Technology

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25 February, 2013

The Super Capacitor — A Battery For the Future

Posted by blackcampbell under Enegy, Technology | Tags: , , , , |
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Kaner Lab researcher Maher El-Kady painted sheets of graphene an atom thick on a plastic surface and bombarded it with controlled laser light (he used a DVD burner.) The result: a stunningly thin supercapacitor which could store up a large amount of electricity in minuscule time frames. A battery made of this material could charge your cell phone for a full day’s use in two seconds, and is much lighter than current metallic batteries.

 

20 February, 2013

iTunes Update Causing Constant Requests For Network Connections?

Posted by blackcampbell under Computers, Technology | Tags: , , |
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Sigh…I really like the OS X environment, I think the operating system works very well and is remarkably stable compared to Windows (although I do like Windows 7 very much)…but what the #$%@ is with iTunes? Every improvement is a pain in the ass — it either doesn’t work well, or it does something to piss me off.

The latest was that every time I would open the program, it woud ask if I wanted to accept network connections. It’s a firewall issue; you’d think iTunes would play nice with OS X’s own firewall. (Good job, iTunes development team; you still suck!)

Here’s what worked for me. Swear vociferously. Close iTunes. Open the application manager and kill the iTunes helper process. (Search — you’ll find it faster.) Delete iTunes — no you will not lose your library, files, or downloads. Mountain Lion won’t let you drag to the trash can, so open the terminal, type in cd /Applications/

Yes, capitalize Application.

Then type: sudo rm -rf iTunes.app/ It will ask you for your administrator password if it’s enabled.

That’s it. Nothing else will happen, but the iTunes icon will be gone. Restart your computer, go to the iTunes web page and download the new 11.0.2. If you want to throw in some verbal abuse at Apple, the iTunes developers, Macs and how much easier Windows is to use — hit it. I recommend swearing. Or hitting an inanimate object.

Now option+click iTunes in the application folder, find your libraries, and you should be good to go.

Now for the saying nice things portion of the rant: iTunes 11.0.2 is much much faster than the last iteration on my 2010 Air, even accessing my network drive for the files. It found the files quickly, and accessed the store remarkably fast. Usually I wait through a long slog just to get into the store, much less try to find something. At this point I apologize to the iTunes code monkeys — this is still a kludged mess in some ways, but it’s running better than it has in years.

 

20 January, 2013

3D Printing and the Future of Shopping

Posted by blackcampbell under Technology | Tags: |
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8 November, 2012

Fact or Fiction: SHIELD Helicarrier

Posted by blackcampbell under Comic Books, Science Fiction, Technology | Tags: |
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Possible? Not possible? Who cares? It’s awesome! Unless something breaks down…then it’s a dramatically awful idea…

 

5 September, 2012

Testing Vid Conferencing For Gaming

Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games, Technology
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Tonight I was testing Facetime, Skype and Google Hangout with a few friends to see if it could be useful for getting together to game, as we are starting to get pulled apart geographically. Facetime and Skype had the best resolution and sound quality, but are limited to calling one person (Skype will allow multiple callers, but you have to pay a monthly fee.) Google Hangout did multiple people easily, but we did notice that the iPad in the conference suffered microphone fidelity — a known issue (there’s an app for that) and I suspect fallout of the idiotic pissing contest between Apple and Google.

Here’s an idea guys, try servicing the customers instead of trying for world domination. What’s next? frickin’ lasers on the moon?

It didn’t hit me at the time, but thinking on it I am still able to be amazed that I am talking to friends 70 miles away in Santa Fe, and also in Seoul on the other side of the world, at the same time — seeing their faces, hearing their voices… There’s a lot wrong with the world (isn’t there always?) but there’s still wonderous things that technology is bringing us.

As for using teleconferencing, I’ve come to the conclusion that if we only have a single player calling in, Skype or Facetime (if they have a Mac) is the way to go; for multiple players, I would go to Google Hangout (which also has a third party dice app you can get a hold of. Facetime was very stable over the period used, but Skype was a bit twitchy from time to time. Google was the worst of the bunch, continually losing at least one of the people.

On the matter of being able to see the person — for the group that’s present, it looks like I’ll probably use the iPad as the camera/mike, and mirror the pickup with an HDMI rig into the television in the living room — and I’ll use my laptop for the notes, dice, etc.

 

4 September, 2012

Player Moving Away? Do You Have to Lose Them From Your Group?

Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games, Technology
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It’s a problem that our gaming group is about to have: One of our better, more fun players is about to GTT (Gone To Texas, for those of you not up on 19th Century slang.) We want to keep him in the game. Solution: Facetime. Both he and I use Apples, and will be on wifi connections, so why not use my iPad to throw the Facetime screen on the television, use the iPad camera so he can see us, and play long distance?

We’re going to do a test run this week to see if the camera has the field of vision to show the whole room for him.

Has anyone else run games via Google Hangout, Skype, or Facetime? I’m interested to see how it’s working out.

 

30 July, 2012

Want “Save As…” Back in Mountain Lion? You Can Have That

Posted by blackcampbell under Computers, Technology | Tags: , |
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First you want to reset the keyboard shortcuts for Duplicate to something not what we’re going to do.

Go into System Preferences, Keyboard, then to Keyboard Shortcuts. On the right, click on “All Applications” and hit the + sign button. You’ll get a window something like this:

To get the command to work, you’ve got to do it right. Type Save As with the capitalizations. You can’t type the elipses, I found; you have to use Option+semi-colon. Then in the shortcut Shift+Command+S (or whatever you want.)

So long as the program allows for Save As, it should show up in the File menu, as well!

 

30 July, 2012

Mountain Lion Users Beware: Dictation Wants Your Contacts

Posted by blackcampbell under Computers, Technology | Tags: |
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Now, allegedly it’s because names are notoriously difficult for speech recognition (and people for that matter) to capture, but Apple sends your speech-to-text data — and your contacts list — to “the cloud” (their massive server farms) to do the translation, much like Siri on the iPhone.

When you go to the Systems Preferences and Dictation & Speech, hit the button about privacy at the bottom. Here’s what you’ll get:

When you use the keyboard dictation feature on your computer, the things you dictate will be recorded and sent to Apple to convert what you say into text. Your computer will also send Apple other information, such as your first name and nickname; and the names, nicknames, and relationship with you (for example, “my dad”) of your address book contacts.  All of this data is used to help the dictation feature understand you better and recognize what you say. Your User Data is not linked to other data that Apple may have from your use of other Apple services.

Information collected by Apple will be treated in accordance with Apple’s Privacy Policy, which can be found at www.apple.com/privacy.

You can choose to turn off the dictation feature at any time. To do so, open System Preferences, click Dictation & Speech, and then click Off in the Dictation section. If you turn off Dictation, Apple will delete your User Data, as well as your recent voice input data. Older voice input data that has been disassociated from you may be retained for a period of time to generally improve Dictation and other Apple products and services. This voice input data may include audio files and transcripts of what you said and related diagnostic data, such as hardware and operating system specifications and performance statistics.

You can restrict access to the Dictation feature on your computer in the Parental Controls pane of System Preferences.

So user beware.

 

26 July, 2012

Quick Review: OS X Mountain Lion

Posted by blackcampbell under Computers | Tags: |
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By now the Mac fanbois have devoured the various gushings of the technorati on the internet and have seen all of the glowing reviews of Mountain Lion, the new OS for Apple’s computer line. I’m a relatively new user of Macs, having switched over when the wife bought me an Air back in late 2010. It’s a superb little machine, I like the interface, but I thought Lion was a disaster. Why? Because prior to that Snow Leopard ran quickly and quietly. Lion, not so much; I saw the beachball much more often, especially when external drives (a must for the small SSDs of the Air), hear the fan crank up to Boeing 787 levels of noise when doing things as simple as watching a short clip on the net or as data intensive as cutting a DVD so I could watch it on my iPad (the gateway drug of the Apple world.)

I was never happy with Lion, but was willing to ignore it. Then comes along Mountain Lion. Notification Center, just like iOS! Reminders, just like iOS! Airplay, just like iOS…unless you have anything older than a Mac produced last week. Hey, wait…I was able to Airplay on my “old” machine with Lion; what the hell? Admittedly, Airplay made my machine labor hard and ran the fans loud enough I had to crank the TV to hear dialogue (seriously, Hollywood, balance the damned sound in movies better!), but it worked. With Mountain Lion? It just locks up iTunes good and dead until you force quit.

No Airplay: Bad. the skeumorphic contact book and calendar interfaces: Bad. Dictation (voice to text) for most programs: Good, but not great — it’s got a very limited cache because it sends what you say to Apple for translation to text. I have a few security qualms about that, on top of it being slow and buggy.

I haven’t bothered with Safari’s new features, since I use Chrome. The share feature being all over the place (but not in Chrome): ambivalent. I use it a lot on my iPad, but perhaps it’s because the laptop is my “work” machine I don’t find it that useful. I’m not surfing the net looking for intriguing things to send my friends when I’m on the Air, unlike the iPad (the first bit of technology, other than vehicles, that I’ve named.) So I’m also not very impressed with the Twitter integration, either, although I use it heavily on the iPad.

iTunes, the bane of pretty much anyone’s existence, seems to run a bit smoother and it’s talking to my network drive without any lag that I can see. Mail having VIP slots for your important contacts? Good. Having reminders and notes separated from mail: Even better. Notification center: Fantastic. More so than I would have thought. Having all of my programs run on ML: Brilliant.

The best part: I haven’t had the fan come on more than once since loading Mountain Lion…and that was pushing a full backup of 52Gb to a network drive. Even then, it only came on for a short time. The beachball has only put in an appearance when iTunes locked up on Airplay, and as I type, I have a movie playing in the background, Mail open, Acrobat open, Word open, and Chrome with 5 tabs. No fan (temps did jump from about 100F or so to 160F.) No lag. Just like when I was running Snow Leopard.

Is it worth it? I blew some of my royalty money from my book sales on the $20 for Mountain Lion and unlike Lion, I think I got my money’s worth. It’s a definite buy — there’s not enough bad changes to not do it, and the bits and bobs (there’s no major changes anywhere) that improve the user experience are definitely worth it.

I just fired up iSkysoft’s iMedia Converter to rip a DVD to see how the machine would handle it. The processors hit a peak of 189F and 180F respectively, with stable temps about 5 degrees cooler. This is on par with the performance on Lion. Fans a-blazin’.

 

8 July, 2012

Quick Review: Seagate GoFlex Home 2Tb

Posted by blackcampbell under Computers | Tags: , |
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My “big drive” — a 2Tb Western Digital that I use to store our media library went sideways on my Friday, locking up while doing a simple shift of a video from movie to TV show category (thanks, iTunes; I know you were the culprit!) I could read, but not write to the drive and the Mac Air could not repair the drive.

As a result, I bought the Seagate GoFlex Home 2Tb network drive from Best Buy for $150. It’s an all-black unit that plugs into the networking base, which then plugs into the back of your router. Setup was simple, once I realized the drive was just not going to let me set it up without the Seagate software. I hate the way these companies set up the folders, and you can rarely mess with the higher level folders. Same issue here — I’ve got all these “GoFlex Public” and “GoFlex Private” folders. I’ll live with it because there’s a benefit — you can use their GoFlex Access app on your iPad to access the information from the drive via wifi, or through the internet (I’ve yet to try this, but the next trip to the coffee shop, I’ll experiment…)

Transfer speeds from the Air were very fast, the drive has functions, so far, flawlessly, and I was able to back up almost all of the iTunes library before the old Big Drive took a dump and had to finally be reformatted. I’m going to use the former for my Time Machine backups (as well as another disk) and to hold the iTunes library for my Air when it’s plugged in at home, but depending on how well the laptop and iPad can access the media through the internet, I may eventually ditch it or use it as a secondary backup for the media library.

My main concern about the drive is the same as the main benefit: it’s on the internet. Someone could , potentially, locate and crack the drive. The other issue is the Gestapo tactics of the RIAA and MPAA, and their minions in the Department of Homeland Security. These copyright trolls have been working hard to find any excuse to limit our free and fair use of media we’ve already bought form them in the name of preventing piracy (which studies repeated show do not impact sales, save to drive them up — it’s advertisement, like a radio station.)

If it doesn’t crap out like the WD drive, it’ll definitely be worth the $150.

 

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