If you have an Apple TV 2 or 3, and and iPhone 4S or iPad 2 (or the “new” iPad-not-3), you can use AirPlay mirroring to show your iOS device’s screen in its full glory on your HDTV. Apple recently posted official documentation for the setup, and it’s a breeze.
Summary of Kindle Lending Library
Last week, Amazon announced a new feature for its Prime subscription members: A lending library, of sorts, for New York Times bestsellers and other popular books. Check out the details.
Neowin.net
A tech site with posts on everything from Mac to Windows and anything in between, including posts that address questions such as “how much does the Internet weigh?”
An interview with Khoi Vinh
Meet the man who designed the fieldnotes WordPress theme you’re enjoying right now.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
[by: Kristen Eshleman]
At a recent Ted Talk, Eli Pariser talked about a search experiment he did with his friends that had surprising results. Google (and other engines and social networks) edit your search results to give you a personalized view of the web, based on what it thinks you prefer to see. He calls this personalized approach a “filter bubble,” and points out the inherent dangers – that the filter is not exposing us to different points of view. He calls for greater transparency and control.
Google recently unveiled Inside Google Search, essentially lifting the hood and letting you see how the search engine works. They also highlight new features, provide basic tips, and help you bypass the noise for more targeted searches. You can even view the highlighted search stories of individuals or share your own.
In response to the discussion around filter bubbles, the designers behind Google’s search engine hosted a panel discussion for the Churchill Club. For anyone interested in the inner workings of Google search, this is a must see. The designers explain the process behind the algorithm updates and the difficulty in balancing relevancy and quality in retrieval. Here is the video of that panel discussion in its entirety:
If your primary method for finding information is via an online search engine, you owe it to yourself to know how to navigate the pitfalls and distinguish treasure from trash. Ask a librarian for search advice and visit sites like Inside Google Search to understand the method behind the tool. If you use Google to search and are interested in following the inner workings and feature announcements, I also recommend subscribing to “Inside Search: The official Google Search blog“. Beware the filter bubbles, and happy searching!
Are you gearing up for a chilly weekend of spooky fun? Then don’t let us keep you with a long-winded post. Check out some quick links!
Digital Culture Books
digitalculturebooks is dedicated to publishing innovative work in new media studies and the emerging field of digital humanities.
Pocket Penguins
Cute alert: An iOS app that allows you to watch penguins on a webcam at the California Academy of Sciences. Is your child still trying to figure out what he/she wants to be for Halloween? Perhaps this will be inspiration.
Tech-Themed Halloween Costumes
Speaking of Halloween costumes…we think this link speaks for itself. Angry Birds, anyone?
[by: Charles Murray]
Missed Part On
e, or want a refresher? When last we spoke, I had returned my Kindle after wanting to love it.
Here’s one way to think about it. To me, a book is actually a kind of very small room that exists in three-dimensional space. It has walls. It has a kind of ceiling and a kind of floor. It has a front door and a back door. The doors even creak on their hinges sometimes like the screen doors you remember from childhood. For me, things exist and “happen” within this very small space. I feel my way around it. I think about things that happen early on in a book as being towards the front. I think about things that happen later in the book as being towards the back, etc. I remember that something significant happened about one-half inch from the front. I don’t think of that in terms of abstract percentages. I don’t have to imagine it in some virtual space. I eyeball it directly. I touch it. I remember whether another particularly memorable passage is high on the page or low on the page or on the right-hand page or the left-hand page.
The book’s binding and cover has a feel and a design I learn and recognize. The paper has a texture, a weight, a color, a smell. I come to know each volume’s idiosyncrasies as physical traits. It’s a room, but it’s also like a person, a friend. It’s interactive and dynamic. I flip through it. I write notes in the margins. I grumble at it. It makes noises in reply when I flip through its pages. I have a relationship with it. Like me, it ages. I have books that have been with me since college. A few, even, from childhood. We are old friends. And like the best of friends, you can ignore them for many years and then pick them up again and pick right up where you left off. They are infinitely patient with you. I will sometimes, in passing, randomly notice one book in particular and take it off the shelf and flip through its pages, ruminating for a moment or two on the experience of reading it. I suppose one could do something of the sort with an e-reader as well, but it would require some intentional effort, like doing an online search. You would have to know in advance what you were looking for. You might even have to retrieve and re-load it from some distant server off in the cloud. You couldn’t do it as a random act on the way to the kitchen.
My friends who love e-reading claim not to miss the physical side of book reading at all. To them, making claims for the superiority of actual book reading is like arguing we should cling to vinyl LP’s or compact discs rather than embracing the convenience and ubiquity of the iTunes Store just so we can read the liner notes in their original form. Just as music has been liberated from the physical object and gone walkabout in the virtual world, they would argue, so should the written word be freed from the book.
But here’s why that’s a false analogy: Since the time of Edison, music recordings were always a medium for preserving and recreating, however imperfectly, live performances. By definition, a recording is at one remove. One speaks of a recording’s “fidelity” as the measure of how closely it reproduces the “real” event—whether in concert hall or recording studio. By contrast, opening a book and beginning to read isn’t the echo of a performance. It is the performance—the thing itself—and the physical book, I still assert, is an integral part of that experience. Reading a virtual book then is like watching the grainy film of a stage play. You can’t smell the greasepaint.
Oh yeah, about those New York Times crosswords. Sorry, but, much easier to do them in the back of the magazine with a good old-fashioned No. 2 pencil with a good eraser). That little joystick on the Kindle is a bear.
I would love to hear other opinions on this subject in the comments.
Brr! This morning sure felt like fall (and even a taste of winter) was upon us in Davidson. Be sure to keep warm this weekend with some tech links.
Google “Inside”
Check out some interesting “search stories,” courtesy of Google. Also, learn basic and advanced search techniques, as well as keep up with the latest projects Google has on tap.
Google’s Filter Bubbles
This TED Talk covers Google’s filter bubbles and what it means for you.
Some Siri Sass
Apple’s latest smartphone offering, the iPhone 4S, comes equipped with an intelligent assistant, capable of learning your name, your habits, and completing basic tasks on your behalf. Last week, a family member asked Siri to “call his wife.” Siri responded: “I don’t know who your wife is. I don’t even know who YOU are.” Artificial Intelligence has some sass, apparently.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
[by: Shauna'h Fuegen]
I’m a huge sports f
an, always have been. I was born and raised in Niagara Falls, NY, which means I’m also a huge fan of the Buffalo Bills football team and the Buffalo Sabres hockey team. In an example of extraordinary sacrifice, I married a man from Maine, a New England Patriots fan, which means our football teams play each other twice per year. The Bills had not won against the Patriots in eight years (slightly longer than my husband and I have been together). The level of drama in our house on those weekends in unreal.
Back in September the first meeting of the Bills and Patriots was upon us, but the game was not televised. Since it was a special occasion, my husband and I decided to deck ourselves out in our best team gear and drive into Charlotte to watch the game at a Bills’ bar and restaurant. My husband was heckled for wearing a Patriots jersey, I had to continuously apologize for fraternizing with the enemy, and a good time was had by all.
That is, until, the satellite feed went out. Charlotte was getting pounded by torrential downpours, as evidenced by the local feed of the Panthers game. The bar patrons shuffled around restlessly, anticipating the clouds would clear and the satellite signal would be reestablished soon. After five minutes or so, it became obvious that was not the case.
The revolution started quietly, with a few scattered cheers as people pulled out their phones and checked online to see that the Bills had scored. A few minutes later apps were open and folks were actively following the gameplay. Soon thereafter, the owner of the place stood up on the bar and hollered, “Who has the NFL app?” A good Samaritan stepped forward, iPhone in hand. The owner fired up the app, plugged the phone into the sound system, and we were back in business.
The constantly-connected world we live in can be overwhelming with the amount of information flashing past our eyes every minute, but sometimes it is a lifesaver. And yes, I consider football to be a life or death matter, thank you very much.
Oh and the final score? The Bills beat the Patriots on a field goal in the dying seconds, snapping a drought that has lasted longer than my marriage. I gave my husband a comforting hug before snapping a picture of his irritated face with my iPhone and instantly posting it to Facebook. What a wonderful world.
[By: Charles Murray]
Part One
I got a third-gener
ation Kindle e-Reader from Amazon for Christmas last year. I found it to be a really elegant piece of technology, and I enjoyed playing around with it. After a while, however, I sent it back for a refund and resumed reading the old-fashioned way, clunky book in hand. But before you write me off as a Luddite or an irremediably clueless digital immigrant from a previous generation, I have to say in my defense that I gave it a real shot. Honest.
I read several full-length books on my Kindle, both fiction and non-fiction. I read technical manuals and programming books. In fact, one of the momentary fantasies I harbored when the Kindle first came to hand was that my staff and I would be able to do away with our shelves of bulky technical manuals and keep our whole library at our fingertips for quick reference. I regularly downloaded and read the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Atlantic Monthly. I even tried using it to do the New York Times crossword puzzles. At times, I marveled at the Kindle’s overall ease of use and easiness on the eyes. I loved the fact that I only had to recharge it every couple of weeks. I loved that it took up no space and weighed nothing. I could simply slip it into my backpack before boarding the express bus for my daily commute between Charlotte and Davidson. It took up so little space in there that I would sometimes have to root around for a while to find it. I had a 3G model, so the absolutely coolest thing about it was being able to download the morning papers in seconds while riding the bus.
In fact, the technology was so appealing, and had so many obvious advantages for serious readers, that I really wanted to love my Kindle. I could easily overlook the fact that it didn’t yet to color (something that has since changed) and that it sometimes mangles graphics and images. I could overlook, I said to myself, the fact that it didn’t really give me page numbers but rather a percentage of the text consumed so far (Amazon claims to have now fixed this, but the pages framed by the Kindle still don’t really synch up one-to-one with the pages in the print edition of the same publication). I could ignore all of that because it was just so cool. I heard myself telling other people how it was a “game changer,” both, I think, to convince myself as well as to show that I was up for it.
But then I began to notice a certa
in restiveness when e-reading that I had tried to ignore, a certain sense of unreality about the whole experience. I think the best analogy might be to the experience of watching a 3-D movie where something looks real and close until you reach out to grasp it and get a handful of air. (Think of those jellyfish-like things in Avatar that are always floating around in front of your face.) You say to yourself, “Now that’s amazing and clever,” but in another sense it’s about as ultimately satisfying as a virtual bowl of fruit to a starving man. Something essentially physical about the experience has been lost.
But what’s that got to do with reading? A novel isn’t “real” either, right? Isn’t the ideal reading experience one in which you “lose yourself” in the process and become totally caught up in the realm of the imagination so that the mechanical part of reading becomes effortless and unconscious, the medium transparent?This is what Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has continually touted as a feature of the e-reading experience—that it presents fewer physical obstacles to sliding into that frictionless zone where nothing gets in the way between an utterly transparent text and the eager imagination that wants only to consume it as rapidly and efficiently as possible. But this is precisely where I jump ship. What I discovered, at least for myself, is that, far from being an impediment, the “friction” inherent in dealing with the physical book was actually an important part of the reading experience, and one I didn’t want to give up.
Stay tuned for Part Two of my experience, coming soon!
[by Rob Smith]
My tale of hardware woe left off with my trying to print a simple USAirways boarding pass on my high-end color photo printer, the Epson Stylus Pro 3800. It was midnight and we had an unexpected house guest who needed some air travel ground support. My ancient, but trusty LaserJet, circa 2000, began refusing to print. Anything.
After coaxing a page of plain paper through the 3800, at that point dripping in photo ink, it was really time for bed and a new plan. I’ve been wanting a color laser printer for awhile, but most of them are in the +$1,000 range–at least the ones with the features I want. Behold the new HP LaserJet 100 Color MFP M175nw (the only parts of that I can decode are “color” and “MFP,” the latter standing for “multi-function printer.”) It does everything we think we need for our home office: print (in color), scan (especially to PDF), and copy. It does not fax, a technology I am willing to be dead and waiting for the rest of the world to understand. Like the absence of a sunroof on my car, I hate to pay for things I’ll never, ever use.
This brand new model from HP was $399, so with tax just over $400. I bought it on the sales tax holiday weekend, thinking that I’d save a little extra cash, but no, peripherals had a $250 cap to be tax free. This setback should have been a sign.
I set up the new printer. Excited about color. Excited about AirPrint for our i-devices. Curious about HP’s ePrint service. Pleased that it could function fully as a Wi-Fi printer. And even though I’ve got my fancy Epson 3800, I thought it might just be good enough to print simple photos. Early results were really disappointing. And the most disappointing issue of all: white vertical lines down the right-hand side of the whole page. Every page. And really dubious color.
After the requisite troubleshooting and a call to HP (LaserJet support is closed on Sundays, by the way), it was clear that whatever this problem was, I wasn’t going to fix it. I bundled the whole thing up and went back to OfficeDepot. Here, the story begins to brighten when they give me another one without so much as a sideways glance or the hassle of a special form, or even a lengthy interview with their on-staff geek.
The results: passable color as long as there’s not a lot of blue in the picture, which tends to look a little like a 60s-era Ektrachrome slide that hasn’t aged well. Browns, reds, greens–they all look a lot better. (I’ll have more about color printing in a future post.) The AirPrint and ePrint work exactly as advertised and without additional configuration. From my iPad, I can touch “Print” and it finds the device and spews out a copy. Even cooler, though absent a pressing need, I can send an e-mail to the device via HP’s ePrint service and it will unpack an attachment and print it out. From anywhere. I suppose that’s sort of like faxing and therefore I’m dubious I’ll ever use this feature beyond setting it up.
I have to say, in spite of the color picture issues, I really like this little printer. It’s small enough and feature rich enough for my home office and my various little hobbies. It has my recommendation.
It’s a chilly Friday afternoon, and looks to continue into the weekend! Warm yourself up with some hot chocolate and some worthwhile tech links.
Why All HDMI Cables Are The Same
Layman’s semi-technical explanation of why Cables Don’t Matter™
MacRumors
Stay up to date on all the latest Apple rumors churning in the rumor mill. This week’s hot topic: When will the iPhone 5 be launched?
Mango Languages
Interested in learning a new language, but don’t want to spend a fortune on Rosetta Stone? Try Mango’s online program. The best part? It’s free through the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library system, as long as you have a library card.