Category: Pursuits

  • Caught up with too many remote controls for the home theater

    One of the biggest problems so far with our home theater set-up is juggling the three remote controls plus keyboard/track pad needed to operate all the various devices. The Samsung TV has a control as does the Samsung Blu-Ray player. Each of those two controls can sort of control some of the functions of the…

  • Newest Kindles are the iPods of reading more than ever

    What the iPod Nano is to music, the Kindle is to reading. –Jon Gruber, Sept. 21, 2010 It’s been almost three years since Amazon introduced the Kindle, a groundbreaking electronic reader that — just as the name promised — ignited the long smouldering e-reading revolution. Way back then, I wrote a blog post for Businessweek…

  • Amazon Kindle ad not at war with iPad

    Who is it that said all markets are conversations? Seth Godin? Robert Scoble? I can’t remember. But the new Amazon Kindle TV ad which debuted today immediately reminded me of the phrase. In the ad, a nerdy guy at the pool can’t read an ebook on his spiffy new Apple iPad because of the sun…

  • New version of Civ? New Windows box

    Well, it happens every four or five years and it’s happening again. Firaxis is about to release a new version of the extremely fun and highly addictive computer game Civilization (Civ V, if you must know) and so we need to build a new Windows PC. It could be months or even years before the…

  • New AppleTV may be great but it solves nothing

    “I, for one, do not think that the problem was that the band was down. I think that the problem may have been that there was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf.” Steve Jobs gives great gadget and he was in fine form on Wednesday…

  • Find the best Blu-Ray movies ’cause some don’t look so good

    As the super-duper-hyper-amazing home theater plan moves into high-gear, I’m discovering an unfortunate side-effect from high-definition television. Lots and lots of shows and movies don’t look any better in high-def and, in fact, many look worse. We have a couple of sources of HD programming including HD shows on our Verizon Fios cable, HD downloads…

  • Using a new HDMI Mac Mini with my TV: Early days

    This will be the first in a continuing series of posts about using a brand new Mac Mini with an HDMI port (purchased in June 2010) connected to a high-definition television. To read all of our adventures jumping through hoops, losing remotes and forgetting the password to bypass parental controls, see this page with all…

  • What Steve Jobs actually said about iBooks market share

    There’s been a bit of controversy about what Steve Jobs said yesterday (video here) in regard to the market share of the new iBookstore. To recall, Apple opened a new front in the electronic book wars when it introduced iBooks alongside the iPad two months ago. iBooks, sold in a proprietary DRM-locked format only at…

  • Out, damn’d spot – Reviewing iPad’s great Shakespeare app

    There are already a lot of very nifty iPad apps, from Entertainment Weekly‘s cool, interactive “Must List” to the show-me-the-radar greatness of Weatherbug to Amazon’s simple yet invaluable Kindle app. But so far, only one app has blown my mind: Shakespeare Pro (iTunes web link). It cost $19.99 but it’s probably worth $199.99 if you…

  • Insane eBook rip-offs — I tried to warn you

    Back when the major book publishers joined with Apple to go to war against Amazon and ebook consumers, there was some serious p.r. spin coming from the publishers’ camp and their toadies. In this bizzaro world, Amazon was hurting consumers by “forcing” an inflexible maximum ebook price of $9.99. If only publishers could get control…