in 6 years with the DS in the face of competition from Sony and Apple compared to the tiny changes they made to the GameBoy over 15…

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