Posts Tagged ‘Gadgets’

Not surprisingly, the huge success of the iPhone and its advanced mobile web functionality is making a lot of developers take another look at this growing market segment.

Mozilla, developers of the Firefox browsers, announced last week that they are working on a mobile browser with a planned release in 2008. For more information, check out this article at CIO.com. Even more details can be found on Mozilla Engineering VP Mike Schroepfer’s blog, here.

Okay, so the party is probably over now, since the official anniversary was two months ago.

What am I talking about? The 25th birthday of the compact disc (aka CD)! That’s right, 25th!

I had no idea CDs were that old. Of course I was *ahem* only 8 when the first one was made…

In all fairness to other forms of music media, the CD may be two and half decades old, but it has not been in common use that long. When I was in high school in the early 90s the cassette section at the music store was still 2-3x as large as the CD section and they were prohibitively expensive for a teenager selling popcorn at the movie theatre after school. Heck, when I was in college a couple years later you could still get current tracks on LP. You had to go to grungy stores in Houston’s museum district, but you could get them.

I didn’t even own a CD player til 1995…and had to get married to get it because it technically belonged to my now-husband!

Anywho… Happy birthday CD!

Philips’ official press release about the CDs birthday

Amusing post from NetworkWorld on the same.

Bonus points if you know the name of the artist recorded on that first CD without following the links!

Okay, I admit it, I just don’t get what all the fuss is about. I have a friend who works for AT&T; mobile, the company with the exclusive airtime contract for the iPhone for the first three years, so I heard all about the bells and whistles early on from someone who had to know. I admit, the visual voicemail feature sounded neat, but not likely to give me iPhone envy.

Apparently I am in the minority. Check out this article from internetnews.com about new VV alternatives on the horizon.

Did you know that your color laser printer may be telling tales?

Apparently many of them print tiny yellow microdots, invisible to the naked eye but that show up under blue LED light in a dark room, on your documents. It is supposedly security encoding, but no one knows what information is encoded in the dots, other than the device serial number.

According to what little has been said by printer manufacturers and the government (both in the US and the EU), the dot identifiers are intended to be a counterfeiting deterrent and a way to help the government locate and prosecute counterfeiters.

The big problem I see with this is that no one will talk about it. No one will come out and say “this is the mark – this is the information encoded in it”. There is too much unknown from the consumer end. It also deprives people of their anonymity.

Technically, anonymity is not a guaranteed right, but it sure as heck encourages free speech–how many of you read (or write!) an anonymous blog? One where the writer can unload about life or work in a way that will protect them from reprisal. That is the glory of anonymity and THAT is what this printer watermarking takes from people.

Seriously. People have been faking money for as long as nations have been making money, color printers aren’t really the problem Big Bro!

There are a few really good articles out there on this, so I’m just going to give you a list, starting with the first one I read:

Seeing yellow over color printer tracking devices at LinuxJournal.com

Seeing Yellow – official web home of the campaign to stamp out printer tracking

Government Uses Color Laser Printer Technology to Track Documents at PC World’s site – one of the first articles to report printer device tracking

This article is about a guy who lost a text messaging contest at a state fair due to a missing exclamation point.

A silly bit of news in and of itself, but a slightly scary sign of the times. TEXTING contests at a state fair? I mean, I guess it is slightly healthier than all those old eating contests, future carpal tunnel surgery aside, but it seems a bit sad.

I wonder if people with full QWERTY keypads were handicapped…?