Category: News

News

In Brief: Bought Vinyl Records? Amazon Has You Covered

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Vinyl record.

I really wished I had purchased my vinyl from Amazon, because today, Amazon expanded its AutoRip service to vinyl records purchased since 1998.

AutoRip automatically adds MP3 versions of songs to your Amazon Cloud Player Account. When Amazon released the AutoRip service, they backdated any eligible CDs purchased from Amazon, and they have now extended this to Vinyl Records…interestingly tempting, but a marginal improvement.

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Some Changes to the Site

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Loading Mail onto Railway Post Office Car

It is time for some housecleaning.

  • There is a new layout to the site. Feel free to provide comment on this post of what you think
  • We have a weekly newsletter, which will send you the posts if you prefer that to other means of subscription. This replaces the previous Feedburner Email service with Mailchimp.
  • We’ll be doing some cleanup of the site content to make it easier to navigate and trying to launch some new content.
  • Feedburner feeds are no longer active, and will redirect to the native theme.
  • We can also be engaged on Twitter or Facebook, should you wish it.

[newsletter-sign-up-form].

Feed Changes

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English: This icon, known as the "feed ic...

To All RSS Subscribers:

Due to the recent uncertainty regarding the future of Feedburner, we are removing all redirects to Feedburner. All links on the site will now use local feeds. If possible, please update your subscriptions.

If not, the Feedburner feeds will continue to be maintained for as long as Google continues to offer the service, but we feel that self-hosting all feeds is the more prudent long-term move.

Feed: http://www.gadgetwisdom.com/feed/

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Time to Update the Tagline

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English: A standard USB connector.

Sometimes, it is time to make a change. We’ve been writing stories for nearly six years now, under the tagline Guide to a Tech Savvy Lifestyle without Emptying Your Wallet.

Today,  we’re changing things a bit. We’ll be changing the tagline to, Living a Tech-Filled Lifestyle without Emptying Your Wallet. This may just be rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It represents what we’ve want this blog to be.

We’ve handled news in the past, Home Theater PCs, Linux, Mobile technologies, Security, Downstreaming(downscaling your cable services), and more. There is so much more we’d like to discuss.

Kodak Kills Slide Film – We Kill Our Slide Collection

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An Old Family Ektachrome Slide of San Francisco

In December of 2010, we mourned the loss of Kodachrome, the iconic film. Now Kodak, amidst its financial woes, is discontinuing slide film. This leaves Fujifilm as the only provider in this area.

The remaining stock of Ektachrome E100G, E100VS, and Elite Chrome Extra Color should last six to nine months.

This comes at an interesting time for us. We just pulled out the old family Ektachrome slides back in December, boxed them up, and shipped them to Scancafe with the intention of having them scanned and subsequently disposed of. Of course, these scans hadn’t seen the light of day for years.

We had previously written about our efforts to do it ourselves, when we reviewed the Wolverine Slide Scanner. It wasn’t a reflection on the quality of that product, only our laziness. Stay tuned for a review of Scancafe. It takes weeks for Scancafe to scan slides. Despite getting them in early January, they have just started processing the 2260 slides sent.

 

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30th Anniversary of the Commodore 64

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Long life Commodore 64 !!! (1)
Image by JaulaDeArdilla via Flickr

The Commodore 64 is still a computer that has a special place in our hearts. The original 64 launched at CES thirty years ago this week in 1982 and was the successor to the VIC-20.

This was the machine we used to first play with programming, using BASIC and classic sprite graphics. It lasted until 1989, but there are still people who remember them fondly, and there is even a reproduction Commodore 64 being sold now with modern hardware.

So here’s to the C64, and days of playing Space Taxi, Mr. Do’s Castle and Tapper, and Reader Rabbit. here’s to 5 1/4 floppies…it will never come again.

 

 

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Improving the Blog: Full-Text vs Summary Syndication

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Here at Gadget Wisdom we are testing distributing full text of our posts over RSS. This will be available to you in your feed reader.

English: This icon, known as the "feed ic...
Image via Wikipedia

Every so often, we spend some time doing a redesign of sites to see if they can be any better. None of the things we are putting in are revolutionary. What we really want out of all of them is increased participation in our sites. Over the 5 years we’ve been blogging, we’ve always wanted to produce more interaction with readers. We enjoy the topics we write about.

In researching improvements, there were a lot of points for and against full-text feeds. The biggest risk is that others would scrape our content and place it on other sites. To that end, we’ve added a link to our site at the bottom of every feed. We may take more measures. We, like most, want to protect what we’ve written from being used by others without attribution.

To those of you who use feed readers, we hope you will enjoy the improvement. You can add it to your favorite feed reader and read without interruption. We know how much people hate truncated content.

This also allowed us to release Gadget Wisdom to Google Currents. You can subscribe here(http://www.google.com/producer/editions/CAow4NsZ/gadget_wisdom). We’ll see how that works as well.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on how we might protect ourselves from being scraped by other sites, and how we might improve your experience here at the Weneca Media Group collection of sites. There is more to come.

15 Years Ago, the New York Times Online Began – Now You Will Have to Pay

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Logo of The New York Times.
Image via Wikipedia

Last week, we were complaining that traditional print media is missing the opportunities of putting a good quality version of their content online. If the electronic version of the New York Times is better than the Kindle version, and the electronic version is free, than the paper is missing its opportunity to get our money.

It was 15 years ago this week that the New York Times unveiled its website. Perhaps the Publisher described the mission statement best at the time. “We see our role on the Web as being similar to our traditional print role — to act as a thoughtful, unbiased filter and to provide our customers with information they need and can trust.” The media is about the name. They have built trust. A website can build trust over time just in the same way as a newspaper. And if we want or demand a certain level of quality, it is not unreasonable for it to be paid for, either through direct subscription or through advertising.

That said, after fifteen years, Bloomberg reports that the New York Times has decided its paid service will be less than the $19.95 charge for its Kindle Edition, although this may be a promotion during the stage of early adoption. Confirmed details are not yet out. The Times, like other newspapers, has yet to establish how much of their content will stay free, and how much will be paid for.

The Times seems set to move to a consumption based model, with a set number of articles free each month, and heavy users paying a subscription fee. Print subscribers will get full online access with no extra charge. So far, the paywall model has not been entirely successful at any of the newspapers which have implemented it. So the Times may be setting itself up for failure.

The Teleread article on the story had an interesting model suggestion in its comments. ‘Howard’ suggested that as paywalls have been less than successful, a micropayment system might be more effective, where people put money into an account and each time they access an article, money is deducted from that prepaid account.

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My Kodachrome Has Been Taken Away

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Eastman Kodak Kodachrome 64 Films
Image via Wikipedia

The oldest color camera film ever made will fade into the history books on December 30th as the last laboratory in the world that processes the film runs out of the chemicals to develop it. The film has been used to capture many of the most iconic color images of the twentieth century. When Abraham Zapruder filmed the Kennedy Assassination, he used Kodachrome.

Kodachrome was the first commercially successful color film, and has been in production for 74 years. Kodak will not be producing any more as they consider it to be no longer viable. Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas, the last laboratory, still processes 700 rolls each day, but will grind to a halt abruptly this week. “The real difference between Kodachrome and all the other colour films is that the dyes that make up the image you see in the film, in Kodachrome, don’t get incorporated into the film until it is actually developed,” said Grant Steinie, who runs the laboratory.

Kodachrome was appreciated by professionals for its vibrant colors and accuracy as well as its storage longevity. The final roll of Kodachrome manufactured was used by photographer Steve McCurry of National Geographic fame and processed in July. You can track the countdown to the end of Kodachrome at the Kodachrome Blog at kodachromeproject.org, a site for Kodachrome enthusiasts.

A Tribute to Kodachrome by Kodak

We have a box of kodachrome slides sitting here that we plan to someday get around to cleaning and running through a slide scanner. And while the age of digital photography is here, there is something to be said about what can be capture on traditional film, even if subsequently digitized…something that is lost now.

Rest in Peace, Kodachrome – 1935-2010 – Paul Simon Sang About It, a State Park was named after It, National Geographic Shot Their Most Famous Photos On It, and now they have taken our Kodachrome away.

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LastPass Acquires Xmarks

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Image representing LastPass as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

The title says it all. LastPass, which is a cross-platform password manager, has acquired Xmarks, a cross platform bookmark, tab, history, and password sync. It seems a match made in heaven. The two businesses seem to align perfectly.

Xmarks will join Lastpass‘s Freemium model. The browser plugin and most of what users are used to will remain, but new features will be available, including an iPhone and Android app. Those features will be part of the $12 a year premium package. You can get both premium services bundled for a $20 a year package.

The two services will continue to require separate downloads and will be administered through two distinct extensions and websites, although there are plans to integrate them in the future.

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