Summer Fun Food and Drink - Techo addiction - Chapter 23 · Monday September 6, 2010 by colin newell
I have a pretty sassy old mom… in her 80’s and as spry as a UVic rabbit dodging a Jack Russell terrier.
Was wowing her with an internet radio that I am testing out. Maybe you have seen them. They look like radios. They pick up a WiFi connection and can spit out 15,000 radio stations.
For most people, it is a 99 channel Universe – especially for those of us who live in urban areas. My wife and I have a digital Shaw cable account that is wrapped with broadband internet. Works pretty well for us. Not always reliable as gravity but I have few complaints about the service. If you pick up the phone and call for help, chances are you are going to speak to some young person in the Victoria area. That speaks volumes for customer service.
Anyway – I am digressing.
My mom goes back to the days of radio. Where there was nothing but radio… and direct dial rotary phones. Where a long distance phone call would cost you bucks based on distance. Unlike today where you can call Mars for about 9 cents a minute.
So she has seen it all. But was immensely impressed with the fact that I could call up a Stereo FM quality radio signal from anywhere on the Planet — via the miracle of the internet of course.
In the space of 5 minutes we were “tuning” in St. Johns Newfoundland, the Vatican, France, the BBC and then back to CBC Radio 1 Victoria.
As my mom also knows, I am a radio guy from a long time ago – at 12 years of age I was building shortwave radios and dabbling in Ham radio. So, through some degree of osmosis, she has soaked in some of this legacy technology.
Fact is, in 2010, we have come to really depend on the leading edge technologies; cell phones, internet, internet phones, iPhones, blackberries, portable PC’s and Macs that depend on a stable broadband connection… that are totally centralized. And where this is a problem is, when there is a power failure, local brown out or, God forbid, a “mass coronal ejection” from the Sun… We could be entirely dead in the water as far as communications are concerned. Under the right conditions we could not even talk across the street – much less connect to a police station or hospital.
Our highways are much like that. Cut one big link and we are screwed.
And do not get me wrong – I am not offering any solutions. Just making an observation.
Like dear old Mom did when she asked…
“This internet radio does not work by itself does it? It is not picking up all these stations out of the air is it? You have another piece of hardware in the home, yes?”
Her words exactly.
My internet and digital connection is a pretty massive and fragile lifeline.
It’s a good thing that I am a licensed ham radio operator capable of helping dig out from a natural disaster and aiding in coordinating communications in the event of…
You get the point.
My advice is: Be prepared with alternatives. An emergency kit is a good start. And a battery powered traditional radio to hear what’s going on.
The rotary dial phone? Sorry. Cannot help you there.
Be safe.
Summer Fun Food Drink and Gear - BING Bots suck - Chapter 20 · Wednesday August 18, 2010 by colin newell
Misfiring Microsoft search bots at BING.com have been hammering my site so much lately I had to put an HTACCESS block on them – not to stop the site being overrun with their crazy spiders… but to save my pocketbook.
Looking at my detailed web logs, it appeared that I was being scanned by “20-30 bots every few seconds”, appearing much like a denial of service attack.
The IP addresses of the bots – Had almost 90,000 hits on my website yesterday – came from 65.55.25.149 – the culprit Microsoft.com in Redmond.
Those people are not only incapable of developing a stable operating system; VISTA or Windows 7… but also, they haven’t a clue about running a search engine.
So guess what?
You’re blocked!
Microsoft gobbled almost 8% of my monthly web bandwidth in one day – thanks a lot folks.
Now piss off.
Colin Newell is a Victoria area resident, food writer, blogger and multimedia engineer – when he is not working at a local University, he is on the hunt for the perfect cup of coffee…
Summer Food Fun and Drink 15 Life in the now lane · Thursday July 29, 2010 by colin newell
One of the neat things about being over 40 – and being fairly hip to what is hot and happening in the early part of the 21st Century…
Is the fact that I am old enough to remember going into a record store to buy LP’s – when cassettes were actually available…
Photo at right: New copyright protection laws and digital locks – technology and new media – Stephen Harper wants to know: What’s on your iPod!?
(And)Seeing the arrival of CD’s in the early eighties was way cool as well.
I can recall shopping out my first CD Player (a Sony) with my one CD I owned… and then previewing the performance of new systems with Dire Straits “Brother in Arms” release (which by the way was the first million selling CD in 1985) – yes, I waited until at least 1985 to get my first CD player.
My Amp was (and is with my Mom now) a Class-A JVC high end amp with a pair of Boston Acoustic speakers (that I think need a re-coning by now…)
There was a time in the late 70’s when home video tape arrived in the form of the VHS and Beta tape – ushering in an era of home video rentals – something that is quickly going the route of DVD rentals. When DVD rentals arrived I think a lot of us figured that “this was it…” – this is the medium for home entertainment that was here to stay.
Then Blue-ray. And in some senses, that technology has hardly dug in its heels and the rental market is entirely drying up as viable internet downloading of individual shows as well as broadband on demand is becoming more available to the average person.
My point? I have seen it all – from the late sixties and album oriented masterpieces on vinyl from the likes of Led Zeppelin – and I heard ever album as they were released!
Nowadays one does not even need to leave their living room to acquire every bit of “entertainment” that is available. No need for video or DVD rental. No need for record stores. Game rentals? History my friend.
And I think that we are all poorer without the whole community experience. One wonders what kind of people we will become when we only need to go out for work or food. I wonder.
As of today, I have still managed to not download one song off of the internet – and I have never downloaded a TV show or movie. Call me square if you want – but I work with this technology all day. Which might explain something.
Currently, what is left of the music industry (and movie empire) is quickly trying to come up with some tough new standards on protecting intellectual property. I am all for supporting the artist – but everything so far has not worked.
Anyway. Stay tuned. Let’s see what is next.
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Summer Food Fun and Drink 14 Six years later and a re-launch · Wednesday July 28, 2010 by colin newell
Who is writing a book on global microfinance for Bloomsbury, puzzle maker for the New York Times op-ed section, travel writer, Forbes Traveler, author of Who Hates Whom, a pocket guide to global conflict outlining more than 30 of the world’s active wars and hot spots?
He is a former writer for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation – season 3 in which yours truly had a minute writing role – and a freelance writer for the show “Bones”…
Deep breath…
And a consulting producer for El Pantera, Mexico’s top original action series, former AP award-winning nationally syndicated radio commentator, former on-camera presenter for the TLC series Mostly True Stories, and a winner of over $350,000 in cash and prizes on Jeopardy! and other quiz shows…
He is Bob Harris of Los Angeles California and I have been his web specialist since 2004!
In the last couple of weeks we have been doing a soft launch of the new BobHarris.com online phenomenon. Bob, in the upcoming days, weeks and months will add to the nearly 1600 articles on the classic BobHarris.com website.
And integrate the other social media elements of Bob’s life into one great big shiny experience; Twitter, Facebook meets Web 2.0
Enjoy Bob’s website – and let me know if something is not working quite right.
Rites of Spring #28 Technology of our undoing - broadband over power lines · Saturday May 29, 2010 by colin newell
My day job is in multi-media design, modernization, implementation and blah, blah, blah…
…in the educational environment. In my case UVic.
(so)Give me a classroom or lab with a black board and a piece of chalk and I will give you video data projection, infinitely variable lighting controls, high speed internet, web-casting and sound so crisp you would swear it’s live.
because in the year 2010, it’s easily to learn when you have all the tools.
And this applies to the home as well.
I have a PC workstation for audio production and a MacBook Pro for doing the stuff I am doing right now… a very high speed internet connection… and Wireless-N that I do not even use. I like my cat-5 wiring if at all possible. It is secure… and it’s reliable as gravity my friends.
I also like keeping my bits and bytes contained within copper cable if possible. Not adverse to wireless… as long as it’s wireless-N or better. Which is secure as heck after all – low power. It’s safe. And nobody gets hurt, right?
Well, there is something that has come down the pipe (more popular in Europe than here) that is scaring the crap out of me – not for what it does to people or creatures – but what it potentially takes away from us… our ability to communicate.
It’s called broadband over the power lines or BPL and it uses house wiring for distributed ethernet. God knows who designed this stuff. It has the capability, ironically, of seriously interfering with existing digital radio and TV and old style AM and FM radio – impeding our ability to communicate with each other and enjoy our high tech lives. Now that is genuinely ironic wouldn’t you say?
The boxes (shown above and sold at COST-CO) are made in China and they are shit. Some colleagues and I are investigating an interference report from the area around Beacon Hill Park in Victoria – some 4 city blocks wide! And it is likely one of these little peckers (shown above). From some of the intelligence that we have gathered, people are buying these units at COST-CO and then returning them shortly thereafter – not because they don’t work… because they do – but because they are difficult to set up.
Wireless-N is tried, tested and true – sets up easily and does not interfere with any domestic or terrestrial radio or data services.
Now imagine that you neighbor down the street buys one of these boxes and your audiophile set-up is screwed… or your HD TV is now replete with interference lines or inexplicable odd behavior – and don’t think for a second that because it’s digital it is immune to interference – cause it ain’t.
So think about this: One device (shown above) and 4 city blocks wiped out.
How wiped out? I listen to CFAX 1070 AM in Victoria and the offending box (or something like it – we are not exactly sure it is this particular unit) actually interferes with a 10,000 watt radio station.
This should concern us.
