Gadget Wisdom

There are so many tech and gadget blogs out there, We’ve spent many a night contemplating how we might distinguish ourselves from other blogs and are going to be relaunching with a slightly new format. Unlike other such blogs, which report on every new piece of technology, we’re going to shift into frugal mode.

You can expect the following from us with our new editorial shift.

• Living Green - Green is such a big thing right now. But most people aren’t willing to go for the big solar panel on the roof, the wind turbine, etc. We’re going to scale that down to how the average person can make green decisions, or small changes and reap the benefits.
• Open-Source Lifestyle - For those of you running Windows, remember that Microsoft is not a deity you must worship at the feet of. With all the issues with Vista and their market dominance, they’ve become a behemoth. We’ll be seeing more of how to integrate open-source into your life.
• Free Software - This relates back to the open-source, to some degree, but there are plenty of wonderful pieces of software out there that don’t cost a cent. We’ve shown you some of them. Expect more.
• Frugality - Jokes about gold-plated MP3 players aside, we realize that most of you aren’t buying one of those.
• Got to See This - For those of you who want to look, but not buy, we will be continuing our series of things that are cool, but less practical.
• Mobile - For those of you on the road, the gear and tricks for the mobile gadgeteer.

And, of course, much much more.

We haven’t had much to say in a while…something we intend to rectify soon. But we saw this recently, and thought it might be of some help. Venturebeat reports that Retrevo, a search engine for gadgets, is attempting to simplify the information overload that comes when you try to make a gadget purchase.

When you make a search, each resulting device/gadget is ranked by a combination of “value” (the number of desirable features at the price point) and community sentiment (the combined wisdom of experts and consumers). The results pages offer the product’s model number, a picture of the product, its price range and two cartoon thumbs. One thumb represents value, the other represents community sentiment. They can point up, sideways, or down. The top ten results contain a reasonable mix of high value, low cost products with good buzz around them and medium and high-cost products that deliver what you would hope to get at those price points.

The site lets you choose between the expert and consumer opinions.

The company says its product index doesn’t contain out-of-date products or those that aren’t widely available in stores. This compares favorably with CNET, where I often find myself reading positive reviews for last year’s technology. It’s also more simple and elegant than Buzzillions, which requires more input to find devices you might like.

So check out Retrevo at www.retrevo.com. We did some random searches, and intend to try this product a bit more.

After 11 years, the Federal Communications Commission order mandating Cablecards took effect on Sunday, July 1st.

It requires all major cable operators to give up cable boxes that they lease to subscribers at a significant profit and replace them with ones that will accept a CableCard…an decoder that plugs into their box or any other equipment that will accept it. Customers will be able to use the CableCard, which they must provide, into equipment from any company. Cable companies have delayed on this decision because most subscribers have paid the cost of their box many times over.

Currently, the options for hardware are limited. Few televisions include CableCard slots…no computer cards sold commercially do…and the only company that has supported it and promises to support the new generation of cards is Tivo.

Once the technology is more mainstreamed…consumers could purchase cable-ready devices that could do much more than a box from the local cable provider. Features could include the integration of internet data onto the screen with the television signal, boxes that also act as media servers for media stored on computers, etc.

The accusation of companies like Comcast is that the requirement amounts to a tax…as they will not absorb the cost, but pass it along to use as the consumers…Conversely, since this mandate has been delayed so long….cable companies had plenty of time to phase in the technology over time and devote proper resources to it.

Our issue is this…you go out and buy a television. It includes a tuner you can’t use because you have to rent a $10 a month box from the cable company. What is the point of a tuner in the TV anymore?

Last month, the Consumerist asked if the DRM phenomenon drove well-meaning people to piracy. We invite you to review the story of one man who did so despite his best efforts.

We may not be the right people to discuss DRM. We have never purchased music from an online store and we refuse to buy an iPod. But when hearing something like this…

There I sat, a loyal music fan who has shelled out actual money to a business that is supposed to be having financial problems, and the best they can do is tell me to wander the streets of Seattle looking for different internet providers who might allow me to download the music that I have already paid for, music that I have spent the better part of three house trying to listen to, and which is still unusable?

We tend to think we made the right decision. We rip our music from CDs, make plans to, but fail to convert our old cassettes and vinyl to MP3. But we have withdrawn from online music downloads because of the above…it just seems too complicated to us. And iPods…well…we bought a 1GB Sandisk MP3/WMA flash memory player for $19.99 after rebate. We haven’t had any problems with it.

There are people who are willing to deal with the restrictions of music in order to buy through these companies. We salute them. There are also people who find ways around it, and those who pirate. We wish them luck in their endeavors as well.

In good news, the EMI Group will be selling premium DRM free music via Itunes in May, excepting Beatles tunes. Higher-quality music files, which will play on any computer and any digital-audio player, will not replace the copy-protected EMI music currently sold through iTunes. They will still offer the standard 99-cent iTunes downloads. DRM-free will be 30 cents more. Existing customers will be able to upgrade. Full albums will costs the same, DRM or non-DRM.

Tests by EMI indicated the higher-quality, DRM-free songs outsold the DRM ones ten to one. Steve Jobs of Apple has advocated the elimination of DRM in the past, and this seems to indicate that the recording companies are reconsidering the current situation.

• Bruce Schneier has an article on DRM in Windows Vista. Not only does Vista implement extensive DRM, but it also continuously spends CPU time monitoring itself, trying to figure out if you’re doing something that it thinks you shouldn’t. If it does, it limits functionality and in extreme cases restarts just the video subsystem. Not exactly a friendly feature.
• The RIAA sued a woman for allegedly sharing copyrighted material. She had her case dismissed and was awarded attorney’s fees in excess of $50,000. The RIAA, however, filed an appeal, to reconsider the decision to make them pay. They want the judge to rule that an owner of an ISP account is responsible for all activity on that account. Such a ruling could make individuals running open hotspots and/or offering public wireless access liable. The RIAA has tried before to establish such a precedent.
• The Consumerist reports that the RIAA has sent letters to 400 students at 13 universities encouraging them to confess to illegal file sharing and pay a “settlement” at P2PLawsuits.com. The RIAA has limited evidence these students are doing something illegal. They have a link to a PDF of the offending document here. If they don’t pay, the RIAA will subpoena the names of the students they say they’ve caught from the schools’ IT departments.

The Motion Picture Association of America, best known for encouraging people to help stop movie thieves, and going after those they consider responsible for such thefts, was using a piece of software called Forest Blog to run its blogs, according to one blog.

Forest Blog, written by 29 year old developer Patrick Robin, is distributed under a Linkware license, which means that anyone who uses it must link back to his site or purchase a license. So essentially, the MPAA is so upset about piracy that they pirated software to run their blog. It is not the first time they have been guilty of such hypocritical behavior.

We believe in the Big Three environmental principles - REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE…but we don’t always go as far as we’d like to. Sure…we’ve championed the replacement of Compact Fluorescent lightbulbs in the building(and we mean to write more on that). But when we go to stores, we still get plastic shopping bags.

Of course, we don’t recall seeing paper bags offered at any of the places we frequented in the last month…not even the supermarket. Ireland, among other countries, actually mandated a 15 cent charge for any plastic bag given out. That reduced usage by ninety percent.

An estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide. Billions end up as litter each year. According to the EPA, over 380 billion of plastic bags, sacks, and wraps are used in the U.S. each year. The Wall Street Journal estimates 100 billion plastic shopping bags, while the American Forest and Paper Association estimated in 1999 the US used only 10 billion paper grocery bags…a much smaller number by comparison.

To do our part, we visited Reusable Bags. Even Al Gore referenced them in An Inconvenient Truth. Not only are they merchandisers of reusable technology, but they are environmental activists. They even have an advocacy line of merchandise with their slogan…”Plastic Bags Blow - BYOB - Bring Your Own Bags.”

We purchased some of their ultracompact shopping bags. These bags fold up into a little pouch you can fit in your pocket so you can keep it in your car, or on your person and use it when you shop, then return it to its pouch for next time. Their bags come in various materials…nylon, canvas, nylon mesh. They also offer reusable bottles…to avoid the continual wasting of plastic water bottles…sandwich bags, lunch sacks, etc. Have a look.

Tales from the Web 2.0 Frontier commented recently on the necessity of cable. Alan Graham, who writes the blog, put it this way:

“Last week I came to the realization that with Netflix and iTunes, I would be able to cut out the $50 portion of my cable TV bill and ditch the 80 or so channels I never watch, including 3 shopping channels, 3 sports channels, 6 family channels, numerous foreign language channels, and one Lifetime Channel for Women that my fiance tortures me with.”

The FCC has long tried to push cable and satellite companies to provide ala carte purchasing…allowing people to purchase only the channels they wish to, instead of being forced to pay for dozens of stations they don’t. While most seem to think that ala carte pricing being forced on the cable companies would increase costs for a large percentage of customers, we think that it would be a good idea to explore alternative packaging schemes. Our local cable company offers a value set of channels, a standard package, then a premium pack. They could offer more ways of saving money by forgoing programming.

But that brings us to the question that Alan Graham raised? What about places like Itunes? They offer per show purchasing. If you combine that with Netflix, which allows you access to any movie for a monthly rate…including DVD box sets when they come out…you can achieve almost the same effect. Channel surfing will be missed though…sometimes you find something unexpected.

We’ve been working on our own method. We built ourselves a Digital Video REcorder and have been recording old movies and runs of TV shows off of television in the wee hours. Before long, we’ll have so much in terms of old movies and other programming we won’t need beyond broadcast stations. Of course, if we get rid of cable…we will have to get a better antenna.

A good tip though…if you can’t check out the competition every so often(our cable company has no competitors)…check them out. They may change their offerings and you can benefit and save money. We check all our utility service bills every few months.

Apple is being sued over the immensely popular iPod. The suit alleges that it is “Crippleware” in that the software disables iPod’s inherent ability to play WMA format files and other forms of protected music format besides AAC. Thus, the owner of an iPod can only purchase music online from Apple’s Music Store. Conversely, owners of other music players cannot play music purchased at Apple’s store.

Specifically addressing WMA, which is a Microsoft creation, it is the only music player not supporting it, and it is the format preferred by competitive music stores. Apple’s response is that it opted to develop its own format rather than being forced to license from Microsoft.

Perhaps the solution is to force an open-source format for DRM, if that is at all possible. A standards body could be established to certify devices and software as complying with the standard. There are various good examples of such bodies in the computing industry.

Is Apple engaging in monopolistic practices by locking iTunes, its purchased content, and your music player together with no alternative options?

We thought we would point our readers toward this CNET discussion about Why Our Gadgets Break? It seems illogical that older electronics were built to better quality standards, while the new ones are built cheaply and designed to fail within a shorter period of time in order to encourage upgrading, but that is the truth with many things.

Engineers have designed objects designed to fail for years. Otherwise, how will they sell electronics to people satisfied with their old reliable pieces? Even if they themselves are not designing this way…the push to make the cost less expensive forces them to use cheaper materials…integrate components…The only positive side is that it forces engineers to find clever and often better ways to do things with less.