Dogs at dinner

January 17, 2010Leave a comment

In their customary position under the table

Added to my nerdom wishlist…

January 16, 2010Leave a comment

Who wouldn't want this chair for their entertainment room?

How can you resist? Surround sound, acoustic tile insulation, comfy foam padded seat, this chair has it all. Good thing I’m married….

How to get your ratings out of Netflix

January 15, 2010Leave a comment

I love Netflix and use it constantly, both for physical discs and for streaming over the network to my ps3 and xbox360. Consequently I’ve rated a lot of movies on Netflix, 983 to be exact. Netflix isn’t perfect though, and one thing about them that really annoys me is that they still seem to think the walled garden approach to content on the web is the way to go. The simplest evidence of this is how they keep the ratings you apply to movies locked up inside their site – there’s no mechanism to get them out. I’ve started using tools like Fandango on my iphone, and I wanted those ratings available to me so I could start porting them over. Enter the super useful Firefox extension Greasemonkey, and this script by the user Maarten over on userscripts.org. A few minutes after getting this running I had all my Netflix movie ratings in a text file on my local machine. Great, great stuff and super easy to get running.

Maarten

The first color ebook device to make it to market

January 12, 2010Leave a comment

The Consumer Electronic Show was last week while I was laid up. I missed out on most of the coverage, but one thing I did notice was that the first color ebook readers are shipping in Japan (at $1k +) and that Qualcomm announced a promising new tech for color ebooks that’s superior to the other solutions I’m aware of. They’re promising products this year using this tech at reasonable prices. We’ll see. Anyway the product is called Mirasol and truth be told I don’t quite get how this works, but the gist of it is there are two plates, one suspended above the other in a magnetic field, and the proximity of the two plates to each other controls the color of the refracted light. Or..something. Anyway you can read more about it here on betanews.com, plus check out a video of the tech in action over on engadget.

I’m pretty interested in this stuff. I’d really love an ebook, but not until they’re in full color. Those are definitely coming, and it’s not guaranteed that this Mirasol tech is what will be in the devices we buy, but in terms of price/performance/battery life, this is the most promising development I’ve seen.