I have always like the Mozilla’s line of browsers, from Communicator to Navigator to the current iterations. They have always either outclassed our outperformed the competition. That being said check out the new bookmark bar feature that uses the website favicon as a bookmark button.
I am sure there are plenty of other features to play around with in the new beta version.
I was at the F train stop near near Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
It had train wheels retrofitted to the undercarriage that connected a pressure wheel to the actual rubber of the normal drive wheels.
Is that a muffler from a retrofitted propane system?
There was a generator, and a remote controlled jack hammer, (both on there own mini train cars) all attached…
It looked pretty hokey to me, plus it would be horrible to have to drive it a job site in some random spot in the NYC subway system…
I was heading home on the “B” train and saw the interesting doggy.
It was not obvious from across the train that the dog was not real…..
JCL
A friend asked me an interesting question about wireless networking…
“wireless network question for you…
I seem to recall reading somewhere that mixing wireless n and wireless g components on the same network will drag the overall speed down to 802.11g levels. If that is the case, does that also apply to iphone 3gs?
That is, if I get my nice new N gigabit router, and update my laptop wireless card will the laptop’s wireless performance suffer when my phone is also on the network, even if it is not actively downloading stuff? ”
My response:
That is a good question….
Whenever you mix wireless speeds on a single antenna it drops all connection speeds to that of the slowest device. For example if you connect a G and a B to the same single antenna device both devices will operate at B speeds. However, when you have a dual antenna setup you can set one to N and one G and they will operate at the related speed and not slow each other down.
There is more to the story…B tops out at 11mbs, G at 54mbs and N is around 115mbs.
Most internet connections top out at about 20mbs, so having the ability to run at N speeds to the internet versus G speeds does not buy you anything. That is unless you have a net connection that is greater than 50mbs, which exists. At that point having consumer networking hardware can effect the speed, especially if you are streaming large videos.
That being said, the connections on the local area network, ie computer to computer file sharing between wired computers can run at either 10mbs, 100mbs or 1000mbs depending on your hardware. So if you had a desktop that had a 1000mbs connection on your network, you would see a speed increase using an N network as opposed to a G network. Keep in mind these are theoretical max speeds, and in reality everything operates at about 75% of what the max speed is on the wired side and about 60% on the wireless side, if that.
Wireless networking is flexible and convenient, but it operates on a busy frequency, and to compensate the connection is constantly disconnecting and reconnecting, hundreds of times a minute. While that is not an issue for email and causal web surfing it does become in issue when video streaming/conferencing and or using skype.
To answer your last question every connection takes up some resources for encryption and to maintain state, but with 2 devices on the same network the impact is negligible. However, newer wifi routers have dedicated hardware to deal with encryption, so they will perform better than an equally spec’d older router.
My dad was in the plastics business in the 1970′s, but before that he was a tinkerer and made things in the oven using a mold and a vacuum cleaner, I think they referred to it as vacuum forming. It seemed kinda dangerous to me when I was a kid, but I wish I could have worked with him to create his wonderful inventions…..
Collapsible lightweight shipping container on the google patent site.
Joseph Liggett
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I saw this while leaving a clients at 27th between 10 and 11th avenues.
Its my favorite New York City picture….
the corner of 10th and 29th street NYC
I was taking advantage of the less than 30 minutes (the rest of the neighborhood has 90 minutes) of alternate side parking that is enforced on east 86th street. I am writing this post in an effort to own my own content and not give it all to facebook and twitter.
I made friends with this flirty butterfly. I am unsure why it chose to land on my retracted window, but it did long enough for me to snap this picture.
Thank you butterflyNYC.
PS: I also posted a copy of the NYC 2010 alternate side of the street parking calendar on my website here.
Being in the computer industry is sort of like being in the wild wild west. There is no computer workers labor union, no licenses, no governing body, and a government that understands so little of what is going on that they wisdom can not fathom the world around them. Therefore, those in my industry have never been able to strike effectively, some have chose other more drastic methods, but I am not going to go into that now.
I have witnessed strikes at various times in my life, mainly in New York city as I was growing up. I have seen the “union rat” and many other forms of labor protest, but it is rare that I have seen a labor protest reach something louder than yelling through a blow horn.
Today was different, as I was walking towards the rush hour subway on 86th street and Lexington Avenue, I traversed 85th street and 3rd avenue, which I do on occasion.
View Larger Map
I came across a labor protest of some self-proclaimed skilled workers in front of a new residential building on that side of the street.
As a method of protest they decided to march in a narrow oval pattern as to allow commuters pass them on the sidewalk while they proceed to blow whistles, while wearing heavy duty ear plugs. The noise almost tore right through the sound of the podcast I was listening to using my in ear headphones. However, the poor people that walked by this noise field with no ear protection were cringing and covering there ears as they hurriedly walked passed the strike.
This to me was a successful case of proving a point. How this point was going to get these people there job back, I have no idea, but it struck a cord with me enough to author a blog post about it.
I have been on the mac platform using OS X daily for about 9 years. When I was first introduced to it professionally, OS 8 had just been released and I was a Windows/Novell administrator at Carnegie Hall. Switching from Windows XP to OS X was a no-brainer, it just worked better and looked a ton better. Coupled with the fact that I am Certified Unix administrator and I can run real Windows, it was a smarter choice. However, the sad truth that differentiates a Windows and Macintosh is that Windows does business better and mac does creative better; a dubious distinction, but one none the less.
More or less with the help of Parallels I was able to feign all of the windows capabilities I ever needed, but then when I started my own business I needed hands-on with my finances. I chose quickbooks on the mac, knowing that it was glorified crippleware, but for the simplicity of a one man operation, I thought it would not matter.
Quickbooks on the mac is the fisher-price equivalent of accounting software, and that is after running the update. The stand-out features are .Mac sync’ing and the ability to transport it to the windows version (but it is a one way process, and I was always afraid to test it) and a nice mac aqua style interface. The best part was watching the accountants eyes glaze over as he tried to find simple things like tax reports. I felt like I might have been better served by paying attention in accounting class and doing my bookkeeping in a ledger book. It would have been more portable that way…
Well, anyway, 6 months after upgrading from Leopard (10.5) to Snow Leopard (10.6) and using my legitimately purchased copy of Quickbooks 2007 4-5 times a week, the software decided that it could no longer operate without phoning home and registering my copy with the Quickbooks Master Licensing server. As the quickbooks registration software failed, it told me to call up Intuit support. Having called intuit on behalf of my clients many times, I knew that it would be unlikely that a phone call to Intuit would result in a positive outcome.
My call to Intuit connected me to a Representative who could have been no closer than 4500 miles from my current location in the western hemisphere. And after explaining the situation, I was informed that there is no fix for this problem and I would have to upgrade to the latest version of quickbooks for the mac for about $200 in order to view my financial records that were trapped within my version of quickbooks. I explained to the representative that I thought that was typical business practice for those in the business of extortion, not financial accounting software for small businesses, he did not understand. After requesting to speak to a supervisor, and another 20 minutes of hold time, I was told that the other option I had was to downgrade my system back to Leopard (10.5), not a trivial process by any means. It turns out that the registration program works in old Leopard…
Out of not quite desperation, but because I was annoyed, I trolled the internet to find what others have done to solve this problem, because I thought that I was not the only one. I found a few people that had a much bigger problems with Quickbooks 2007 on Snow Leopard, but none seemed as trivial as the registration software not working.
Going back to the primordial interface the connects my seat to the dull black key of my MBP, I checked to see what exactly worked or did not work after quickbook failed to register and did not let me open my company file. It seemed that they had ghosted every useful menu item, and as much as that sucked the actual quickbooks program was still running.
I thought to myself what would a stubborn computer user do in this situation? There had to be a simple answer and I was trying to solve the hard problem. After spending about 5 minutes sifting throughout the numerous backups that quickbooks had no Idea how to keep track of I found my most current active quickbooks file. I double clicked on it, my company file opened. I was saved. IT JUST OPENED, what the F!!!!
If I were a normal user I would have probably never read the error message or called Intuit and wasted over an hour on the phone with incompetent tech support. I would have just tried to double click on the company file, and everything would have just worked.
So in the end the annoyance of dealing with the registration of software within quickbooks, software that I legitimately purchase exposed a flaw with quickbooks that is just the tip of the ice berg in how Intuit tries to throttle cash out of America’s small businesses. If you feel like switching to better accounting software on the Mac platform, I would recommend
Accounting Edge or MYOB.
Out of desperation, after I lost hope that I would ever find my V-moda vide duo (beware this website plays music) headphones, I went to the apple store in soho to purchase any iPhone headphones that had a mic, the only ones that were less than $200 were the the Klipsch s4i image headphones with mic and 3 button remote. So i bought them hoping that they would sound great out of the box…
Boy, was I surprised as soon as I got them on and started playing some high bit rate music and the s4i’s made my music seem angry at me. Granted I was listing to some KMFDM, but the sound level was just too unbalanced. The treble seemed like it was on overload, and to get any bass response I had to put the headphones on 8, and grind my teeth. However, on the plus side with the correct earpads the s4i’s fit great and blocked out a good part of the ambient noise.
The other thing that bothered me about the s4i’s was the response from the 3-button control. It responded as if it was processing the signal instead of passing it through. sometimes when I would pause a song, the song would stutter and then stop, and when I adjusted the volume my iPhone responded sluggishly.
Would I recommend that you buy these headphones? Absolutely not, at least until they get a firmware update. Single click, double click and sometimes even triple click worked and the volume buttons worked, and they are definitely louder than the headphones that Apple includes with the iPhone. Stick with the V-moda’s they are solid and proven and they have good customer service to boot…..
image: detail of installation by Bronwyn Lace