Category: Tech

50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years

PC World has released its list of the 50 greatest gadgets of the past 50 years. Here’s my take on the ones I know something about.

45. Sony Mavica MVC-FD5 (1997)

Absolutely deserves to be on this list and probably higher. My first digital camera, after I fell in love with one owned by my brother-in-law. We still have it around here somewhere. It took digital photos directly onto a floppy disk.

43. Polaroid Swinger (1965)

I remember being utterly amazed that you could take a picture and it would print immediately while you waited. This was some amazing technology. Cassidy asked Santa Claus for a polaroid camera for this Christmas, so the technology is still around.

40. Connectix QuickCam (1994)

Another gadget I learned about from my brother in law. I have one of its great grandchildren attached to my computer right now. This was a great step forward in terms of internet connectivity.

36. Iomega Zip Drive (1995)

Yes, everyone owned one. The stock was a day traders’ dream back in the day. But the technology was crappy then and it’s crappy now.

32. Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer (1999)

Everybody had one, yes. But it wouldn’t make my list.

27. Commodore 64 (1982)

Absolutely, positively deserves to be on this list. Probably higher.

17. Texas Instruments SR-10 (1973)

The first TI calculator I ever had was a 1/2 pound Christmas present that seemed at the time like a dream come true. Definitely made math and Chemistry easier.

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14. BlackBerry 850 Wireless Handheld (1998)

This was the first Blackberry I carried around. I replaced it with the newer phone-form model, but this was truly amazing technology at the time.

7. Atari Video Computer System (1977)

My friend Andy Rogers’ brother had Mattel’s Intellivision competitor to this, and it was a groundbraking thing to be able to play video games at home. I still remember beating Andy’s butt at Intellivision Football for hours on end. I had two plays- roll out right and roll out left. And I was unstoppable!

5. Sony CDP-101 (1982)

CD Players changed the world and made me have to repurchase my music collection for a third time: LPs, cassettes and then CDs. I remember the first CD I ever bought: Hot Rocks by The Rolling Stones (I’m not a fan of greatest hits records, but there wasn’t a wide selection to choose from back then).

3. (Tie) ReplayTV RTV2001 and TiVo HDR110 (1999)

I’d actually pick all of the TIVOs and give them the number one place on my list, as I would have in my 10-year list as well. My love for TIVO is what makes me angry and sad as I watch it die a painful death.

2. Apple iPod (2001)

I’ve never owned an iPod, but as a stand-in for all portable MP3 players, it should be high on this list. But number 2 is a little too high.

1. Sony Walkman TPS-L2 (1979)

I had several incarnations of the Walkman line, and they were great products. Number 1 is too high, however. Maybe top 10, but you’ve got to put the stand-in for personal computers number 1. I’d put TIVO number 2. After that, maybe a tie between the Walkman and the iPod.

Here are some other people’s takes on the list (I’ll update as people send me links):

Engadget

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ScobleFeeds A-Z: The I’s

This is part nine of my A-Z review of Scoble‘s feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

Here’s my pick from the I’s:

iBLOGthere4iM (RSS Feed)

iBLOGthere4iM, Randy Charles Morin’s blog, is actually one of the first blogs I started reading when I first began to explore blogs as way of getting news and information. This was before I had a news reader and so I never added it to my blogroll. I am happy to have rediscovered it. Lots of good blogging and general tech posts.

Honorable Mention:

Incremental Blogger (RSS Feed) (ineligible because I already read it)

Inside Microsoft (RSS Feed)

Ian Dixon (RSS Feed)

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How Microsoft Can Win the RSS War

Scoble links to a blog post by Michael Affronti, a program manager for Microsoft’s Outlook team, about planned RSS integration in an upcoming version of Outlook. I use Outlook for email and probably always will. I have often scratched my head about why Outlook (unlike Outlook Express) doesn’t have newsgroup integration- thereby making users launch another program to read newsgroups. Now it looks like Outlook will have a built-in RSS aggregator so users won’t have to look elsewhere to read their RSS feeds (there’s a screen shot on Michael’s blog post).

Here’s how Microsoft can win the RSS war:

1) Make the RSS integration seamless. The screenshot looks pretty sweet in this regard.

outlooknews

2) For the love of Elvis, give us a “mark ALL feeds as read” button. The lack of this is a Sage-killer for me.

3) Figure out a way to give us 3 big viewing panes: a list of feeds; a list of post titles; and the post itself. Give me an integrated way to click to the post page AND home page of the blog I’m reading. In most of the RSS readers I have used, the first two columns make the window where the actual blog post appears too narrow. Outlook has a good pane structure now, so this should be easy.

4) Give us a way to synchronize our feeds, including read and unread, over multiple computers (via Foldershare, perhaps?). Scoble mentions the need for synchronization in his post. Foldershare, Foldershare, Foldershare. Say it with me…

5) Get this release out there before Firefox and/or Sage makes Outlook as an RSS reader as yesterday’s news as it’s in the process of making Internet Explorer. Firefox (and the multitude of extensions for it) is seriously kicking Microsoft’s butt as far as the browser feature war goes. I just don’t know if Microsoft can move fast enough to keep up. I hope it can (I have owned Microsoft stock for a long time), but I bet it can’t.

Alas, there are also ways Microsoft can lose the RSS war:

1) Take forever (see above).

2) Remove elements and features that people are expecting (think Vista).

3) Release something that does what other RSS readers do, but doesn’t represent an evolutionary advance. People need an evolutionary advance to switch. That’s why Internet Explorer dominated the browser market pre-Firefox.

Outlook still owns the email business and no one has come out with the ultimate RSS reader yet. Microsoft can win the RSS war if it moves fast enough and gives people something that is significantly better than what we have now. That sounds easy enough, right?

UPDATE: Mike busted me on my lack of numbering skill in the comments. I just fixed it. There are three reasons why I can’t count : (1) I’m bad at math, (1) I can’t type and (1) I’m bad at proofreading 🙂

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All I Want for Christmas

It’s Christmas time and I’ve been doing a little shopping for Raina and the girls. They keep asking me what I want for Christmas, and I never know what to tell them.

But I have done a little thinking about my blog-related wishlist and here’s what’s in my email to blog-Santa.

Dear blog-Santa,

I have mostly tried to be good this year. Here’s what I want for Christmas:

1. At least one person to comment on one of my Flickr photos.

2. To get on Memeorandum again.

3. A place on Dwight Silverman‘s blogroll.

4. To learn how not to skip numbers in my lists. (NEW)

5. For Kevin Hales to blog more.

6. To meet the King of Houston Bloggers, JKOnTheRun.

7. For John Perry Barlow to blog more (or even some).

8. For Thomas Hawk to take and post lots of photos with his new camera.

9. A link from Fred Wilson.

10. To find more great blogs to read.

Thanks, Santa. I’ll try harder to be good in 2006.

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ScobleFeeds A-Z: The H’s

This is part eight of my A-Z review of Scoble‘s feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

One of the things I have concluded based on my review of the Scoblefeeds so far is that there are an awful lot of blogs that either (a) have moved with no forwarding address or (b) aren’t updated very often. My rule of thumb is to move past any blogs that don’t have a least a few posts a week. I’d say between the two, about 40% of the Scoblefeeds are eliminated.

For all of those reasons, there’s not a lot to choose from in the H’s, but I did find one good one:

HorsePigCow (RSS Feed)

HorsePigCow has a little tech, a little photography, a little life. A nice mix of interesting topics by the Online Marketing Manager of Riya. I don’t know enough about Riya to comment one way or the other, but if a bunch of cool people decide to build something, that’s always a good thing.

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Lifehacker’s Top 10

top10Lifehacker, one of the best blogs in the world and an everyday read of mine, posted its Top 10 Computer Applications of 2005.

Their list and mine share Flickr and Del.icio.us.

The only app they listed that I affirmatively would not list is Yahoo! Widgets. I used that app back when it was Konfabulator and didn’t find much to get excited about. Otherwise, they list a bunch of very good applications for your consideration.

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Want to Read Newsome.Org Via Email?

While I believe the best way to read any blog, including mine, is by visiting this page or subscribing to my RSS Feed, I know I have quite a few readers who prefer to get their news the old-fashioned way- via email.

Now you can subscribe to Newsome.Org via email. See the Email Feed blank in the left column of this page (you may have to scroll down a little)? Simply fill in your email address and click Subscribe. You’ll be emailed a link to click on (to prove that it’s a real email address) and then you’re subscribed. You’ll get one email a day containing the stories that appear on this page that day.

You can unsubscribe any time.

Again, I prefer to visit a page or read the RSS feed, but if you prefer the email option, it’s an option that’s now available.

Top 10 Tech Products of 2005

2005 was a good year for tech products. Here are the top 10 items or services I started using in 2005, in order.

top101) A Flickr Pro Account. For all the reasons I have raved about here, Flickr simply changes the world as far as digital photography management and sharing goes. Too bad none of my friends and family use it, because they are missing some good photos that the public cannot see.

2) My Thinkpad X41 Tablet PC. Again, for all the reasons I have talked about, I can’t imagine ever traveling without it.

3) ACDSee 8. Simply the best desktop photo management program on the market. The batch renaming function alone is worth the price. The photo editing features are not as good as Paint Shop Pro (sadly destined to a painful death now that it’s been bought by Corel), but everything else is perfect.

4) Sony Cybershot DSCV3. Yes, this seems to be the year of the digital photograph. I love this camera. If feel and features are more important to you than small size, this is a great camera choice.

5) Audacity. While not a perfect solution, it makes making podcasts a whole lot easier than it was before.

6) Technorati. Great service. Great founder. It is the backbone of the blogosphere.

7) DigMyPics. This service converted a ton of our old prints to high resolution digital photos for a very reasonable price.

8) Del.icio.us. The runner up to Technorati as the most useful new web service of the year.

9) Linksys WTR54GS Travel Router. Hotel freedom for less than $80.

10) Alias Find and Replace. As I raved about a few months ago, this may be the best software solution to the problem of whole-scale web page revisions I have ever seen.

If 2006 is anything like 2005, there’s some good tech on the horizon!

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Performancing for Firefox

firefoxIf you use Firefox as your internet browser and you blog, you owe it to yourself to check out Performancing for Firefox, a plugin that allows you to create a blog post within a split screen right in your Firefox window. This makes it easy to add the links, images and content from one screen, as opposed to clicking around in tabs to get the links, etc. you need.

The extension supports multiple blogs, and it works with most of the major blogging platforms. As Duncan Riley points out, all it needs to be nearly perfect is the ability to easily include Technorati tags.

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