tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66404123994633038232024-02-20T17:30:21.791-08:00Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.comBlogger58125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-9848903350298160902009-07-01T05:52:00.000-07:002009-07-01T19:10:56.129-07:00

What makes the violins of Antonio Stradivari stand out in quality beyond those of any maker since? What is his secret? Perhaps there is none, and this idea that no maker can equal or surpass the Cremonese master is nonsense, hype, a myth. Perhaps Stradivari was simply a master craftsman who produced violins at the level of any master craftsman of any century. Could the average person, or

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-16095508473713142242009-06-11T06:11:00.000-07:002009-06-15T04:01:11.087-07:00

Over at Computer World, they've got a piece celebrating this summer's 40th anniversary of the invention of the UNIX operating system with a look back at its past.While originally designed to be a multiuser operating system, and later becoming the default for big iron, UNIX was initially created on a quite gutless, even by the standards of the day, PDP-7 computer. Small and efficient were the

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-260679635692932112009-05-20T15:30:00.000-07:002009-08-08T16:52:00.133-07:00

Shaun Nichols and Iain Thomson of pcauthority.com.au have compiled a list of top ten disappointing technologies. Drum roll please . . .Number 10: Virtual RealityNumber 09: Alternative Search EnginesNumber 08: Voice RecognitionNumber 07: Apple LisaNumber 06: 10 GB EthernetNumber 05: FireWireNumber 04: BluetoothNumber 03: ItaniumNumber 02: ZuneNumber 01: Windows VistaYes, there you have it,

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-27560142708117298172009-04-25T01:01:00.000-07:002009-04-25T03:49:00.872-07:00

Recently I followed my sister on a quest for running shoes. They had to be New Balance brand. She swears by them. We found some in a sports store in a mall.I'm glad she wasn't after Nikes, because we all know the history of Nike's exploitation of workers in the third world, and I would hate to think my sister was supporting that sort of thing. Thankfully I am completely ignorant of who exactly

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-67306031393945494352009-03-19T02:01:00.000-07:002009-03-19T03:56:51.838-07:00

Parenting, from time immemorial, has been considered a noble purpose in life. No major religion is without some form of the exhortation to honour one's parents. Indeed, in the Abrahamic religions, God is himself a father, while feminists, not content with the subordinate role allocated to women while Yahweh was king, long for a kinder, gentler epoch when mother ruled all, once upon a time, a

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-65944954350501038532009-02-13T04:42:00.000-08:002009-02-16T04:56:13.071-08:00

Will Microsoft be compelled to open source its Windows operating system? Yes, says Charles Babcock in his informationweek.com article, Why Windows Must Go Open Source.He posits that Microsoft is facing serious competition from Linux on netbooks and other low-end computers, such that if it wishes to protect its application market (mostly Office), it had better give away the OS. Unfortunately,

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-4086433875152368462009-01-12T03:44:00.000-08:002009-09-07T17:50:36.883-07:00

How's about a nuclear reactor in one's own backyard? I mean, literally in the backyard. It's technically possible, thanks to the fine people at Hyperion Power Generation. I could get one of their tool shed sized reactors, bury it out back, and sell enough juice to BC Hydro for 20,000 homes. Now that's a business opportunity.But sadly, according to an article on thestar.com, the cost of one

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-28753079000584184452008-12-15T00:52:00.000-08:002008-12-15T02:15:18.255-08:00

I'm looking back at last year's end-of-year tech columns and feeling totally bummed out. We still don't have globallink communicators with roll up screens a la "Earth: Final Conflict." It remains something for the lab, like this prototype.Still no sexbots. Perhaps they'll be one of those techs like videophones -- featured in scifi, but, once the technology is actually available, not really

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-12877151651301138222008-11-14T02:39:00.000-08:002008-12-06T14:44:24.480-08:00

Viewers of CNN might have been reminded of Star Wars when Wolf Blitzer spoke to a hologram of correspondent Jessica Yellin on election night.Unfortunately, this was a bit of a cheat, since from Mr. Blitzer's perspective nothing was there -- just special effects. This is not to dismiss altogether CNN's technical achievement. Even if they lacked the technology to project a three dimensional image

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-40621370307348699612008-10-24T16:17:00.000-07:002008-10-24T19:51:59.072-07:00

I don't collect art. I've thought it's something I could be interested in if I won a lottery and was suddenly rich enough to indulge in the hobbies of the wealthy, but that's all. So I was somewhat surprised when a friend commented, "I didn't know you collected art." He was looking at pieces on my wall by Russian-American artist Vladimir Pronkin. I stumbled across Pronkin on eBay some time ago

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-74895989573923160792008-09-28T14:18:00.000-07:002008-09-29T20:13:33.304-07:00

The Earth has received a stay of execution due to the failure of some really big superconducting magnets at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Any of you who were concerned that the collision of high energy particles at the LHC would produce a black hole to swallow the earth, including the fine people at lhcdefense.org, can breathe a sigh of relief, at least until the spring. Of course, if

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-32457136796379836532008-09-10T23:31:00.000-07:002009-07-29T02:53:37.298-07:00

isoHunt, a Canadian bittorrent site akin to The Pirate Bay, is making a preemptive strike against the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), our own little Canadian version of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). From TorrentFreak: As an act of self-defense, isoHunt has decided to sue the CRIA instead, and today Fung will file a petition (pdf) to ask the Court of

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-41260937262394151552008-06-24T21:05:00.000-07:002008-06-26T02:45:38.668-07:00

Some time ago I posted about the arrival of NASA's Phoenix Lander on Mars. I noted that the initial images were essentially a postcard letting us know that it had arrived on the red planet and was getting ready to do some work. One of the primary objectives of the mission was to explore the possibility of water ice being just below the surface.Sure enough, in not much time at all, Phoenix has

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-25600967977630265492008-06-08T20:19:00.000-07:002008-06-14T00:38:41.925-07:00

This week we'll be considering the element known as sodium. What is sodium? Some might say "Sodium is that which makes salt bad for us," which would be a mis-characterization born of the fact that we get altogether more salt than we need, largely because of its ubiquity in processed foods.In fact, we need sodium so much that, in the pre-processed-food-past, salt was highly valued. Our modern

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-25391065567907106572008-05-26T18:46:00.000-07:002008-05-28T05:01:22.180-07:00

The really interesting tech news at the moment is that the Phoenix lander has landed on Mars. They aimed the thing at the planet, it travelled through space, entered the Martian atmosphere, deployed a parachute to slow its descent, and landed where they wanted it to land. All that is in itself amazing, since so much has to happen without a hitch to be successful and not wind up like the

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-4007225125162507782008-05-13T21:37:00.000-07:002008-05-14T21:59:53.978-07:00

Let's face it, we're sitting ducks. The planet has a huge bullseye painted on it just waiting for a giant asteroid to hit the target. But rather than get a breeding population of people and a library of all our history and achievements the hell off the planet, we have apparently decided that manned space missions are unnecessary and too expensive, and instead pick our noses and look at pictures

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-30171929825222412022008-04-26T21:13:00.000-07:002008-04-27T14:26:54.914-07:00

Rumblings of discontent within the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project erupted to the surface last week with the resignation of chief software architect, Walter Bender. A split has formed between those, like Bender, who see the project as primarily educational, and OLPC leader Nicholas Negroponte, who wants to push as many laptops into the hands of as many children as possible, even if it means

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-14573001623889751612008-04-07T21:36:00.000-07:002008-08-24T16:08:27.246-07:00

A while ago, I wrote a piece outlining why the One Laptop per Child's XO computer was not for the average user. It essentially boils down to the fact that the XO uses a graphical environment, Sugar, which is totally tailored to classroom use and eschews anything outside that narrowly defined context, including what most of us think of as file management. It doesn't even have an e-mail

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-31424159986086790712008-03-23T23:39:00.000-07:002008-03-25T04:01:52.732-07:00

I commented to a friend the other day that Easter seemed early this year, and he replied in disgust "Yes, first they move up daylight savings time and now this."While the ever-changing date of Easter might seem arbitrary, it is actually carefully calculated. Obviously, it was of great concern to Church fathers for many, many centuries prior to the advent of computers. They referred to it as the

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-38694682259105131462008-03-02T21:10:00.000-08:002008-08-25T02:33:56.635-07:00

This post is being written on the OLPC XO laptop. Why, didn't I already make the point that it could be used to do actual work here? Yes, but I've got a new, small, usb keyboard for it (yes, I am keyboard obsessed), small enough to fit into a laptop bag accessory pocket, yet big enough to touch type on!(chopstick rails prevent interference with XO's keyboard and trackpad)I got the wee wireless

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-32828145058925170962008-02-18T21:40:00.000-08:002008-03-06T17:52:25.082-08:00

Huzzah! Finally, British Columbia's liquor stores stock a real distilled absinthe, as opposed to those Bohemian imposters! It is called Taboo and is made by Okanagan Spirits. Taboo can be ordered from the Okanagan Spirits site if your local liquor store doesn't carry it. That brings the number of distilled absinthes we can enjoy in Canada up to two by my count. The French absinthe La Fee can

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-83297052180638482972008-02-04T23:36:00.001-08:002009-05-20T18:46:29.647-07:00

My One Laptop per Child (OLPC) XO laptop arrived last week, and I have been playing with it since. For those who haven't heard of this little beasty, intended to be given to children in the Third World, here is a video introduction by David Pogue of the New York Times.The Give One Get One deal that Pogue refers to is over now, but if you want an XO, you know where to get one.I am writing this

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-38007098350571108922008-01-20T19:33:00.000-08:002008-01-21T06:19:39.907-08:00

The Ansari X Prize for the first reusable private space craft capable of doing two missions in two weeks got a lot of media coverage, and was successfully won, back in 2004. But did you know that there are other X Prizes still on offer? For example, if you can sequence 100 genomes in 10 days at a cost of less than $10,000 per genome, you can walk away with the $10 million Archon X prize. Then

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-17365845535753754052008-01-07T19:50:00.000-08:002008-01-10T13:13:13.780-08:00

The use of aerial and satellite photography in archaeology is nothing new, but not long ago if you told the average archaeologist he could get it for free, he likely would not have believed you. Today, of course, we all know about Google Maps (or Google Earth with its fancier interface), and the surprise isn't that it can be useful to archaeologists, but that it took a couple of years for

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6640412399463303823.post-68801192557652088602007-12-17T18:17:00.001-08:002008-08-11T02:36:46.517-07:00

I've been thinking about tech predictions for 2008, and have I got a good one for you. 2008 will be the year of the sexbot! That's right, cooing, ooing, orgasming sexbots. Okay, maybe they won't be able to actually orgasm, but women have been faking it since long before recorded history (heck, I wouldn't be surprised if Homo hablis females faked it), so what's the diff?I can hear some of you

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0