THE day I saw Tom Cruise waving his arms to manipulate video images on a transparent glass monitor in the 2002 science fiction movie Minority Report was the day I realized I had become a technological reactionary. While others were going, “Cool,” I was thinking, “What a waste of computing cycles.” As I watched Cruise “grab” hold of one screen with both hands and dramatically fling it away to discard it, I thought, “I can do the same thing much faster by clicking the close button on an application window.”
Some writers suggest that dedicated e-book readers are on the way out, since Apple’s iPhone and other smart phones can do the same job, I disagree. For most serious book readers, the tiny screen just doesn’t cut it. The real challenge to Kindle and other dedicated e-book readers will come, not from mobile phones, but from small and inexpensive netbooks.
EVEN though I usually don’t have the time, I have to admit that I’m a couch potato at heart. Give me a good TV show—CSI, House, Dexter, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, to name just a few—and I’ll happily drop what I’m doing and vegetate. Unfortunately, I’m almost never home in time to catch these shows when they air on cable, and I don’t own a TiVo. In theory, the Internet would be the perfect solution to my scheduling problems. Just watch the episodes online when I’m free. The problem is, Internet TV has largely been an unfulfilled promise, especially if you’re not a US resident.
IN the Internet age, you can access any content you want, right? Wrong. If you have ever tried to watch full episodes of popular American TV shows on Web sites such as Hulu, or buy songs from iTunes, you’ll quickly realize that not everything that technology makes possible is doable. Often, it is licensing problems that get in the way. At other times, the technology choices that content providers make can severely limit your ability to access their material—or even lock you out. Unfortunately, this is more likely to happen if you run on an open source operating system such as Linux, than a closed system like Windows or Mac OS X.
WHY would anyone want to emulate the iPhone on his desktop computer? That question crossed my mind when I heard that some people were using a Firefox add-on called User Agent Switcher to do just that. You’d think the only people who would want to shrink a beautiful wide-screen display to a fraction of its size would be developers who were writing software for the iPhone. Think again. The Phone’s popularity has created so much content designed specifically for it that even PC users want a piece of the action. The digital newsstand Zinio (http://www.zinio.com), for example, lets iPhone users browse many of its best-selling magazine titles for free. Don’t have an iPhone? Then pretend you’re using one.
MODERN desktop Linux systems excel in many things, but font management is not one of them. Over the weekend, I brought home some OpenType fonts, eager to install them on my MacBook and my Linux desktop computer. On Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X, installing new fonts is easy. Pop in the CD, call up the Font Book application, and choose Add Fonts. If I were using Windows XP, it would be a simple matter of going to the Control Panel and choosing Fonts. On Ubuntu 7.10, one of the most user-friendly Linux distributions available today, things aren’t that intuitive. To install a new font, you must open up the Nautilus file manager and type “fonts:///” into the location bar. This will open up the system font folder. You can then drag the new fonts into the folder to install them.
RARELY watch TV, but this weekend I was a couch potato. Instead of sitting in front of the television set, however, I watched a bunch of shows on my notebook computer. No, I didn’t scour YouTube for the latest home videos. Instead, I watched full-length documentaries on nature, travel and food; ancient cartoons like Little Lulu and Betty Boop; news parodies from the Onion News Network; old black-and-white features like Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy and Tarzan; and 1960s TV shows such as Bonanza and the Monkees. My weekend entertainment was provided free courtesy of Joost, a program that distributes TV shows and other forms of video over the Internet using peer-to-peer TV technology created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who developed the Internet telephony program Skype and the file-sharing application Kazaa.
DESPITE early fears that the Internet would hurt reading habits, few bibliophiles have traded in their books for flashing electrons on a screen. In fact, online retailers such as Amazon.com have made books even more widely available anywhere in the world. now, some Web sites reinforce the love of books by taking it online, where it can be shared by like-minded surfers. To a certain extent, three fairly new sites—Goodreads, LibraryThing and Shelfari—do essentially the same thing. They all enable users to easily catalog their books, rate and review them, and share this information with others. In this sense, they are all Web 2.0 sites that rely heavily on user-generated content and social networking to generate traffic.
ELECTRONIC books have been around for more than 30 years, but the technology to make them widely available on portable, affordable and ubiquitous devices remains elusive. The problem is, nobody enjoys reading a long document off a computer screen, and the displays on most mobile phones and handheld computers are just too small to do a good job. Thus the search for the perfect e-book reader---lightweight, energy-efficient, and compact--continues. Next month, online retailer Amazon.com joins a handful of companies that have tried to create such a platform, the New York Times reports. It’s too early to say if Amazon will succeed, or if its new Kindle e-book reader will join a motley collection of niche products that never really got off the ground.
THE place isn’t even five years old, but technology giants such as IBM, Microsoft, Dell and Sun Microsystems already maintain sprawling, futuristic offices there. They are joined by the likes of Adidas, Calvin Klein, Coca-Cola, Sony BMG, Toyota and General Motors. Media outfits such as the British Broadcasting Corp., Sky News and Reuters operate out of the area, as do a number of US federal agencies. Last month, Sweden became the first country to establish an embassy there. The place doesn’t exist in the real world but in cyberspace. It’s called Second Life, a 3-D virtual world on the Internet built by Linden Labs.
“HAVE you tried turning it off and on again?” This is the standard first response to any call for help in the hilarious British TV sitcom “The IT Crowd,” which follows the misadventures of a small, unappreciated tech support group in a large London-based conglomerate. While most of the comic situations in the show are absurd and over the top, some scenes are funny because they have a ring of truth to them.
HOW would your IT department handle a fire? One of my favorite scenes from the new British sitcom The IT Crowd shows Maurice Moss, a highly intelligent but socially inept programmer, e-mail the fire department after he forgets the new and ridiculously long phone number for emergency services. You can catch snippets of the series (six episodes so far) or even watch entire episodes on YouTube. Give it a try. It will leave you a giddy goat!
Update: Looks like the copyright police have caught up with the YouTube posts. Sadly, the videos are no longer available.
Digital Life is a blog that features a technology column by the same name that appears every Tuesday in Manila Standard Today, a national daily from the Philippines. This blog gives readers easy access to the column, which started in November 2002. Copyright 2009 Chin Wong.
Some writers suggest that dedicated e-book readers are on the way out, since Apple’s iPhone and other smart phones can do the same job, I disagree. For most serious book readers, the tiny screen just doesn’t cut it. The real challenge to Kindle and other dedicated e-book readers will come, not from mobile phones, but from small and inexpensive netbooks.
EVEN though I usually don’t have the time, I have to admit that I’m a couch potato at heart. Give me a good TV show—CSI, House, Dexter, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, to name just a few—and I’ll happily drop what I’m doing and vegetate. Unfortunately, I’m almost never home in time to catch these shows when they air on cable, and I don’t own a TiVo. In theory, the Internet would be the perfect solution to my scheduling problems. Just watch the episodes online when I’m free. The problem is, Internet TV has largely been an unfulfilled promise, especially if you’re not a US resident.
WHY would anyone want to emulate the iPhone on his desktop computer? That question crossed my mind when I heard that some people were using a Firefox add-on called User Agent Switcher to do just that. You’d think the only people who would want to shrink a beautiful wide-screen display to a fraction of its size would be developers who were writing software for the iPhone. Think again. The Phone’s popularity has created so much content designed specifically for it that even PC users want a piece of the action. The digital newsstand Zinio (
RARELY watch TV, but this weekend I was a couch potato. Instead of sitting in front of the television set, however, I watched a bunch of shows on my notebook computer. No, I didn’t scour YouTube for the latest home videos. Instead, I watched full-length documentaries on nature, travel and food; ancient cartoons like Little Lulu and Betty Boop; news parodies from the Onion News Network; old black-and-white features like Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy and Tarzan; and 1960s TV shows such as Bonanza and the Monkees. My weekend entertainment was provided free courtesy of Joost, a program that distributes TV shows and other forms of video over the Internet using peer-to-peer TV technology created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who developed the Internet telephony program Skype and the file-sharing application Kazaa.
DESPITE early fears that the Internet would hurt reading habits, few bibliophiles have traded in their books for flashing electrons on a screen. In fact, online retailers such as Amazon.com have made books even more widely available anywhere in the world. now, some Web sites reinforce the love of books by taking it online, where it can be shared by like-minded surfers. To a certain extent, three fairly new sites—Goodreads, LibraryThing and Shelfari—do essentially the same thing. They all enable users to easily catalog their books, rate and review them, and share this information with others. In this sense, they are all Web 2.0 sites that rely heavily on user-generated content and social networking to generate traffic.
