Gear
-
Prepping for Paris
Tomorrow we fly to Paris, where I’ll be based for the next five weeks. To help myself prep, here are a few of my notes from conversations with friends and my own inadequate research… Offbeat Guildes. Already have ours. We can update it during the trip too. La Cantine. Co-working Via @slatteryz Paris – interactive… Continue reading
-
An appeal for open cameras
David Siegel, author of the excellent new book Pull, shares with me an abiding frustration with all major camera makers — especially the Big Two: Canon and Nikon: they’re silos. They require lenses that work only on their cameras and nobody else’s. In Vendor Lock-in FAIL David runs down the particulars. An excerpt: If you… Continue reading
“Stephen Lewis”, cameras, Canon, David Siegel, EOS 30D, EOS 5D, film, Nikon, Photography, Sigma, Sony, Tamron, Zeiss -
Beyond the iPad
I was just interviewed for a BBC television feature that will run around the same time the iPad is launched. I’ll be a talking head, basically. For what it’s worth, here’s what I provided as background for where I’d be coming from in the interview: The iPad will arrive in the market with an advantage… Continue reading
-
Building the Information Squeezeway
Some encouraging words here about Verizon’s expected 4G data rates: After testing in the Boston and Seattle areas, the provider estimates that a real connection on a populated network should average between 5Mbps to 12Mbps in download rates and between 2Mbps to 5Mbps for uploads. Actual, achievable peak speeds in these areas float between 40-50Mbps… Continue reading
-
Thinking outside the Internet box
A couple days ago I responded to a posting on an email list. What I wrote struck a few chords, so I thought I’d repeat it here, with just a few edits, and then add a few additional thoughts as well. Here goes. Reading _____’s references to ancient electrical power science brings to mind my… Continue reading
ABC, AM, Brett Glass, Broadband Politics, CBS, cloud, Erik Cecil, FM, fox, Hammarlund, Hammarlund HQ-129x, information service, internet, NBC, New Jersey, new york, Nicholas Carr, ota, PBS, projectvrm, regulatory capture, Richard Bennett, Sporadic E, telecommunication service, television, towers, uhf, utility, vhf, VRM, Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler -
Adventures in Value Subtraction
One of the reasons I liked Dish Network (to the extent anybody can like a purely commercial entertainment utility) was that their satellite receivers included an over-the-air tuner. It nicely folded your over-the-air (OTA) stations in with others in the system’s channel guide. Here’s how it looked: Well, the week before last I discovered that… Continue reading
-
Life in Cox tech support hell
Major props to Cox for cranking up my speeds to 18Mb/s downstream and 4Mb/s upstream. That totally rocks. I’m getting that speed now. Here’s what Cox’s local diagnostic tool says: TCP/Web100 Network Diagnostic Tool v5.4.12 click START to begin Connected to: speedtest.sbcox.net — Using IPv4 address Checking for Middleboxes . . . . . .… Continue reading
-
Opening the paying field
When we went looking for an apartment here a couple years ago, we had two primary considerations in addition to the usual ones: walking distance from a Red Line subway stop, and fiber-based Internet access. The latter is easy to spot if you know what to look for, starting with too many wires on the… Continue reading
-
We’re gonna need a bigger boat
WebTV was way ahead of its time and exactly backwards. The idea was to put the Web on TV. In the prevailing media framework of the time, this made complete sense. TV had been around since the Forties, and nearly everybody devoted many hours of their daily lives to it. The Web was brand new… Continue reading
-
Silos End
Thanks to Keith McArthur for clueing me in on Cluetrainplus10, in which folks comment on each of Cluetrain’s 95 theses, on roughly the 10th anniversary of the day Cluetrain went up on the Web. (It was around this time in 1999.) The only thesis I clearly remember writing was the first, “Markets are conversations.” That… Continue reading
-
Oft-rode vehicles
Back in the summer of ’05, I put up a post that ran down a list of all the cars I’ve owned. Since then I’ve added one more car to that list. Since it’s giving me trouble lately I thought I’d copy over and update the original vehicular C.V. and add a few more words… Continue reading
-
Tired of sucky AT&T Wireless coverage at home?
Me too. Which brings up the subject of this post here. Continue reading
-
Tune in, Turn on, Say nice things
So now my dream app is ready on the iPhone. It’s just the beginning of What It Will Be, but it’s highly useful. If you have an iPhone, go there and check it out. It’s free. As you see here, I’m involved, through the Berkman Center, which is collaborating with PRX, which is working under… Continue reading
-
Seeing how ugly it can get
Since I’m an aviation freak, I’m also a weather freak. I remember committing to getting my first color TV, back in the mid-70s, because I wanted to see color radar, which at that time was carried by only one TV station we could get from Chapel Hill: WFMY/Channel 2 in Greensboro. These days TV stations… Continue reading
-
A world of producers
There’s a good chance that the best picture you can put on your HD screen doesn’t come from your cable or satellite TV company, but from your new HD camcorder. As time and markets march on, that chance will only get larger. That’s because the there is a trade-off between the number of channels carried… Continue reading
-
A portrait of the Swiss Alps
On departure from Zürich to Paris yesterday the ground was shrowded in gloom and haze, but above it the sky was clear and crystalline. I sat purposely on the left side of the plane to get a view, even though I knew I’d be photographing the scene against the sun, which would be low in… Continue reading