New Military Field Radio Concept
Jul 24th
Sounds like an amazing break-thru concept for reliable field communication.
Though I can’t help but wonder – how long will it be until feral packs of curmudgeons from the amateur radio service realize the obvious flaw with this technology and shout in unison: “HOLY CRAP, THAT’S NOT REAL RADIO!!!” given that it utilizes a network and doesn’t involve atmospheric propagation?
From Strategy Page:
“The U.S. Army recently conducted a successful field test of their new RiflemanRadio, a 1.1 kg/2.5 pound voice/data radio for individual infantrymen. By itself, the two watt RR has a range of up to five kilometers. But it can also automatically form a mesh network, where all RRs within range of each other can pass on voice or data information. During the field tests, this was done to a range of up to 50 kilometers.”
Victory Gardens Growing Anew
Jul 23rd
The term Victory Garden hearkens to those days during the Second World War when folks were asked to sacrifice for the war effort by growing a little food in their own yard.
I know, it’s a bizarre concept – especially contrasted with this current age where we send our troops into endless wars and the only sacrifice the government asks of us is to keep the cash registers ringing in the shopping malls!
Of course, having entered the long emergency and the forced austerity that will bring, it’s little surprise that the Victory Garden is experiencing something of a revival:
“Across the country during this time of recession and economic anxiety, Americans of all ages are flocking into their gardens to grow their own food. Community-based gardening projects, similar to Galena’s, are taking shape in urban areas like Milwaukee, Denver and Warren, Mich. Such “victory gardens” are reminiscent of those planted during World War I and World War II as a way to help put food on the table when resources were scarce.”
Even though our yard is quite small, we’ve managed respectable crops of tomatoes, carrots, squash, blueberries and raspberries and we’ve been trying something new every year – just to see if it will grow.
How about you, do you garden? Feel free to brag and link to photos of your handiwork in the comments.
I’m no farmer, but I do know how satisfying it is to serve up a plate full of vegetable that were the product of your own hand…
Head for the Hills!
Jul 23rd
ReadWriteWeb reports that John Curran, CEO of the American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN) believes that the Internet will be out of IP addresses in one year. The IPv4 countdown Twitter page states that we have approximately 343 days left … until Internet Armegeddon?
IPv6 is the solution, though its implementation could prove to be somewhat painful.
I Sold My iPad
Jul 22nd
Since its debut in April, my opinion of the Apple iPad has gone from ‘completely unnecessary’ to ‘must have it’, to ‘it’s really useful but now I want an alternate platform’.
During those transitions, I bought one, used it, loved it, and then sold it.
The form factor is nearly ideal for the consumption of data, especially for multimedia.
But no gadget is perfect and the iPad is no exception. The screen is wonderful but the device is too heavy to replace the Kindle. I like to read in bed before going to sleep but holding the iPad like I do the Kindle causes my arm to quickly become numb.
And the glare off that gorgeous glass finish can be an issue if you can’t control the ambient light.
Then there’s the sticky matter of file management – it doesn’t really have any. The darn thing is so much like a computer that you want to use it that way, and yet you really can’t and that’s more frustrating than you might imagine. It has to be connected to a real computer from time to time; also frustrating for a device that’s nearly a real computer and you know that it’s been crippled this way intentionally.
Apple left out some key features in this first iteration, no doubt so they can crank up the sales machine for the soon coming second edition – also frustrating. For instance, the development of the iPad and the iPhone 4 occurred nearly at the same time yet the new iPhone got a front-facing camera for video chatting but the iPad did not. Do you have any doubt that same camera and FaceTime application will find its way on the iPad2 just in time for the holidays?
But like I said, no gadget is perfect and my observations above amounts to little more than picking nits – my motivation to sell it was rooted in my recent conversion to Android.
Apple and Google are busy building their own eco-systems and the two aren’t compatible by design. The iPod proved long ago that if you can get people to buy one item that’s tightly coupled with other products, then a magical halo effect can lift sales to new heights – "I have an iPod and using it with a Mac is easier than with a PC therefore I need a Mac too", etc.
It makes very little sense to me to try and straddle both worlds, Android and iTunes, so I made the decision to get out of one and embrace the other. Accordingly, I’ve retired my Mac and am liquidating my iPod collection for the same reason (anyone want a new generation 32Gb iPod Touch with ios4?).
Now I want an Android based tablet. And while many have been announced, none have actually made it to market. But that’s okay for now, I’m still too busy playing with my new Droid X to bother with yet another doo-dad.
Requiem for the Book
Jul 20th
I’ve been contemplating the news that probably signals the slow demise of the hardback book – and the paperback can’t be far behind. Kindle e-books are outselling hardcover books by almost 50%, according to Amazon.
For the past three months, Amazon has sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 dead-tree books. Paperbacks are not included in these figures.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos:
"Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books—astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months"
This is probably a good thing. After all, we live on a speck of dust of finite size and dimension. With the printing presses having run for several centuries now, and given that there are some six billion of us filling its every nook and cranny with our "stuff" we’re bound to run out of room for it all!
Besides, consider the process required so that just one billion of us can have the entire set of Harry Potter books on a shelf at home. The millions of trees, the fossil fuels required to transport those trees and then convert them to paper to be printed upon and assembled into book form. Then more fossil fuel required to move the books from manufacturing to distribution, and from there to your local bookstore – where you burn even more fossil fuel to buy them or to have them delivered by fleets of fossil fuel burning brown trucks.
Simple logic dictates that this model cannot be sustained.
I bought the first Kindle and now have 153 electronic books in my library. I love the electronic format for it’s convenience and space saving features. Whenever I leave home, my entire library can accompany me wherever I go though I don’t use the actual Kindle anymore. Now I use the Kindle Reader app as I find it more convenient still to read the books on my phone than to carry another device.
But electronic books aren’t perfect.
The digital rights management "protection" stuff makes it difficult, if not impossible to share a book with a friend. Once I’ve read a book I can’t sell it in next years garage sale. And at the moment, not every single title published is available in this format.
What’s more, without the aroma and the texture of the pages, it’s all but impossible to fall in love with an electronic book.
I feel sorry for this and future generations who will never know the joy of plunging into long rows of small drawers holding index cards, one detailing each and every title – and shelf after shelf supporting literally thousands of actual books in a place we used to call the library.
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