I like the list of PCWorld.com – The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years but they conflate products with models so you have to be an early adopter for some products (to get the specific model they include) but not others. For example, #16 Texax Instruments’ Speak and Spell. No model mentioned and [...]
Browsing Posts in Consumer Electronics
The new Sony DRM (digitial rights management) CDs Sony Rootkit – Worst.DRM.Ever – Gizmodo use some fancy technology (rootkits) to hide the software so that you can’t remove it. However, this leaves a huge hole for malware (bad software like spyware) to also use because it also subverts the operating system. Copy protection (DRM) from [...]
Some printers now print yellow tracking dots so that law enforcement agencies can track documents back to the printer that produced them. Aside from the legal/privacy issues I think it really is bad that the printer makers have not disclosed this information. The EFF: List of Printers Which Do or Don’t Print Tracking Dots is [...]
Why is Apple coming out with a new ipod product announcement every week or two? It’s too much. I have an ipod mini. A few weeks ago I was looking for an attachment to let me record on it. There are a couple of choices for “regular” ipods but not for the mini. Now that [...]
Sure, now that tivo is going down the tubes in the US, they start offering service in Canada. Well, better late than never. Now I just have to figure out how to get my tivo from where it is, a couple of thousand miles away, to Toronto so that I can use it.
In the blue corner: Sony and Matshusita/Panasonic (product: Blu-ray) In the green corner: Toshiba, NEC, and Sanyo (product: HD DVD) The goal: a new format for DVDs that will hold about 10 times the amount of current DVDs and will be big enough to contain High Definition movies. The two sides have failed in a [...]
The Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 PVR (Explorer from now on) is the absolute worst piece of consumer electronics that I have ever owned. Nothing else I have ever owned causes me to say out loud about once a week, “what a piece of _____” (the blank word varying depending on how exasperated I am). I [...]
