Category Archives: Gadgets & Apps

All posts that don’t obviously fit in one of the sub-categories go here.

New scanner

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Scanner
Dave Winer bought a new scanner recently. He didn’t say much about it… just that it had arrived. My scanner was two or three years old, so –with hardly a thought– I clicked the link (to Amazon) Dave provided and purchased the same scanner.

I had a high level of confidence that Dave knows more about scanners than I do and I couldn’t go wrong following his lead. And I was right.

The CanoScan is fast and produces sharp scans. My favorite feature, however, is the software that enables me to scan four or five photos at once and wind up with individual files. I hate to think of the hours I spent chopping out individual images in Photoshop. And I’m sure I’ll discover many more wonderful features.

I’m sure Canon spends millions in marketing and advertising. But none of those efforts could ever be as effective (for me) as knowing it’s the scanner Dave Winer is using. I have no way of knowing, but I’ll bet he didn’t get a nickel (or a free scanner) from Canon for mentioning their product on his blog. I guess my point has something to do with blogs and trust.

I’ve made a couple of imaging purchases in the last week or two. As I scan more (old) prints and take more digital photos, I need to be sure these images are as good as I can (practically) make them.

Let’s say I took 1,000 photos over the next two years and they weren’t quite as good as they might have been. There’s no way to fix that. I can’t re-take those photos.

At the same time, I’m willing to accept far less than "perfect" images. That’s where Henry works and lives. I make some practical trade-offs.

But the scanning is going much faster now and iPhoto makes it easier to tweak the images and get them on flickr.

Portable wifi hotspot

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Avis has begun to offer a product called Autonet as an add-on to some car rentals, giving customers with a mobile device such as Treo or a laptop access to the net (and Internet radio stations, one assumes).

The service, called “AVIS Connect” allows customers to rent the router and service for $10.95/day, less than most hotels charge for daily WiFi access in a room. AVIS currently offers the service to rental car customers in San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles, with plans for service to seven additional cities expected soon. [RAIN]

Rent movies on iTunes, watch on Apple TV

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Apple is in talks with the Hollywood studios to make new movies available for rental on iTunes, with titles to rent for $2.99 for a set number of days before expiring. It is unclear which studios might participate. [WSJ.com]

I hope –and expect– this to come together. Netflix is great but there’s still some lag time. And I can’t recall the last time I bought a PPV movie from DirecTV. Selection pretty much sucks. As Barb and I have less and less time (or so it seems), the convenience and choice of on-demand becomes more and more important.

NYT: Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine

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This story appeared last week in the New York Times and is one of the best I’ve seen in a while on Google. Posted here for future reference.

“Google does more than simply build an outsized, digital table of contents for the Web. Instead, it actually makes a copy of the entire Internet — every word on every page — that it stores in each of its huge customized data centers so it can comb through the information faster.

As Google compiles its index, it calculates a number it calls PageRank for each page it finds. This was the key invention of Google’s founders, Mr. Page and Sergey Brin. PageRank tallies how many times other sites link to a given page. Sites that are more popular, especially with sites that have high PageRanks themselves, are considered likely to be of higher quality.”

Beyond blogging with TypePad Pages

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smays.com is hosted by and managed with TypePad, a blogging platform. I’ve been a happy camper since making the switch from Blogger. The ONLY thing it didn’t offer was the ability to create individual pages (as opposed to a blog post). And this morning I see they’ve added a "TypePad Pages" feature. Yessss.

I’ve been steering clients to TypePad for the last year or so and the inability to add "static" pages has been an issue. I’ll add a page or two here at smays.com and let you know if this is as handy as I expect it to be.