Editorials | Gear Diary

Editorials June 29, 2009

“There Is No Science Fiction”

The divide between our imaginations and our reality may not as be as wide as we think. Tonight’s “60 Minutes” had a repeat piece titled “Mind Reading” on the development of a budding technology referred to as ‘Thought Identification’ or in laymen’s terms – ‘Mind Reading’ – and it’s a technology that seems to work with a fair degree of accuracy. As Lesley Stahl asks: “How often have you wondered what your spouse is really thinking? Or your boss? Or the guy sitting across from you on the bus? We all take as a given that we’ll never really know…

Editorials June 23, 2009

An Open Letter To Amazon’s Jeff Bezos

The following email was sent directly to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Dear Mr Bezos, My name is Dan Cohen and I am an editor for the tech website www.geardiary.com. I am also a proud Kindle owner. In fact, many of us on the site’s staff have, and love, our Kindles. I’m writing to you regarding an experience I have had over the past few days that clearly struck a cord with readers and Kindle owners worldwide. It began last Friday when I got a new iPhone and iPod touch and was unable to load some of my kindle books on them….

Editorials June 21, 2009

KindleGate: Confusion Abounds Regarding Kindle Download Policy

I’ve been on top of KindleGate most of the afternoon. It took speaking with three MORE customer reps today, plus the one yesterday, to finally get accurate, or what I hope is accurate, information. This sordid tale began last night when I was setting up my iPhone 3G S, and a book I went to download to the Amazon Kindle app would not download. I called customer service to inquire about the issue. In short order the customer representative told me that each publisher determines the number of times a book can be downloaded, and once that download number is…

Editorials June 21, 2009

To My Dad, Mel Cohen, on Father’s Day: Thanks for All the Toys

I love technology and gadgetry. Even though I’m in a field that isn’t normally associated with such things, I can’t get enough of it. For the longest time, I thought that my interest had to do with my maturity level, which, as my wife will tell you, can be rather low. 🙂

Editorials June 19, 2009

Kindle’s DRM Rears Its Ugly Head… And It IS Ugly

I love my Amazon Kindle. I love reading with it, I love how light it is, and I love the battery life. I also love the fact that it automatically syncs with the Amazon Kindle application on my iPhone and iPod touch. That means any book will open to the last page read regardless of the device last used. it is an amazing bit of technology that makes reading books across multiple platforms beyond simple. It’s a perfect situation — right? Well, it’s an almost perfect situation. This afternoon I discovered a huge Achilles heel in the whole Amazon Kindle…

Editorials, Music Diary June 19, 2009

How much is that MP3 Download Worth? How about $80,000?!?

I am a staunch anti-piracy fighter: I engage in forum discussions about it on a regular basis, and also being a hardcore PC gamer I see the direct impact of piracy on that hobby. I see how it has impacted where developers target their games, how many top-level PC games are released, and the increasingly draconian DRM schemes used to try to thwart piracy … most of which simply punish honest customers. I constantly rail against piracy and try to stop folks from doing it when I can. That said, I have absolutely no love for the RIAA , the…

Editorials June 18, 2009

Pro’s and Cons of Integrated GPS and Cameras

It all started innocently enough when Christopher Gavula e-mailed the team about the Mapquest on iPhone article. Wayne responded with an email on how much he liked the Palm Pre’s navigation program and wished standalone GPS makers well because from his point of view the Pre’s included turn-by-turn Telenav software/GPS combination all but put the nail in the standalone automotive GPS coffin. And it all spun off from there. Join us in another behind the scenes look at the Pro’s and Con’s of integrated devices.

Editorials June 16, 2009

5 Years of Free Internet Left?

I saw this the other day on ZDNet and wanted to say a couple of things. I promise to make this short and not ramble on too much. I’ve been cooking this response for the past couple of days, and it may still not be fully there yet… At the Advertising 2.0 conference, Barry Diller, Chairman and CEO of the IAC, an interactive services company raking in over $1.5 billion dollars in revenue a year, stated that the free internet would soon be a thing of the past. Picture from ZDNet.

Editorials June 14, 2009

Memory and Perspective

A fish doesn’t know it’s in water… until it is hanging in midair from a hook while being reeled in. Sometimes you are so close to something that you lose all perspective… until something comes along to remind you, that is. Yup, there is suddenly that tap on the shoulder that reminds you where you’ve been, where you are and the amazing journey from one to the other. This afternoon I had just one of those experiences. Let me explain.

Editorials June 2, 2009

China Blocks… Pretty Much Everything

It’s amazing that in these troubling times filled with economic uncertainty and unbridled social woe, the petty-minded governments of various countries still manage to find the time and resources to censor media outlets in order to protect their citizenry from the corrupting influence of free speech. Iran briefly blocked access to Facebook, ahead of its June presidential elections. China has upped the ante by blocking, amongst others, Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail. Even Microsoft’s newly unveiled bing search engine hasn’t been spared. The ongoing media blackout occurs ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre this Thursday (June 4).

Editorials May 22, 2009

Is Greed Good on the Internet?

[begin rant] Why does everything have to be about money? Why is someone always looking to get something for nothing? Free this, free that, promotional item here, promotional item there. Has capitalism ruined the beauty of some of the things that are free on the internet? I do video reviews on YouTube. Earlier this week I posted a chat video I recorded, about some of the things which were bothering me about YouTube reviews. I haven’t been doing video reviews long, and I have small following so far. And that’s fine. I do it because I enjoy it. I do…

Editorials May 20, 2009

Should the FTC have a say over blog content?

If you read Gear Diary, you are probably familiar with product reviews on various blogs. But do you ever consider why your favorite website is reviewing product X? Or whether product X has been overly generous to buy goodwill in the blog world? The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) cares. How will this affect you? Read on and find out.

Editorials May 17, 2009

Keyport Key Fob – Product Vaporware

Promises, promises, promises. At one time in my life I worked for a small, start up company. For the entire first year the company existed all we did was market. We had no product to sell, only a few working prototypes. We traveled the world displaying these prototypes at trade shows to very interested customers. We had the prettiest booth and the best brochures but nothing to sell. We even promised release dates. But these quickly came and went and eventually our potential customers became upset. They lost their patience. They wanted the product and they wanted it now. When…

Editorials May 11, 2009

It’s The Content… Stupid

We were over my in-laws’ house for Mother’s Day, and I did something rather unusual — I actually read a newspaper… from newsprint! Here’s what happened… I saw these quaint bundles of paper sitting on the counter and inquired as to what they were. My father-in-law said they are called “newspapers” and that, in his day, it was how they got the news. (I know I know… as shocking as it is, I learned that RSS feeds are actually relatively new.) I was surprised to find that the same information I read on my iPhone and Kindle could be found…

Editorials May 1, 2009

Earphone Specifications Explained

Many people buy some sort of portable hearing device. By this I am referring to earbuds (like the iPods have bundled), in-ear earphones (like Apple’s In-Ear), over-the-ear headphones (like Sennheiser’s PX series) or large cans (something like the Sennheiser HD series). For the sake of simplicity, I’ll just refer to these as “earpieces.” When you’re buying a new one, whether you’ve lost your iPod earbuds or you’ve frayed your last pair, you will almost always see, technical specifications. Most of you will gloss over these, ignore them, or — at best — glance at them and shrug your shoulders because…

Editorials April 23, 2009

Watching Local Jobs Disappear

I usually keep my thoughts of economic doom and gloom to myself, but John Starkweather posted a link to this on Facebook, and I had to share. Chris Wilson of Slate has posted an interactive map of where jobs have been gained and lost across the country since January 2006. The map’s dates start with January 2007, and when each button is pressed they show respective losses or gains for each month throughout the previous year. Only counties with a gain or loss of 250+ are represented by a red or blue dot. Using the Labor Department’s local area unemployment…

Editorials, How to Do It Yourself! March 4, 2009

Windows 7 on the HTC Shift

There have been two activities that have become the norm across the world of technology blogging in the last couple of years: unboxing, and loading Mac OS X onto netbooks. As a person who is lucky enough to have the opportunity to play with lots of phones, notebooks and other “unboxable” items, I’ve done the former a fair bit, and as an owner of a MacBook Pro for the past few years, I can understand peoples need to load OS X onto any device with an x86 processor. Another trend that’s come up in the last month or so is…

Editorials March 2, 2009

Science projects without tears

A few days ago I ranted about my belief that take home School Science Projects should be banned. I’m not altogether against them – it’s just that as a parent of two 9 year olds my experience is that most projects are a test of the parent’s ability to teach their kids how to do a project as opposed to the kids understanding anything at all about what they’re doing. Little did I know there’s actually a company that creates science project kids that help parents understand the science fair process. You might refer to this kit as parent’s “science…

Editorials February 28, 2009

The Amazing Hubble Space Telescope in Action

According to astronomer Lyman Spitzer’s 1946 paper “Astronomical advantages of an extraterrestrial observatory”, there were two main advantages that a space-based observatory would have over ground-based telescopes. The first advantage was that “the angular resolution (smallest separation at which objects can be clearly distinguished) would be limited only by diffraction, rather than by the turbulence in the atmosphere, which causes stars to twinkle and is known to astronomers as seeing.” The second advantage was that “a space-based telescope could observe infrared and ultraviolet light, which are strongly absorbed by the atmosphere.” The United Kingdom launched the first orbiting solar telescope…

Editorials February 26, 2009

What If Your Town Got Nuked? A Ground Zero Project

Fresh from last night’s viewing of Religulous, which ends with a disturbing cacophony of nuclear explosions, I found this in my RSS feed today… CarlosLabs has posted a bit of Javascript which uses Google Maps to show the effects of various catastrophic disasters; manmade and otherwise. According to DVICE’s Charlie White, “The deep red color means total destruction, dark red would be third degree burns, light red signifies second degree burns, and yellow means you’d get a pretty nasty sunburn.” You can get a more specific interpretation of distance related damage represented by the colored rings, here.

Editorials February 26, 2009

Why school projects should be banned [rant]

I think my mom is the Queen of Science projects. At my house I’ve been struggling with getting my son’s science fair project completed by next week. I’m probably the least creative person at thinking up new and interesting ways to test how fast a matchbox car can run down a wooden ramp. Leave it to my Mom to an interesting way to complete the project in one emailed suggestion that my son build the cars from the kits he received for Christmas (thanks mom!) and then test each by adding weight. I suddenly realized that my Mom wasn’t born…