Dec 0916
It’s the holiday season and if you’re looking for the perfect gift for the techie in your life, have no fear. I polled the Matrix Group staff and they came through with these terrific suggestions:
Aug 0918
I just discovered CoolIris, a browser plug-in that lets me surf images and videos in a cool, new way. Browser plugs-in are small pieces of software that extend the capabilities of your Web browser. In this case, I downloaded the CoolIris plug-in for Firefox, installed it, restarted, and I was good to go. So what’s so cool about this plug-in?
Cooliris lets me scroll through images and videos on my computer and sites that support Cooliris. For example, if I want to browse photos from my son’s birthday party, I point Cooliris to the proper directory and the photos will appear as a wall of photos in my browser. I can scroll through the images by using my mouse to drag images, or I can use the Cooliris scroll tool.
It turns out that many of my favorite sites now support Cooliris, like Flickr, Facebook, Hulu, images from Google,and Getty Images. I can tell if a site support Cooliris if I hover an image and the double squares appear in the lower left corner of the image. I can then click on the double squares to launch the photo album, collection of photos or RSS of images and videos in Cooliris.
It’s super fun to browse friends’ albums in Facebook in Cooliris without having to press Next, Next, Next. And I love being able to surf hundreds of images in Getty Images in one long wall of photos.
Is Cooliris here to stay? Who knows? It’s free, it’s cool, it’s convenient and it’s fun to play. Check it out and let me know what you think!
May 0912
What do the iPhone, Facebook, Twitter and Google have in common? They have great platforms that have contributed greatly to their success! What’s a platform and why does it matter?
Wikipedia defines a platform as “a place to launch software. It is an agreement that the platform provider gave to the software developer that logic code will interpret consistently as long as the platform is running on top of other platforms.”
I’m convinced that Facebook zoomed past MySpace because it launched a developer platform earlier. The developer-friendly platform lets developers create zillions of cool apps and suck more of our time, energy and loyalty. How many quizzes have you filled out on Facebook?
The iPhone is no different. Apple opened up its platform, hosted a user-friendly store and nine months later, iPhone users had downloaded 1 billion applications, most of them free or under $5. My husband says he can purchase or download apps for his Blackberry but it’s not easy and the apps are on multiple sites. No fun at all.
Twitter’s platform lets developers capture streams of data from the millions of tweets posted every day. Born from these streams are apps that let us visualize tweets, manage tweets, search tweets, map tweets.
Read the rest of this entry
Feb 0924
In my last power bill, Dominion Power reported that “(n)ationally, 6 percent of our residential electricity consumption goes to … ‘phantom loads’ used by devices – such as, VCRs, televisions, stereos, kitchen appliances – that are turned off and not in use. Holy cow! 6 percent?!
I don’t know about you, but my power and gas bills shock me each month. At home, we upgraded our HVAC system to high efficiency Trane units; we have turned our thermostat down to 68 this winter; we have window film on bedroom windows; all of our light fixtures and lamps use compact flourescent bulbs; well, you get the picture.
But we’ve completely overlooked the phantom loads used by: the laptops that get left on at night; the PS3, Apple TV and Wii that are on standby all the time; and on and on. So I dug a little deeper and found these suggestions for reducing the phantom load at home and at work. Read the rest of this entry
Jan 0919
After taking over 15,000 shots I retired my old Sony digital camera and got this green little number. Love the high res images, long battery life, video mode, and smile detection.
Jan 0906
Engadget posted a story about a guy who hacked his washing machine and got it to tweet (send a message via Twitter) when a load of wash is done. Here’s the Twitter account for PiMPY3WASH, which I’m now following.
I guess it’s possible this is a true story. I’m married to a guy who can install Linux (I mean NetBSD) on practically anything. But I’m suspicious about this story for one reason: there’s too much laundry being done. There were 3 loads done on December 30 and two loads on December 29. That’s too much laundry, especially for a guy (no offense, guys!).
However, I’m excited about the idea of appliances and gadgets communicating with humans. If I had the engineering chops, I would design the following:
Dec 0805
Okay, so it’s December 5. I feel like I have tons of time before I celebrate Christmas with my family, but I know that I need to get on the ball with my holiday shopping. So I asked my staff for their favorite gadget gifts; this is what I got back. Some items are oldies but goodies, some are outrageous, all are loved by at least one Matrix Group staffer.
Sep 0804
High Definition (HD) is everywhere. The Blu-ray format has won the HD DVD war and I’m seeing a lot more Blu-ray movies at my local video store and retail stores. As I mentioned in a previous post, Apple TV and the PS3 now have HD videos on demand.
Earlier this year, Microsoft released Silverlight, their answer to Adobe’s Flash. The official Web site describes Silverlight as “a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.” I downloaded Silverlight in order to watch the Democratic National Convention live, in HD. The picture was unbelievably crisp and the audio was terrific. BTW, I checked; no HD feed on the official Republican Convention site.
I didn’t realize it, but the NBC Olympics Web site had videos powered by Silverlight (not in HD, however). Here’s a link to a video feed of the closing ceremony and a PC World article describing what Silverlight allowed the Web site developers to do.
Read the rest of this entry
Aug 0806
Over the past couple of weeks, my family and I had the opportunity to check out the video on demand services from Apple and Sony. We found the services to be easy to use and competitively priced, but there are still a few kinks to work out in the business models.
Apple TV vs. Sony PS3
Let’s start with the Apple service. We have an Apple TV (we bought ours for $199), which is a device that hooks up to your TV and connects via wireless to your Macintosh computer. Using the Apple TV, we can stream photos, music and podcasts to our big screen TV. Perhaps most fun of all, Apple TV has a custom interface for surfing YouTube! Surfing YouTube as a family, on the big screen, from the comfort of my couch, is wonderful. And now, we can rent or purchase movies from Apple.
The Sony service is available on the PS3. I love our PS3 because I absolutely love Blu-ray. The Sony service has a good selection of movies, although you’d think that a company like Sony would have a much bigger selection than Apple because it is in the entertainment business, but what do I know about these things.
Read the rest of this entry
