respublica

The new, improved, amazing, sd memory card

The Eye-Fi share card, a memory card for digital cameras comes equiped with Wi-Fi.   If you you have a wireless internet set up in your home, the photos you've taken will automatically download to your computer.    Even if your computer is turned off, it will do this.  No cord, no nothing.  It will also upload the photos to photo sharing websites such as Flickr.

Not only that, the Eye-Fi card will also keep a record of exactly where that photo was taken.  Kind of like a GPS system for your photo album.

New computer

I got a new computer yesterday which meant many tiring hours of moving stuff from one to another, or, saving documents from the old to portable media. 

I put off getting Windows Vista, but now it's settled into my home.  I haven't decided whether it will turn out to be like house guests who overstay their welcome or a welcome addition.  So far I have had to deal with endless windows messages everytime I open a program.  And, things aren't where I'd expect them to be. 

There will be a bit of a learning curve.

The new iPhone arrives

Heck, I never even got the old iPhone, too expensive and it came with AT&T.  But the new, updated iPhone 3G unveiled by Steve Jobs today will be available on July 11 with a price of $199 for an 8GB and $299 for a 16 GB.  The 16 GB will be available in white as well as black.

The iPhone 3G also has built in GPS.

This is so tempting.  However, in order to make me give up my Blackberry, I'll have to see how well the iPhone handles email.  No one does this better than Blackberry.

via Gizmodo 

And, via Engadget

And via TechCrunch which reports that the new iPhone will have a SixApart application so a Typepad blogger can blog from the iPhone and add photos to the post right from the phone.  I can blog from my Blackberry right now, very easily, but adding photos from the phone is not possible.  This application will be free for anyone currently using Typepad.

What's with spell check?

A small thing perhaps, but something that puzzles me no end.  Writing an email with our AOL account the program always highlights very common computer/internet words as being mis-spelled.  How can it be that one of the first successful internet sites has a spell check which does not recognize the word "internet" as being spelled correctly?

Or, blog?  Has no one gotten word to the brains at AOL or Microsoft Word that blog has been a word for at least 6 years now? 

Or how about "website"?  Why does AOL think this is spelled wrong?  They are a website are they not?

Collinsville is always underlined as being spelled wrong on Word, AOL and Typepad.

AOL's suggested alternative to blog include:  bog, log, belong, oblong

Everyone seems to want 'internet' capitalized and thinks 'website' should be two words although most authorities make the 'two word option' the alternative.

Collinsville suggestions include:  Collins Ville, Collins, collapsible, codlings! Louisville

St. Louis TV

The city of St. Louis utilizes the public access channel on cable tv to promote events and inform residents of what is happening.  While the rest of us in the metro area do not have this broadcast, it is possible to get a feel for what is going on by checking STLTV on the web.

St. Louis is doing something many local cities should do, using as much public technology as possible to reach the most people.  The STLTV website is colorful and inviting and contains many of the videos broadcast on cable access. 

Why more cities aren't doing something like this is puzzling.  Maybe there is a feeling that the public access channel won't attract viewers, but if there is local programming done well with frequent additions, people will watch.  And, to continue this on a "tv web page", well, this seems so obvious.

So many local cities tend to focus their internet technology too narrowly on in house networks, connecting all the city commuters, blah blah, working with tech people who's focus is similar.  Then they have no energy or staff to continue on to the next, most important step-public information.

iPhone user update

The Rubicon company completed a survey on iPhones which shows successes and challenges.  More successes than challenges.

Most interesting, but not really surprising except for the amount, was the increase in revenue by AT&T, the designated carrier for Apple's iPhone.  The company saw an increase in revenue related to the iPhone of $2 billion.

More than a quarter of iPhone users have begun substituting the phone for their laptops and three quarters of those owning iPhones are previous owners of other Apple/Mac products.

I still dream of owning one.

Smartly stupid goggles

We may be at the tipping point, technologically speaking, if these glasses/goggles become fashionable.
Photo at the link.

Internet slows to a crawl

Once again our internet signal is moving at about 1 tenth the speed it should.  Last week we lost our signal entirely and after umpteen chats with Charter's telephone support team and three home tech visits, the problem was found to be on the outside line.  Specifically, a piece of equipment on the top of a pole three poles down from our house had deteriorated or broken and had allowed water to penetrate which dropped the signal.

On Monday of this week we had a lot of rain which turned to ten inches of snow on Tuesday which began melting in a hurry yesterday.  Yesterday when we tried to use the internet we could get online, but the links beyond a home page would not come up.  This morning, during the dog walk with neighbors, we learned that we are not alone.  The weak signal seems to be affecting a pretty wide area, not just localized to a few homes near us. 

Call Charter and the phone techs always want you to reboot your cable modem, they never want to hear that it might once again be on outside lines.  I guess that must take manpower away from easier jobs.  But the recent rain and snow and the loss of internet signal just can't be coincidence.   A few of us from the surrounding neighborhood are going to spend part of the day checking with others to see if they are experiencing the same problem and if they are we will have some ammunition with which to deal with Charter's phone people.  Seems ridiculous that we have to do their job for them.

We're "this close" to taking a look at DSL.

Troubles with cable and video and internet

We've had constant outages since this past Friday.  Outages of the electrical power type, internet, digital television signal, just about anything that can be plugged in or dialed has gone down and in the case of cable internet, stayed down.

We've had our cable provider on the phone more times than I can count.  Their tech support always trys to fix the problem remotely over the phone and this never works.  I have unplugged and rebooted our cable modem and digital tv box more times than I can remember.  A tech guy came to the house yesterday to fix our tv which was doing something they call "tiling", a nice word for see the picture break up into little colored squares or go away altogether.

He fixed that by fiddling with the outside cable connection.  Hurray.  Then later in the evening we tried to turn on our tv in the bedroom and found that he had somehow disconnected cable to everything but the one tv.

And, the internet is still not up, it's been 4 days.  Another tech guy is coming in a few minutes and we hope this one can figure out what is going on.  However, we have learned we are not alone.  Something weird is going on which is taking out many other people's cable internet.

About those Congressional websites

A Gold Mouse Report by the non-partisan Congressional Management Foundation, found that individual websites of many lawmakers are below par and no one on Capitol Hill seems to care.  The report gave each website a letter grade ranging from A-F and found that the websites of democratic members ranked slightly higher than those of republicans, with 61 percent receiving a C or better.  Republicans only had 55 percent in that range.

One third of congressional websites do not have a functional search engine. 

From 2006 to 2007, the number of Democratic member sites with “C”s or higher increased by 3 percent while the number of Republican websites winning “C”s or higher fell by 7 percent.

Not all have an email address by which constituents can correspond.

The purpose of these websites is supposed to better assist members in communicating with their constituency, but when there was no real change in these sites, the CMF decided to begin grading them which has caused some scrambling to improve. 

The same below par functionality can be seen on the blogs most newspaper and tv news people like to promote these days.   Way too often there are no links to whatever story their blogs posts refer to.   

For instance: A post by St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay on a Kansas City Star story on Amtrak.  No link.  Let us go and see what it said.  He didn't link it, but I will.