Most Commented Technology Blogs (217)

I'm in the middle of a YouTube marathon viewing stories about some amazing inventions.

Thomas Edison patented (and marketed) the electric light that changed the way we live. No more candles or gas lights in the night. His lights were powered from generators that he built using direct current (DC) which is the same current created by batteries. DC current is good for short distance. The major drawback using DC is voltage drop over wires for any distance. This would require a power station every mile. Another problem was the generators themselves weren't efficient nor reliable.

Nikola Tesla, a young immigrant to America started working for Edison. Tesla told Edison he could fix the generator problems and Edison agreed to pay him a million dollars* if he did. Tesla redesigned the generators and Edison reneged only giving him a pay raise.

Angered he had been cheated by Edison, Tesla went off on his own and worked on a new invention of a generator using alternating current (AC) but he needed funding and struck up a partnership with millionaire George Westinghouse. His generators were in direct competition to Edison.

Edison announced to the public that alternating current was dangerous and began a smear campaign of publicly electrocuting dogs using AC. In response, Tesla gave a demonstration at the Worlds Fair in 1883 by shooting electricity through his body to produce light in the lights in his hands!

Alternating current being the superior method of transmission became the standard of electricity as we know it.

The more I learn about Edison, the less I like the man.

* note: one story claimed the deal was $50,000 and another said $1,000,000.

All we are doing is switching pollution. Bottom line is solar power and wind power are barely making a dent in where electricity is generated from. Same idea with getting rid of coal fired power plants.
No matter how a power plant generates electricity using fossil fuels, it still is polluting.
Nuclear plants are few and hated. And there we have the issue of where to go with spent rods.
Cali wants to ban the sale of all new cars that aren't electric. We already have a power grid that is hanging on by it's eye teeth. Black outs and brown outs in the making.
Now everyone is supposed to plug in their electric car batteries to re-charge. Kick up that old power plant folks and burn some more coal or gas. Get that fracking going, sorry about those earthquakes and water
pollution.
All the solutions seem to be is swapping bad for bad.
People don't seem to think about where that electricity comes from they use. Nor what will happen to those batteries when they die. Or what pollution is being done manufacturing them.
Gasoline has improved, mileage has improved. Public transportation has not. The best solution is less flying, less driving. That is the point covid has made.
Cut out driving to a gym to run on a tread mill. Make a shopping list and get it all instead of making a breakfast drive to the store and then an evening drive to the same store.
I make few trips to shop. And when I do, I take my list, hit 8 stores in one afternoon and get everything I need or think I will for weeks. Get home tired, but so what.
How soon before the landfills are polluting with dead batteries. Do you recycle them? I know I don't. No place takes them around here.

Happy New Year!

This week, I've gone back to watching YouTube videos about the life of Nikola Tesla and the common thread is he gave too much of his talents away... so much that it drained him. He died at the age of 81 after being hit by a taxi. Many years Tesla had been living alone in hotels leaving behind unpaid bills.

As a young man coming to America, Tesla had worked for Thomas Edison. This was a double edged sword as Edison had cheated him of money and inventions. However, Tesla had the chance to grow and expand his experiments in the laboratory environment.
Edison's idea was to power homes by direct current (DC) generators. The problem with direct current was the limitation of traveling long distances. Thick wires and power stations every few miles were needed to conduct this type of electricity.
Tesla didn't agree with Edison and had invented motors and generators that worked with alternating current (AC) so he could run much longer distances with thinner wires.
His use of alternating current was less expensive and was gaining in popularity. He partnered with George Westinghouse to provide AC power distribution.
This was affecting Edison's business to the point where Edison started a smear campaign of fear mongering the dangers of alternating current. In retaliation, he began to use alternating current and horrified spectators when he publicly executed animals.

Anyway, I find it ironic that the most famous electric car in America named Tesla, is powered by batteries that supply (DC) direct current.

The 1962 cartoon series The Jetsons is a look at what family life could/would be in the future where every family had their own flying vehicle. YouTube has dozens of videos of experimental one-man drones labeled eVTOL. Vertical Takeoff and Landing.
While they all make lots of claims like no-license, ultra-safe, long flight times, I haven't actually seen any production models flying around my neighborhood.

This morning another eVTOL popped up on my technical radar. It's called the Jetson ONE. At a cost of $92,000 production for 2022 is already sold out and they have taken lots of orders for 2023.

All but one or two of these concept flying vehicles have the rotor blades at knee level and my first thought is they fail miserably with regard to safety.

While they have a cool 3 minute video of the Jetson ONE, it's promoted as a fun vehicle.
The website calendar shows they booked one per month in 2022 and a list of more than 100 orders booked for 2023. Yeah, maybe lots of people have $92,000 to spare.




Official site:

Today is the official day that Microsoft discontinues support for Internet Explorer in Windows 10. Hard to believe, but IE has been around nearly 27 years and now and it's fading away.
Microsoft Edge has been the replacement for some time now. To help with a few compatibility issues, there is an IE mode in Edge that will be supported until 2029, so if you really need IE on a site where Edge doesn't function, a working version is in the background.

Rarely did I need IE and have been using Firefox for years. Although it's buggy at times, I'm most comfortable with the interface. I tried Safari, but it lacked features. Except for a zoom magnification feature I liked, I stopped using it.
If you are using Google products, I would expect you to be married to Google Chrome, simply because it goes hand-in-hand with many of the Google add-on products, especially things used in business. It's operation is seamless, especially with cloud based applications.

In the event it removes a file (or files) I may need in the future, I don't plan to uninstall IE. I'll only delete it from my taskbar. Out of sight, out of mind.

Maybe you are like me and have a long list of things that really piss you off. I'll start with websites returning a 404 message. Comcast is my internet provider and this week, they sent out a new gateway/router with minimal instructions that required me to download their app on my phone to set the unit up. I don't want to use my phone and was looking for a way to do this via desktop computer. Calling customer service is a process because they are resistant to allow me to speak to a person. Their system is designed to be fully automated, which is okay if you only need one of the 5 problems listed in their menu system.

I wasn't getting anywhere because my request wasn't in their menu and (stupidly) accepted instructions by text. That wasn't any better. I called back and waited for live assistance. It sounded like the woman had a dog and baby in the background... probably working remote. She explained I could go to their website and make the selection 'activate' that will give me the necessary details to setup the new equipment by desktop computer. That's when I received a 404 message.


Okay, I'll try this YOUR WAY and downloaded the app, but it was asking all kinds of bullshit questions like alternate phone numbers and email addresses. Just get me to the setup page! Well... that didn't happen.

I read about Tourette syndrome and guess an episode was beginning to take hold of me. Thinking of a logical way out... the gateway I've been using wasn't broken, so I didn't see a need to switch to a new one that could require me to setup passcodes of all of the 16 devises in my house. I dropped the new gateway in the shipping carton and went back to work.

Always expected... there's a survey after the call to customer service that I'm known to ignore. This time, I actually went through the process, trying not to use profanity when filling out the 'other' selection that gave me the opportunity to actually type in a 404 message ended my desire to install the equipment. The old gateway wasn't broken and there wasn't any need to fix it.

My guess is I'll get an email followup about the setup.

Maybe I should switch from cable at $90 a month to wireless 5G home internet from my cellular provider at $60 a month. That sounds tempting.

In the mean time, I'll be thinking of more things that reallypissme off...

I bought a refurbished Samsung phone last year to replace one that was around 5 years old. The old phone had a worn battery that needed to be charged a few times a day if I used the GPS and made a few hours of calls. There is a factory authorized service center not far from me, that could order a battery, but they needed the phone 2 days to do the work. I'm not okay with that so the total change was less restrictive.
Cloning one phone to the other was easy and It took a while to get to get all the apps set up the way I'm accustomed. One new preinstalled app was Samsung DeX. Normally when I connect the phone to the computer it's to upload photos or do a backup with Samsung Smart Switch.
This morning, when I connected the phone to the computer, DeX automatically came up. Okay... What's this? It's a projected version of my cellphone. I can drag and drop photos easily now. Lots of new stuff to explore... I just need to copy a few photos to my desktop today.

Thanks Samsung... I think I'll be using DeX often now!

I estimate the percentage of iPhone users versus 'the other phone' users to be as high as 70/30 and many most of them have an apple watch to go along with their setup. The phone rings and they look at their wrist. Most of the time, you don't hear their phone, but you see them looking as text messages or Twitter feeds scroll across the screen.



Digital or simulated analog watch face, some try to emulate what is on the main screen to their iPhone.

One guy in the design department wears Apple earbuds and talks through the Wi-Fi connection in his watch while his iPhone sits in a charging cradle.

So the idea of carrying around a phone that does everything hasn't replaced a wristwatch, as I found if it's not an Apple watch, it's the 'old standard' watch.



However, if you've got money... nothing says it more than a diamond watch.



In summary: It would appear having a cellphone doesn't eliminate the need or desire for a wristwatch, probably because watches are often worn as jewellery that happens to tell time.

Apple watches are on sale this weekend!

That's a topic I haven't discussed before. Consider the extreme hot and cold temperature range on the moon. -208F ( -133C) in darkness to 250F (121C) in direct sunlight.
I'm not sure how they got the darkness reading as we haven't sent any lunar landers there, but they've got the facts.
We've setup seismic measuring equipment near the Apollo 17 lander module in the 70's that detects activity.
Is it important to know what happens on the surface on the moon? To scientists who make a living on doing 'out of this world' research it is.
I would think the moon is a pretty quiet place. No hurricanes, strip mining, fracking, nuclear missile testing and things that happen on earth...

Maybe one or two things to mention. The Russians attempted their own lunar landing that ended up in a devastating crash. Yeah, the country who invaded Ukraine has the money and resources to explore the moon. That's got to be a huge source of quake, possibly changing statistics in the Farmer's Almanac update later this year. The other thing is an alien base setup on the dark side of the moon. So, maybe there is a lot of excavation and road work happening behind the scenes.

Thoughts are running deep on the subject.




Link that kinda got me started: