(Almost) New Apple MacBook Wheel

I couldn’t resist posting a video of this computer.  Sure, the news is a few months old, but some friends haven’t seen it yet so I decided to share it with those of you who haven’t seen it yet.

It’s a video for the new Apple notebook computer, the MacBook Wheel.  It is so simple to use that it doesn’t have a keyboard; it used a wheel (ala the iPod wheel)!  How much more simple could a computer be?  No thought required, just use one finger to type, navigate the web, and do whatever it is that you do with one hand free.

Tongue.  Cheek.  Get it?  Got it?  Good.

Cell phone companies finally agree on a single recharger plug standard

Every single year, over 51,000 tons of cell phone charges are thrown away.  That’s a lot of waste!  With over 400 different proprietary types of chargers, and with the average person buying a new phone every 1.2 years, who doesn’t have a few orphaned phone chargers lying around in the remote hope that they will someday, somehow be useful?  They never are, and get thrown away soon after their uselessness is finally admitted.

In a fit of sanity, the major cell phone manufacturers have recently gotten together and decided to adopt the mini USB plus as a standard charger connection.  That’s right, all cell phones will soon use the same type of charger.  No more playing the “Find the Right Tip Boogie”, “Pray the Volts Matchgame”, or “Great Cord Detangling Shuffle”.

The cell phone manufacturers who will be complying with this new standard are: AT&T, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, mobilkom Austria, 3 Group, Motorola, Nokia, Orange, Qualcomm, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Telenor, Telstra, T-Mobile, KTF, and Vodafone.  One of the prime motives of this decision is to help reduce not only the 51,000 tons of non-biodegradable junk that old rechargers soon turn into, but it is estimated that reducing this mass of discarded cell phone chargers will help reduce greenhouse emissions from an estimated 13 to 21 million tons a year.

The bad news?  This standard will take effect in 2012.  The delay is most likely so the manufacturers can unload all of the stock of unused chargers that they have lying around!

Best iPhone Apps… Ever!?

Apple’s  iPhone App Store is an interesting virtual shopping mall for a wide variety of iPhone applications.  There are random sexy message generators for those who want to attract partners but don’t know what to say.  Applications that make your iPhone look like a beer that you’re drinking.  Or animated eyes that the user can display and place the iPhone in front of their eye to make it look like the user has a crazy eye.  There are also almost 100 applications dedicated to fart sounds.

Civilization marches on, one iPhone fart at a time.

148Apps.com has sponsored a contest for the most popular iPhone applications, called the “Best App Ever”.  I say “most popular” because these applications were voted for my iPhone users.  With 34 categories to choose from, from “Best Productivity Killer” to “Most Useful App”, there were plenty of winners.  I’m surprised there weren’t categories for “Like Totally Rad App, You Know” or “Kewl3st Gamez 4 Ur iFon”.  You know, to keep with the “Best App Ever” theme.

And the 2008 winners were…

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Microsoft Zune crashes into the new year

Many owners of the Microsoft Zune 30mb media player had an extra surprise waiting for them at the turn of the new year… their MP3 player locked up and would not function at all.  Happy New Year!
The problem turned out to be very simple; looking at the source code for the Zune reveals that a very simple bug caused the whole fiasco.  I just looked at the source code, and it turns out that all that was wrong was that the code was missing an “=”.   Microsoft’s “fix” for the problem is less than impressive as well.  “Let the battery run out and restart the device.”  At least they don’t reccomend reformatting the hard drive, as is often a final “fix” that Microsoft tech support offers when they encounter a user’s system that a system with the MS Windows operating system that they don’t know how to resolve through normal troubleshooting procedures.

For those more technically minded, here is the problem code:
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Ethical Killer Robots?

My DVD player thinks that it is 12:00 whenever the power goes out.  PCs are thousands of times likelier to crash than cars are.  Checkout scanners often mis-price items.  Your spell checker can’t tell the difference between their, they’re, and there.  Let’s face it, computers are wonderfully powerful tools, but they are quite prone to failure, both mechanical and design related.  When computers fail to perform correctly, the worst that usually happens is that they waste a few minutes of our time, annoy us, or cost us a few extra bucks.

Safeguards are put into place for computer-controlled machines that could cause us harm when they fail.  Safe shutdown protocols, solenoid switches, back-up mechanical devices, etc. are all standard features with computer-controlled devices who’s malfunction could result in harm.

That is, unless…
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Social Networking for… Spies?!?

James Bond would love this… The CIA, FBI, NSA, and 13 other intelligence agencies have collaborated together (shock!) to create a national information sharing system called A-Space. This is actually good and bad news, depending on your concern about civil liberties, privacy, and all those “old-school” values. But I am not going to address that issue right now. Simply put, the mere fact that these three security agencies are actually working together on something is a shocker. But just what model did they choose to use to share information? A Wiki? A well-indexed knowledge base? A class/relationship based model? How about a symbolic or even ontology-based system? Nope. Here’s the model that they chose instead…
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*Sniff Sniff* Sniffex blows up

With all of the U.S. media attention on suicide bombers, terrorists, bloodthirsty Jihadists, suicidal fanatics, and whole countries filled with people who apparently hate freedom, it’s a wonder that any of us can stand at a bus stop and not wonder if we’re going to die in a ball of Starbuck’s coffee and flames.  And in this culture of fear and paranoia, wouldn’t it be great if you could have a “Terrorist Detector” that would warn you when one of those cunning bastards was near you?  Never fear, brave American!  The Sniffex bomb detector will detect any explosive device within 300 feet of you and warn you before you turn into a collateral damage statistic!  I this know because I read their marketing materials…

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Let Them Eat Toast!

There are jokes about home computers being nothing more than glorified heaters, which in some part may be true.  Ineffeciencies in chip design cause much of the electricity used to power them to be wasted as heat.  While much research is being done to reduce the amount of energy that is lost to heat, we will still have computers that double as heaters for a long time.

While they are great at keeping your toes warm, little else of use has been made of the excess heat generated by PCs.  This featured invention does absolutely nothing to eliminate or even reduce this problem.  It makes the problem worse, much worse.  Then why is thisproduct being featured here?  Read on…

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An alarm clock more evil than you are sleepy

Waking up in the morning sucks.  Well, I suppose that it beats never waking up again, but I digress.  I know a few pople who wake up in the morning chipper and ready to take on the day with an energetic smile and a spring in their step, but Lithium and Prozac aren’t a part of my lifestyle, so scratch that option.

Human creativity is rarely put to use by the masses, except when it comes to putting off waking up when the alarm clock is blaring.  This product is no exception…

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The good, the bad, and all the rest

There is so much information floating around about any particular piece of technology that is is virtually impossible to seperate hype from reality.  After all, with the proliferation of blogs, paid reviews and paid “news” stories, who knows where any piece of information is coming from anymore? This problem is not just confined to technology information and news, but is a widespread one that affects every single thing that we read in newspapers, magazines, all online information sources, and even word-of-mouth.  It is more important now than ever to consider the source when judging and weighing information that we receive about anything that we are learning about.

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Cellphone handset… yesterday’s technology today!

Remember the 50s?  Back in the days of cars that looked like spaceships, toasters that were aerodynamic, and of course everything had to be covered in shiny chrome?  No?  Neither do I, but I’ve seen Happy Days, and that’s close enough for me.  Apparently, however, some rocket scientists deep inside of the skunk works of product development in a dark basement of some unknown Chinese company have decided to bring the wonders of old technology to the cell phone age.  What happens when old technology and new technology get together and breed?  The results are in, and…

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