Ah, the problems of modern technology … Digital Video Recorders like TiVO are good for the time-shifting of TV broadcasts - for later viewing, but the question arises: What to record? Today’s limited capacity and single-tuner DVRs require choices to be made … some programs get recorded, but most cannot. Wouldn’t it be nice simply [...]

The RIM versus NTP patent disputes have been going on for almost 5 years now. The twists and turns and reversals of fortune are now documented in a new article entitled Patently Absurd in the Globe and Mail. The article does not make note of or try to analyze the worthiness of the 11 main [...]

The new issue of Business Week recounts the start of one of the most dramatic business meetings that we’ve seen in a while. The setting is on the occasion of Steve Jobs’ return to the helm of the then underperforming Apple Computer in 1997 after having been fired by them twelve years earlier. In [...]

Apple Computer is doing very nicely, thank you very much. AAPL share prices have doubled over the last year, and are at an all-time high, yielding a market cap of just over sixty billion dollars. Earnings have doubled, revenues are up by two-thirds, the company is cash-rich and debt-free, iPods are selling fast, but that’s [...]

The Motorola Razr V3 was launched in November of 2004, and went on to become the world’s best selling mobile phone with 12 million sold to date. The Samsung SPH-A900, aka the Blade, became available exactly a year later (11/05) and, according to a new review in yesterday’s New York Times, although the 2 are [...]

Sony has been making Walkman music players at their fabled Saitama plant since the first TPS-L2 models rolled off the lines there in July of 1979 … but no more. In a sign of the times, Sony has just announced that it will shut down this 1 remaining Walkman manufacturing facility that is located in [...]

The Toshiba Gigabeat S series music and media players were announced at CES 2006 recently. The S series is available as the S30 with a capacity of 30GB, or the S60 at 60GB. Toshiba plans to release this iPod-seeking-missile in March of 2006.
The Toshiba Gigabeat S60 gets as close to the Apple video [...]

Here’s yet another list of so-called coolest gadgets, this time for January 2006. Courtesy of IDG News, the apparent coolest gizmo in the coldest month (Jan) is the Toshiba HD-XA1 HD DVD player. The HD-XA1 plays HD DVDs in either 720-progressive or 1080-interlaced modes, handles current-gen DVDs, and is one of the opening moves in [...]

Here is a pointer to an exhibit of photographs at the Library of Congress taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii in Tsarist Russia between 1909 and 1915. Prokudin-Gorskii was a bona-fide pioneer in the area of photographic innovation, was appointed Photographer to the Tsar and charged with creating a photographic record of the Tsar’s empire. [...]

Hasselblad has released a new digital camera, the model H2D-39, which it claims is the world’s first 39 megapixel, digital auto-focus camera. It offers ultra-high resolution at an ultra-high price which ranges upwards from $30,000, depending on options and features and backs. A single uncompressed RAW file image from the H2D-39 can require as much [...]