5 Tech Things #54: Commodore Amiga is Back (Sort Of)

Was feeling a little under the weather the last couple days. Therefore, a little late in the show, but we have a great 5 Tech Things You Should Know this week. That includes:

• Apple Event – Why I am not endorsing Apple TV and who is Geekazine endorsing?
• The Desktop computer – Will it be extinct in the next 365 days?
• Back to School – Need Coffee?
• Happy Birthday to Google, Happy Birthday to Google Chrome
• The Commodore Amiga is back – But Lawsuits may be in the Way.

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Get the Audio Version of 5TT – Commodore Amiga is Back!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:24 — 76.9MB)

ebay

1995 – The online auction site eBay has had a lot of success in it’s 15 year run. The company officially founded on this day by Pierre Omidyar, but it was known back then as “AuctionWeb”. The first auction was for a broken laser pointer. It was sold for $14.83.

Makes me wonder how much that laser pointer would be worth if it went back up on the auction block.

Since then the company has grown to a juggernaut in the online Auction business. They even have an ebay slot machine. Just like the auction site, I personally didn’t do too well in profiting from it…

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Other Day in Tech History items:

• Lotus ships “Lotus 1-2-3″
• HP acquires Compaq
• Hubble photographs HUDF

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:22 — 3.8MB)

The XAMPP project produces pre-configured webhosting packages based on Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl for Linux, Windows, Mac, and (early beta) Solaris. Once you have installed it, you have all you need to run a website, including a one using an SQL database, such as a blog, on your local computer, with all the different elements configured to work with each other.

It’s intended for development and testing, not for production. When it installs, it is completely without security and without password protection, though that can be changed.

After implementing the security, I used it to self-host my public website for three years (eventually, the site’s database outgrew the capabilities of my P4 server and I put it on GoDaddy).

I gave a presentation on XAMPP for Linux at my LUG tonight; you can download a copy of the handout (PDF).

Front of Samsung HMX-T10

There are a lot of handheld cameras out there, but few that can tout being ergonomic. The Samsung HMX-T10 is one of those cameras.

With a 20 degree slanted lens, the HMX-T10 allows you to hold the camera without cocking your wrist. Therefore, you can hold the camera up a lot longer to get the baby’s first steps, or to record your buddies band and get the whole song without having to try and switch hands.

The camera has a few other features, too. 10x Optical zoom, 5.1M CMOS sensor, image stabilization and 1920 x1080 60i.

“The HMX-T10 offers not only a stylish, compact design, but also demonstrates the thoughtfulness and innovation Samsung brings to making movies” said Mr. SangJin Park, President of Samsung Digital Imaging Business, Samsung Electronics. “The HMX-T10’s convenient features encapsulates the innovative and easy-to-use nature of our camcorder range, as well as our aim to remain at the cutting edge of innovation and design.”

Back of Samsung HMX-T10

The camera has a 2.7″ touch screen LCD and can take both still images and video at the same time. It takes standard SD/SDHC cards and contains the Smart OIS technology that Samsung has been developing.

Only downfall is while it does have an HDMI, AV and USB ports, it still lacks the same items most other cameras lack – external microphone and mount for an external light. In fact, it doesn’t look like there is a light on the camera at all.

Price point is $299, which is decent. You might have difficulties if you are a left-hander, but other than that, it’s very comparable to other SD cameras.

1995 – Sega launches the Saturn video game console in the US. The 32-bit Cartridge loading system contained the 2 x Hitachi SH-2 32-bit RISC (28.6 MHz). It was launched in Japan and Europe earlier in the year, but didn’t hit the US until this date.

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You could get the system with Virtua Fighter for $399. Below is the teaser commercial for the game system.

Other items in Day in Tech History:

• Ultima I released
• The first Interface Message Processor is connected to the ARPANET
• eBay stops an auction of a human kidney

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:22 — 3.8MB)

Google Chrome

2008 - It was hailed as a “Mistake” on their blog. With that, Google Chrome is released in Beta on Windows machines. The new browser takes a lot of people by surprise as this was a pretty secretive project – that is, until the comic was released. Google then blogged about it saying:

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available — you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

The browser was suppose to be announced on Sept 3rd.

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Other items in Day in Tech History:

• The iMac starts shipping
• IBM announces Copper based processors
• The first meeting of the “Virtual Library” project is held

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:26 — 3.9MB)

Don’t you love Thunderstorms? We just had one that knocked out the power and internet for about 30 minutes. The smell in the house is superb!

I did not go to San Francisco – I’ll explain about it on the show. It has been an interesting couple days and the push for the video Day in Tech History has begun. Also going to be joining up with Mignon Fogerty for a session at BlogWorld & New Media Expo.

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Day in Tech History – 5 Tech Things You Should Know
Geekazine Special Media Feed

I – S.U.N. (Straight Up News)
Commodore Amiga is BACK!
Skype Goes Corporate
Intel Buys Infineon
Palm WebOS 2.0 SDK
KISS Headphones
Foursquare says: STD Free!
Google Prioritizes
Google Bug Report
AutoCAD Back on Mac
Oxford Going Printless?
First Online School in San Jose

Video – CES live stream event with Pogoplug
QOTW – Is Apple giving in with Live Streaming the Event?

II
NASA Opens Photo sharing site
Virginia DMV IT Outtages
Apple Livestreaming Event?
Hard Candy Cases for iTouch 4G
Google gets SocialDeck – Gaming System Coming?
iPhone Stethoscope Changing Doctors?

The Geekazine Podcast is under a Creative Commons no-deriv license
Music for Podcast by the John Masino Band

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Podcast (videos): Play in new window | Download (344.4MB)

CES

For the 5th year, Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central, Andy McCaskey of SDRNews and myself will once again decend on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to see what 2011 has in store. However, from the great response of our live stream event at NBC Universal stage, we have been working hard to put together a proposal to actually stream from the floor.

The 10×20 booth has been approved. We will be putting together proposals for sponsors and getting gear together to push content as we see it.

The floor interviews will still happen. We still have to uphold our quality content and give you an inside look to the coolest new gear.

For those that might be working with a company that needs great exposure, let us know and we’ll show you how CES 2011 coverage can work to your advantage.

Adobe Aldus

1994 – Adobe finalizes the merger with Aldus to try and create a new powerful desktop manager. Aldus brought to the table a desktop publishing program in “PageMaker”. The program was first created in 1985 and used the emerging Graphical User Interface in both Mac and PC environments. This also allowed Adobe to control the TIFF file format.

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Other items in Day in Tech History:

• Apple announces 2 million iMac
• Emulex Corporation hoax
• PHPMyAdmin released

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:04 — 4.6MB)

I have been working on a presentation on XAMPP for my LUG meeting Thursday–just a basic introduction about what it is, what it does, file structure, and a few utilities.

I have finished the take-away handout, though I’ll probably fine-tune it over the next couple of days as I discover the typos that spellcheck missed. I will work on the slides next–most of the show will be live demo from my laptop, but I have decided to use a few slides. (I didn’t need an outline, because I know the topic very well, so the handout is doubling as my outline.)

I note that what a lot of people do is design their slides first, then build the presentation around them, which is completely backwards and which is why many persons say that powerpoint is evil–presenters let the medium, a piece of slideware, drive the message, when, in fact, the message should drive the medium.

(I also refuse to use copies of slides as handouts. That’s lazy and inconsiderate of the audience. Paper and the display screen are two different media and should be treated as such.)

I am doing all of this in Open Office.

So a column in today’s Guardian about the obstacles local British governments face in trying to move to Open Office, which is free, open source, and multi-platform, seemed quite timely.

Despite the potential saving millions of pounds in software licensing fees, they are finding an uphill battle, not least because businesses and vendors are heavily invested in Microsoft Office. An excerpt (the “Maxwell” in the item is Liam Maxwell, the councillor responsible for IT policy at the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead):

“Only the Cabinet Office can set this standard. It does sound a bit wet [to be waiting for that instead of just doing it in the council] but this is what’s actually stopping it happening. There’s a huge saving to be made. If just half of councils moved half of their employees from Microsoft Office formats to ODF the cost of running desktops could come down dramatically – it would save £51m. If all of the councils moved all of their employees off Office, the savings would be £200m, though of course you’re not going to get that happening.”

What’s tying them into Office? As Maxwell put it to me, “you assume Office is only used for, well, office-y things like writing a letter or doing a presentation. Sadly it is not that simple, if it were £300 Office licences would have gone years ago (because it is a commodity, there’s an open source version of it).

“However, because Microsoft Office is integrated into the applications our officers use (when they want to write a planning letter they have to use Microsoft Word because it is coded that way in the planning application) we are stuck with it. So engineering our way out of that is pretty complex.”

By the way, after I give my presentation, I’ll link to a *.PDF of the handout. Open Office has included export-to-PDF capability for I-can’t-remember-how-long over five years.

Clearwire's Rover pay-as-you-go 4G system

When I was in Vegas in June, I had the opportunity to use a Clear 4G card for the week. It was nice – $50 for the week and I didn’t have to suffer from hotel speeds – especially since the hotel charged $14.95 a day to connect ( Which would have cost $90).

Today, Clearwire announced a new pricing plan, which would come to $5 a day – $50 a month.

The service is called Rover – It’s the first “Pay as you go” 4G plan. You can connect with one device, like a laptop, or for $149.99, you can get the rover puck – their hotspot alternative. You can then connect up to 8 devices and would be perfect for connection to iPhones or iPads when there is spotty 3G and WiFi service.

If you want to buy the USB dongle, that will cost $99.99.

“Simple, commitment-free wireless services are wildly popular with the Gen Y crowd, and Rover provides them with the first pay-as-you-go unlimited mobile internet offering at 4G speeds,” said Mike Sievert, chief commercial officer for Clearwire. “We’ve built Rover from the ground up with products, pricing and features designed specifically to serve a younger market who knows how you get connected is just as important as where. Expanding our offers to meet this underserved segment is an important new business opportunity for Clearwire as we continue to extend our leadership in mobile broadband.”

There are 49 4G markets right now, with plans to  grow in the next 12 months. Rover also includes a rewards program and encourages people “On the go” to use and submit their success stories with the service.

This looks like a great idea. Especially for those people (like myself) who do not live in the current 4G market. Companies like Sprint, Comcast, Time Warner and Best Buy will be able to capitalize on this service.

No longer will I have to rely on hotel Wi-Fi to upload a video or write a post about a product I am covering. I could even use it in a pinch if the regular Wireless signal is too congested.

Rover has the current coverage map.