Back in the day, a short wave radio with a decent antenna was needed if you wanted to listen to foreign broadcast stations. Now all you need is a computer connected to the I’net. Radio Garden provides a globe you can scroll with green dots for radio stations. Click on a green dot or scroll […]
The big deal this season looks to be TV sets. The fifty to eighty inch diagonals are getting below $2k for OLED and below $1k for standard LCD with all the bells and whistles. One of the new features is HDR or high dynamic range that is showing up in 4k sets with a lot […]
The first question was what to do with this thing (the Raspberry Pi or just pi). The NOOBS (new out of box software) install process worked well and provided a multi-boot pi with Raspbian, LibreELEC, and OSMC. Nice. Worked. Made a nice media center for the RV. Now what? How about a web services host […]
There is sometimes a need to provide a governor on things to keep them from going out of control. Protecting trade secrets has a long history that the patent idea was embedded in law to open this up a bit in a controlled way. Regulation is almost always a limiting control and it is another […]
An Amazon deal, the Vilros kit was on sale a while back, so I now have a Raspberry Pi 3 B to see what all the fuss is about. First thing up was to boot NOOB (New Out Of the Box software) and install a basic Raspbian system, the LibreElec (just enough Linux for Kodi) and […]
Google has been a telephony solution for the last few years with leverage from 3rd party support such as from Obihai. A change from Google has this service in turmoil. On the surface, it seems simple but the river is deep and turbulent. Google says it doesn’t want to be a telephone company. It isn’t […]
It looks like Dell is coming up with one. Patrick Thibodeau says it’s A new computer that defies category. It’s not a tablet, PC, or cloud-only device – but Dell’s upcoming computer has everything. What it is is a stick PC with an ARM system on a chip. It has a USB port for power […]
Ecoustics has information on optimal HDTV size and viewing distances. The formulas and tables are based on the work of Bernard J Lechner who was an EE and VP at RCA. For 1080p, the optimal viewing distance works out to be about 1.6 times the diagonal screen size. Since the HDTV is becoming rather common […]
Gizmodo describes a stereo mic for your iphone with the idea that it’d make for a “sneaky bootlegging tool.” That’s really only the old way to do it. One of these days, a group of concert-goers, maybe tens or even hundreds strong, will team up. Each will record the concert on their personal communications device. […]
The ‘net neutrality’ thing was about billing and bundling. I’net access is something usually bundled. The cable companies bundle it as an add-on to their traditional media delivery. Telephone companies added it to their land line voice services. Cell phone companies bundle it in with their voice, and now, text services. When it comes to […]