Category: Companies

  • Short-tailed Sony reader needs a much longer one

    Sony’s new e-book Reader certainly seems like a marvel of technology but it’s also an example of a company forgetting to ask the most basic question of new product development: what is the customer benefit over existing products? With a nod to Chris Anderson and his much discussed long tail thesis, the real direction for…

  • Everbody’s thinking about S3 for backup

    I can see today that I’m hardly the only one messing around with Amazon’s super-cheap S3 online storage system as a possible off-site backup strategy. Jeremy Zawodny, whose has been wanting/predicting solid online backup for a while, says he’s experimenting with S3, but doesn’t give all the details yet (like what software is he using,…

  • You don’t actually need an Expresscard/34

    There’s a great review over at Barefeats.com of Verizon’s new mobile broadband card (you know — the one that actually fits in the Macbook Pro’s Expresscard/34 slot). But the more interesting bit is that using a USB cable and a Motorola Razr phone, they were able to achieve the same broadband performance. You still need…

  • New page of stuff I’m messing with

    I’m adding a new permanent page to my link list down the side today. It’s intended to fill the gap between blog entries and my existing lists of hardware and software that I use regularly. Really, it’s just stuff I’m messing with and I’ll use it to keep a running list of products that I’m…

  • Lo hicimos, Lo hicimos — we did it

    Sunday night we put together the spare parts and made a new PC, a Shuttle XPC, actually. As I explained the other day, it’s made with loose ends, bits of the old MSI-based Windows 2000 system and bargains picked up around town for about $400. For the record, it’s based on an Intel Celeron D…

  • Sony’s promising Mylo gets a poor review

    I was intrigued by Sony’s announcement of a $350 mini portable device, Mylo, that could browse the web and play multimedia files. But the first review is in, by Tim Onosko, on Dave Farber’s Interesting People list and couldn’t be more negative: “Mylo, in my opinion, is a classic case of overpromising and underdelivering. It…

  • Getting ready to upgrade the Windows 2K box

    A little less than a year ago, I scrounged up some spare parts and built an AMD Sempron 64-based PC running Windows 2000. It used a bare bones case by MSI which was so loud and slouchy that I got sick of it. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve again searched high and low…

  • Screen size and battery life boost for iPods?

    I have to say that today’s Steve Jobs announcements left me less than thrilled. iPods didn’t get bigger screens, my main desire, and why would I pay for a cheesy, low resolution downloaded movie when I can buy a DVD for almost the same price and rip my own cheesy version? And iTV sounds great…

  • Why I got such a good deal on my Canon Rebel XT

    Canon introduced an update to its top-selling digital SLR today, according to the Digital Photography Review web site. The main new features seem to be a slightly bigger and brighter LCD, 10.1 megapixels instead of 8 and some kind of automatic lens dust cleaner. Can’t say there’s much there to make me sad I moved…

  • Netgear’s switching gear just works

    With most of the computers in the house able to network via ethernet at gigabit speeds, I’ve used a Linksys gigabit router to connect them. It doesn’t affect web surfing speed, which is constrained by the much slower cable modem, but it’s great for backing up files from one computer to another (someday my NAS…