Olympic high-speed watching and other notes
MythTVI’m watching the Olympics, and my primary tool as always is MythTV. Once you do this, it seems hard to imagine watching them almost any other way. Certainly not real time with the commercials,...
View ArticleScience Fiction movies at Palo Alto Film Festival, and Robocars legal in...
I haven’t bothered quickly reporting on the robocar story every other media outlet covered, the signing by Jerry Brown of California’s law to enable robocars. For those with the keenest interest, the...
View ArticleLarry Niven and Greg Benford on "Bowl of Heaven" and Big, Dumb Objects
Last month, I invited Gregory Benford and Larry Niven, two of the most respected writers of hard SF, to come and give a talk at Google about their new book “Bowl of Heaven.” Here’s a Youtube video of...
View ArticleThe importance of serial media vs. sampled and Google Reader
The blogging world was stunned by the recent announcement by Google that it will be shutting down Google reader later this year. Due to my consulting relationship with Google I won’t comment too much...
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Please, NBC, let us choose our audio for the Olympics, especially the opening
The Olympics are coming up, and I have a request for you, NBC Sports. It’s the 21st century, and media technologies have changed a lot. It’s not just the old TV of the 1900s.Every year, you broadcast...
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Near-perfect virtual reality of recent times and tourism
Recently I tried Facebook/Oculus Rift Crescent Bay prototype. It has more resolution (I will guess 1280 x 1600 per eye or similar) and runs at 90 frames/second. It also has better head tracking, so you...
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Future proofing video with high-res stills
On Saturday I wrote about how we’re now capturing the world so completely that people of the future will be able to wander around it in accurate VR. Let’s go further and see how we might shoot the...
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Fixing the sad state of in-flight entertainment (your own or the airline's)
When Southwest started using tablets for in-flight entertainment, I lauded it. Everybody has been baffled by just how incredibly poor most in-flight video systems are. They tend to be very slow, with...
View ArticleThe Daily Show is the most valuable TV program out there, and probably will...
Musings on the economies of cutting the cord.Over the past 14 years, there has been only one constant in my TV viewing, and that’s The Daily Show. I first loved it with Craig Kilborn, and even more...
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Targeted Ads after I buy something are really annoying
I’m sure you’ve seen it. Shop for something and pretty quickly, half the ads you see on the web relate to that thing. And you keep seeing those ads, even after you have made your purchase, sometimes...
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Hugo awards suborned, what can or should be done?
Since 1992 I have had a long association with the Hugo Awards for SF & Fantasy given by the World Science Fiction Society/Convention. In 1993 I published the Hugo and Nebula Anthology which was for...
View ArticleSecond musings on the the Hugo Awards and the fix
Last week’s Hugo Awards point of crisis caused a firestorm even outside the SF community. I felt it time to record some additional thoughts above the summary of many proposals I did.It’s not about the...
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Facebook makes less than $10/user, can we find alternatives to advertising?
Facebook’s ARPU (average revenue per user, annualized) in the last quarter was just under $10, declining slightly in the USA and Canada, and a much lower 80 cents in the rest of the world. This is...
View ArticleTo fix human attack on the Hugo awards, you need humans
I wrote earlier on the drama that ensued when a group of SF writers led a campaign to warp the nomination process by getting a small but sufficiently large group of supporters to collude on nominating...
View ArticleFears confirmed on failure of fix to Hugo awards
Last year, I wrote a few posts on the attack on Science Fiction’s Hugo awards, concluding in the end that only human defence can counter human attack. A large fraction of the SF community felt that one...
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Museums in ruins and old buildings will take on new life with Augmented Reality
We’re on the cusp of a new wave of virtual reality and augmented reality technology. The most exciting is probably the Magic Leap. I have yet to look through it, but friends who have describe it as...
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If you built "Westworld" (or other robot sex) it would probably be with VR
HBO released a new version of “Westworld” based on the old movie about a robot-based western theme park. The show hasn’t excited me yet — it repeats many of the old tropes on robots/AI becoming aware —...
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Digitizing your papers, literally, for the future, with 4K video
I have so much paper that I’ve been on a slow quest to scan things. So I have high speed scanners and other tools, but it remains a great deal of work to get it done, especially reliably enough that...
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How to do a low bandwidth, retinal resolution video call
Not everybody loves video calls, but there are times when they are great. I like them with family, and I try to insist on them when negotiating, because body language is important. So I’ve watched as...
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E-mail is more secure than we think, we should use it
E-mail is facing a decline. This is something I lament, and I plan to write more about that general problem, but today I want to point out something that is true, but usually not recognized. Namely...
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