Category Archives: General Tech Stuff

I’m on several lists of press people, thanks to my magazine columns. That means I get lots of press releases, ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime. Today’s is probably the most interesting one I’ve ever gotten: turns out that 26-30 April is National Battery Check Week (the 6th annual celebration, no less!) The press release calls it “a national call-to-action that encourages consumers to check the rechargeable batteries that power their cordless products, and if they can no longer hold a charge, to recycle them”. This is undoubtedly a great idea, given what’s in the batteries: cadmium, nickel, lithium, and so on, none of which you want in your bloodstream or organs. Home Depot, Lowe’s, and other major retailers have put out battery-recycling boxes; the press release also mentions that ReCellular is working with them on a nationwide effort to recycle old cellphones, which are then refurbished and resold (a portion of the profits go to charity).
The Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation is behind this celebration of portable electrical goodness; oddly, their home page makes no mention of what should by rights be a national holiday. On the other hand, they do have a picture of Richard Karn on their page, so it’s not a total waste of electrons. They also have commercials and a school lesson plan that you can download. Who would have guessed there was so much recycling goodness just a few clicks away? (Note to the flacks who sent me the release: next time, send it before the week starts, would ya?)

TechEdBloggers.net is back again this year. I enjoyed last year’s edition; it was cool to see TechEd through the perspective of other speakers and attendees, especially folks who got to go to some of the many sessions I missed out on. To keep things simple, I’m going to post all of my TechEd-related stuff over at Exchange Security, but if anything interesting or exciting happens I’ll back-link it here.

You’ve heard of weather radios before, but this is way cooler. A small company called WxWorx has a really cool weather radio: it uses the XM Radio satellite system (which I’m listening to right now) to download real-time NEXRAD radar and a host of other data, including stuff for pilots (METARs, PIREPs, winds aloft, SIGMETS/AIRMETS, etc) and boaters (buoy data, wave height and direction, etc.). Both varieties integrate with GPS units, so you can get a real-time plot of weather over a terrain map, route chart, maritime chart, or topo map. Very slick. All you need is a laptop or Tablet PC, their XM data receiver, and $50/month.

This is very cool: Skype for Wifi-enabled Pocket PCs. It only works with WiFi-enabled devices; if you only have GPRS, you can use IM but you can’t make voice calls. However, when it’s working, it more or less gives you a free WiFi-based cell phone. Pretty slick.

The University of Louisiana-Lafayette has a team in the DARPA Grand Challenge: Team CajunBot. The goal: build a vehicle that can drive itself, with no human intervention, from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. (Be sure to check out Clotile, their mascot). Their team journal is here— I’ll be following it regularly.

Edward Tufte has a terrific new information visualization concept: sparklines, small word-like graphs that compress data into easily readable trends without using measurement units. This makes me want to write some code.

I finally got my Vonage kit the other day, so I installed it and started using it. My first impression: wow! Setup was very easy, and the web-based interface works well, making it easy to see call details and change settings. I have a two-line desk phone, so I unplugged my business line (which forwards to my cell) to use the Vonage adapter instead. Call quality has been quite good, with an occasional pop or crackle. Because I have an integrated DSL modem/router, I can’t install the Vonage box as the first “upstream” device. Doing so allows the box to do quality-of-service metering to reserve enough bandwidth for phone calls. I’ll have to live with it. On the other hand, I love having a Redmond phone number, and the money we’ll save from having calls between me and people in Redmond will quickly outweigh the $15/month. So, call me (425/818-0484), and let me know if you’re interested in signing up for Vonage– if I refer you, we each get a free month of service.

I sent my Fossil Abacus watch in to get the fix for its worrisome susceptibility to static. I mailed it via Priority Mail on 2/23, and I got it back a week later– not bad, considering that it had to be mailed out and UPS Ground-ed back. I apparently got a new watch, since I had to re-register it. The little nicks and scratches on the old watch were gone. An overnight charge and I was back in business! (Except for one minor nit: I got a bunch of stale news flashes from 2/17, 2/18, and 2/20). I’m impressed with how fast and easy the return & repair process was, especially for a $129 piece of consumer electronics. For most gadgets in that price range, it’d probably be easier to just get a new one from Best Buy than to jump through the manufacturer’s hoops.

After seeing Scoble point it out, I found this very cool article at Jeff Sandquist’s blog. Imagine playing golf with a bunch of MS and vendor folks… on the Xbox. What a great idea! (Personally, I’m waiting for a similar group to play a game I actually can compete at, but that’s a minor quibble.)

This is an extremely cool feature of the Motorola MPx-200:

The Automatic profile switches between the Normal profile and the Meeting profile when the calendar indicates that the current time is busy.

In other words: your phone will automatically know not to ring during a meeting! How cool is that?

I just signed up for Vonage‘s voice-over-IP service. Why? For $15 a month, I am now a local call to Redmond; I spend more than that on combined cell airtime and long distance service (not to mention the cost of having coworkers call me). Until I get the little box they use to do the VoIP conversion, I have my new number forwarded to my cell phone, but in a week or so I should be live. (And no, Mossberg’s favorable column had nothing to do with it!)

Rick Schaut, one of the developers in Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit, has a blog.

Scoble asks if there’s a web part for generating RSS feeds from SharePoint. The comments to his post mention Harry Pierson’s part, but my pal Sig Weberhas web parts to display RSS in SharePoint and a component to produce it.

Ever wonder how to make your own custom “page not found” page appear? Dave Taylor has a tutorial that gives some examples, some of which are pretty funny.

I’m testing Ecto (née Kung-Log) to see how it works. So far, it’s quite slick.