Category Archives: Sufficiently Advanced Technology

IF

Posted on August 28, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

If I had a TV, I might have a satellite dish (or cable, I have no idea which is worse).

If I had a satellite dish, I'd definitely want to use the Satellite Alignment Calculator 2.0 to aim it.

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 6 Comments

One Laptop Per Child Review

Posted on August 14, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

Freedom to Tinker has the perfect One Laptop Per Child Review — written by a 12-year-old. He likes it a lot, but identifies a couple of issues.

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 1 Comment

Cool Travel Phone (But You Can’t Have One)

Posted on August 2, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

This Spice D-80 Dual Mode Handset looks like a cool GSM phone for traveling with both a domestic and a foreign SIM. Pity it's not a flip phone…and that it's only going to be sold in India.

I think US carriers will be forced to unlock all their phones and accept some competition…eventually. Maybe some day they'll even start selling phones like this. (But in the long run we are all dead.)

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 4 Comments

Phone Frenzies

Posted on June 30, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

We were driving in downtown Coral Gables last night a bit before seven pm, when we saw something very unusual: a long line of people queuing on the sidewalk. Understand that people just don't stand around much outdoors in South Florida in late June. It's too hot. And yet, here was a line halfway down the block, curving around to something we could not see. A book signing? Supermodels? Miami Dolphins? No. After we turned the corner, all was revealed: The AT&T/Cingular store. I'm guessing a horde of folks came by after work to buy an iPhone and were still there an hour or two later. (The looked too fresh to have been there all day.) When I came back around 8:30 pm there were still over a dozen people in the queue. Amazing.

More to my taste is this feature from AnandTech, Apple's iPhone Dissected: We did it, so you don't have to. Not that there's anything terribly surprising in there…

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 3 Comments

The Real Problem with USB Flash Drives

Posted on May 14, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

Someone should write about the REAL problem with flash drives: they break too easily at the connection between the usb male plug and the body of the drive. The otherwise wonderful Flash Voyager is by far the most vulnerable I've encountered, but many others share the same Achilles Heel too.

Reviewers always seem to write about running a car over the drive. That mean putting pressure on the case. This isn't, in my experience, a common real-life scenario. In contrast, the real-life damage case is torque when your laptop bumps into something with that drive sticking out. It snaps easily. And no one ever talks about that.

The best drives I've had for performance (I want to be able to copy lots of small files quickly; reported tests usually concentrate on large file transfer, so my preferences may not be your preferences) were also the most delicate at that critical point: the Corsair Flash Voyagers. I've broken two. Second-fastest, the OCZ Rally2, were not as fragile, but were not exactly tough either. I bent one. It still works, but I don't trust it.

I've currently moved to a Cruzer Titanium, which not only looks a bit stronger, but has a nice retractable head so I don't have to worry about losing the little cap. The performance is good, although I don't think it is quite as good as the other two.

Unfortunately, the Cruzer came with the dreaded U3 software. I used the control panel to disable it, but haven't had the heart to delete it on the theory that this might be irrevocable (online opinions vary), and anyway it didn't take much space. But I may delete it soon, as it seems my Asus motherboard absolutely won't boot up with the drive plugged in, even though the BIOS is set to boot from the hard drive first.

Posted in Shopping, Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 4 Comments

GPS Urban Navigation: Still Some Bugs in the System

Posted on May 6, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

A walk with GPS reveals some of the problems with the system.:

In retrospect, what's really interesting is this: when the technology failed us, we didn't look around to see where we were and search for street signs. Of course, at that point we were standing in the middle of a barren junkyard wasteland.

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 1 Comment