woolrich follow-up

In 'woolrich', I mentioned the strange telephone call I received on my unlisted home number from the ACLU.

I called my local telco to try to get a really unlisted number the old fashioned way -- by disconnecting service. Unfortunately, my home DSL (from Megapath) comes in on the same circuit. Cancelling service would interrupt my DSL.

Megapath offers 'naked' DSL that doesn't require dial tone service. I signed up for some of that and waited for the telco man to come and drag a new line to my house. They said they would turn up

from 8am to 5pm on the appointed day and that my presence was required. I sat no more than four feet from the door during the entire window and got no telco love.

I can't stand to do it again and so I have to unwind the entire Megapath transaction, cancel the existing DSL, and cancel the phone line just to be done with this nuisance. I may try the cable folks.

I was on the fence about it until the next day. Planned Parenthood called the same unlisted number looking for some year end bucks. It is possible, I suppose, that Planned Parenthood and the ACLU are really two faces of the same giant liberal conspiracy and that I've tricked them into revealing it. I think it is more likely that they share an outsourced call center or databases. I think I've lost for good in any case.

resolve

I'm starting in on my New Year's resolutions a little early this year. One is to monetize you readers even harder.

For the curious among you, the core blog concept of negative product reviews that happen only past the sell-by date of the merchandise is not the path to easy riches. I've decided to stick with it and stay true to my principles. You deserve it.

Here's my offer to gadget manufacturers: Are you bringing a new product to market? Does your competitor's product suck? If so, send me one of their boxes for review! My unusually modest fee is negotiable and may be waived completely if your competitor's widget is bad enough to spark a CPSC recall while in my care. No Microsoft products, please.

host

I spent most of Sunday cleaning up after the previous day's holiday open house. Successful hosts know that party gifts take many forms. These range from a plate of delicious homemade cookies prepared in advance to more spontaneous gifts -- a cashmere coat or gently used handbag laden with prescription drugs, valuable photo identification, and other holiday treats.

When the wreckage was cleared away, I found my favorite party gift was a small FPGA board tucked away in the bottom of a hall closet. It came with a delicious lack of documentation or provenance. It was still in its festive red sparkfun holiday gift box.

The board itself is decked out for the season with festive red soldermask. I remember when all the cool kids used to do that. The board is a 'Papillo One' from www.GadgetFactory.net. It must be the cutest FPGA board I have ever seen.

Papillo One (with Betty O'Shannon for scale)
Photo credit: Your correspondent

Some hobbyists like evaluation boards. I'm not one of them. Where others see discount eval boards as a natural extension of the free sample heroin/semiconductor mentality, I see vendor condescension and lock-in. I think that one of the biggest differences between the original Arduino and an eval board with the same microprocessor (like Atmel's STK500) is that the Arduino is marketed to you as a product that makes sense in its own right. No pesky questions about what the size of your target market is and which industry you work in and the number of employees in your basement workshop.

I actually like the Arduino IDE. For me, though, it's enough to distribute the boards without a crippled evaluation version of a larger and more full featured crippled C compiler.

Just as the Arduino is really not very different from a number of small AVR boards, the Papillo One
is not very different from some other small boards for the Xilinx Spartan 3e. I have only spent a few minutes with the board so far. It's 'killer app' appears to be the included AVR-alike from softcores and supporting patches to let the board be used with the Arduino IDE.

For me, the hardware differences between boards makes less difference than the concept of the board. This board is for fooling around with, not for selling the Spartan 3E. I think that's a good thing.

A full review will come as soon as I can get this to replace one of the Arduinos driving my Christmas lights.

golden age

It is hard to not be nostalgic for the golden age of air travel after a visit to the Airline History Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. I'd share a hyperlink with you but the Blogger interface for iPad is so poor that it doesn't seem to support embedding links. Thank heavens Blogger supports the camera directly. That way I can just take a picture of the URL for you and save you a bunch of trouble. This must be the multi-media I've been hearing so much about.

An URL
Photo Credit: Your correspondent

The Museum's centerpiece is a beautiful Lockheed Super Constellation. Everything about that plane is gorgeous. I think Claire McCaskill, the senior senator from Missouri, must have visited recently. Her office put out a press release yesterday in the form of an open letter to the FAA administrator.


I would just go with a chant -- '2 4 6 8 10 / make flying fun again' and a fist pump. McCaskill singles out restrictions on electronic device usage and then rambles. I haven't read anything duller or less coherent since I proofread my last post on smart homes.

Here's my favorite part:

"As you surely know, the public is growing increasingly skeptical of prohibitions on the use of many electronic devices during the full duration of a flight, while at the same time using such devices in increasing numbers. For example, a traveler can read a paper copy of a newspaper throughout a flight, but is prohibited from reading the same newspaper for major portions of the flight when reading it on an e-reader. The fear of devices that operate on electricity is dated, at best. Importantly, such anachronistic policies undermine the public's confidence in the FAA, thereby increasing the likelihood that rules of real consequence will be given too little respect. The absurdity of the current situation was highlighted when the FAA acted earlier this year to allow tablet computers to replace paper flight manuals in the cockpit, further enhancing the public's skepticism about the current regulations."

This is a damning criticism of our current copyright rules by a senior lawmaker. Progress! Why should it be a big deal that you want to read some text on an electronic device of your choosing? Sadly, the topic is not copyright reform.

Here's a new argument based on McCaskill's reasoning...

---

the public is growing increasingly skeptical of prohibitions on the use of fire during a flight. The fear of fire is dated, at best. The absurdity of the current situation was highlighted when the FAA acted earlier this year to continue to allow fiery jet engines to be used during every phase of flight.

A traveler can read a paper copy of a newspaper throughout a flight, but is prohibited from filling the same newspaper with tobacco, rolling it up, and smoking it for major portions of the flight.

---

The ashtrays at every seat in the Constellation speak to Lockheed's position on fire in the cockpit.

I get it. Newspapers are dying. Easing them out of the airline cabin, a traditional stronghold, is really an act of mercy. Still, McCaskill's position is absurd. The existing rules, sane or not, are not actually about newspapers.

I welcome new and better rules. Here's what I fear from McCaskill's office:

The Omnibus Air Travel, Patent, and Copyright Reform Bill of 2013

Whereas the hoarding of Intellectual Property is the engine of our current prosperity and the principal basis of the new American Economy ...

Whereas airplanes are also powered by engines ...

...

... that neither the FAA nor the FCC nor any Executive Instrumentality shall make any rule restricting the freedom of air travelers to consume the properly licensed intellectual property of their choosing during any flight portion on any patented device whatever nor restrict their ability to contact a DRM licensing server of their content provider's choosing throughout flight.

...

smart waste

This week's ewaste is actually a grab bag of broken and obsolete junk from Smarthome.

Here's an old one: Anything with 'science' in the name isn't. I know few computer scientists who would disagree too strongly. Here are two more: Anything with 'open' in the name isn't. Run from anything with 'smart' in the name.

Smartphones seem to be thriving in spite of their name. Some things do. Not 'smart homes'.

I never really understood why large retailers private label otherwise popular products. I

recall the Sears Video Arcade II. This was a VCS-compatible box with bad controllers.

Casual users would never know that it wasn't a lame knock-off. It was actually a rebadged

Atari 2800. It wasn't cheaper than the VCS. Users were never quite sure that it would actually

play VCS games. Sears never offered a large collection of games for sale in stores anyway.

Sears has been rebranding power equipment for almost as long as they have been selling it. For years, they let shoppers in on the ground floor of home automation by rebadging X10 modules and switches. Sears wasn't alone. Stanley, Radio Shack, IBM, and others all slapped their labels on X10 products at one time or another. Only in the case of Radio Shack could this have been a pick-up for brand image. These products were not good.

X10 wall switches were especially bad. I've included a explanatory illustration. The fact that it required one was not good news. They advertise that it works with your standard switch plate. That was worth a mention. It made it easy to gloss over other details. It looked nothing like a wall switch. It didn't work in a very obvious way. It didn't feel good.

Classic X10 wall switch (explained)
Photo credit: X10.com
Used without permission

The X10 protocol itself may have been dodgy and the X10 wall switches may have been confusing. I never had any actually die. Though they are now more than thirty years old, they are still compatible with X10 controllers. They are still for sale on Sears' site though they are now sold through sears.com by X10 itself.

In 1992, a California company decided to actually wear the 'smart' mantle. It seems to be working. smarthome.com is still in business. Smarthome did and does sell X10 gear through a catalog and over the web. They eventually decided that there was a market for an X10-compatible wall switch that looks and feels like something a human would understand. I owned about a dozen of these. The last came out today.

Smarthome sold these as 'switchlinc' switches. They were available as dimmers for dimmable lights and relay switches for other loads. They improved on X10 gear in form and function. Not only were they operable without training, they had EEPROM instead of plastic code wheels. They were (nominally) bi-directional. Smarthome sold a related product called a 'keypadlinc'. These have six or eight buttons to trigger home automation actions. Some of these modules include a local module and can use some buttons to control a local load.

In my experience, these smarthome X10 modules were much less reliable than their actual X10 predecessors. Of the dozen or more that I owned, all failed in less than eight years. Light switches are not supposed to fail.

I recently installed several new switchlinc modules from Smarthome as replacements. These speak a new protocol 'Insteon' devised by Smarthome. I have been using these newer Insteon switches since about 2008 and have had no failures so far though I am on my third Insteon modem.

Wall (switches) of Shame
Photo credit: Your correspondent

X10 would never have appealed to me without a computer interface. I think I have owned almost every X10 computer interface ever produced. I had the original CP-290. I connected it to a Commodore 64. It was terrible. For a time I regretted only being able to throw it away once. I got another chance when I got a second CP-290 to connect to an IBM PC clone. I had the TW523 two-way interface module. That was reliable but very timing sensitive. I got an X10 CM11a bi-directional computer interface directly from the company and I wrote some bad Linux software for it. That flaky module had several flaky variants. I tried all of them.

X10 actually managed to get an interface right some years later with the CM17A 'firecracker'. This was a cheap and nasty little RF dongle that sat on your serial port. It transmitted commands to one of the old fashioned X10 RF bridges used by remote controls. The device itself was reliable. It absolutely could not hang -- partly because it had no state to speak of. Driver programs had to bit-bang X10 RF packets

to it directly through DTR and RTS.

I threw away modems because they died or they sucked. I have only recently started throwing away modems because they became obsolete and I'm not happy about it.

I ordered a new Insteon appliance module this year to replace a twenty five year old X10 appliance module that controlled my Christmas tree for many years. I plugged it in and tried to pair it with my Insteon modem and 'Indigo' controller software. Failure. I bought an upgrade to Indigo. Failure. Failure with a better message that told me my modem was not new enough to control the firmware on the appliance module.

Huh? The appliance module has been basically sorted out as a concept for thirty four years.

I bought a new modem from Smarthome and life appears OK for THIS MOMENT. Insteon was obviously never fully baked if we're still having a think about how to build an appliance module or a modem capable of talking to one.

I now have a 2413 modem. It appears to be working with Indigo. It uses a reliable FTDI USB to serial bridge. The FTDI drivers for Mac are mature. I just replaced a 2414U modem. I have no idea why it had to go. How this thing couldn't speak to a christmas tree is bafflement incarnate. It weighed 280g! It should speak with gravitas! The 2414U had earlier been replaced by a 2412U modem. I don't know what modem lockup problem that was intended to solve but I don't think it took. The 2414U went back into service when the 2412U died. The modem instability may have been caused by one of the last of the original switchlinc switches on its way out.

I tried the 2412. I tried the 2414. I'm hoping the 2413 is the Goldilocks modem. I'll put my numerological superstition aside and I'll keep you posted.

I'm more concerned about upgrade's evil handmaiden obsolescence. With each modem upgrade, I unplug a box from the wall and throw it away. I haven't yet been told that I need to replace an Insteon wall switch because it is obsolete. This most recent appliance module experience makes me think that day is coming.

carbon

It's hard for the laity to know just what to make of Curiosity's carbon find on the red planet.

I flew into DC for business for a couple of days and caught this view of the next Mars rover in front of NASA headquarters.

If this treatment is anything to go by, I think contamination is likely.

Perhaps this is not the next rover. This may simply be a re-purposed runner-up from the design competition for the current mission. In that case, Curiosity killed the (bob)cat.

A future Mars rover? Notice the NASA 'meatball' just below the flag.
Photo credit: Your correspondent

grout

My childhood dreams are reduced to a grout color.

Pre-mixed grout
Photo credit: Your correspondent

woolrich

It was chilly here today. I was out with the kids. I wore my favorite red Woolrich shirt. That shirt reminds me of the company every time I hang it up. You can't beat a heavy cotton flannel assembled in Sri Lanka when you want a reminder of a small Pennsylvania wool mill and America's lost textile economy.

I've had the shirt for many years. Still more years ago, I went to a Woolrich factory outlet in California and bought a brilliant windbreaker from them. Plastic fiber. The kind of jacket that can be folded, still damp, into its own pocket and left to mildew until you need it again.

My windbreaker never made it to that part of its life cycle, at least not in my care. I like to think it was sucked out a convertible somewhere on some twisty segment of the Pacific Coast Highway. It was probably left on the back of a diner chair instead.

I learned a lot about outlet shopping with that windbreaker. I had thought that the real trick was to inspect merchandise carefully before you bought to avoid visible manufacturing errors. I realized soon after that an outlet garment with no visible flaws must have either hidden flaws worse than a simple missed stitch or marketing flaws that left it unfit somehow for general consumption.

The jacket may have been just the wrong color of blue/green that year. I think it was consigned to the outlet for a deeper flaw. It had a velcro closure over the zipper. I soon found that the velcro was installed the wrong way around. The stiff, hooky part of the velcro faced in toward your body . If you happened to be wearing an actual wool sweater of the type formerly made by Woolrich, it would happily engage the jacket and serve as surrogate velcro loops. The sweater usually lost those encounters. I ruined a couple that way before I figured it out.

All of this came to mind today when the ACLU called.

I don't have a lot of outlets here where I live. I do have MicroCenter. They serve a similar purpose. They remainder lots of products with hidden flaws. The Philips DECT phones I bought from them a couple of years are a good example. Their chargers absolutely destroy the rechargeable batteries in the phone. I have to replace them every year. The last one died during the election season this year. There didn't seem to be any good reason to get the phones back on line until well after the robocalls subsided. Today was the day to bring them back. If I had thought more clearly, I would have waited till after the year-end giving people hung it up.

Not ten minutes after I got the phone reconnected, the ACLU called looking for more money from me. I've never given them my private, unlisted home telephone number. There are lots of reasons not to. The most compelling is that I don't even know it. Nobody does. My wife has it buried in a phonebook entry for me somewhere. She never dials the actual number manually. She probably only saw it once, a decade ago, when putting it into her cell phone.

The ACLU called looking for me by name.

Somewhere along the way, my local telco sold my unlisted number to some database types who thought that the cleverest thing since the gateleg table would be to fuse this info with their existing donor contact info so that they could reach out in new and unwelcome ways.

I only pay my telco $2.50 per month for not printing my name in their directory. They could hardly be expected to make ends meet on that alone. It must cost them at least $4 per month just to not print it!

The ACLU is not the only guilty party. Since this privacy breach, I have received lots of calls from organizations that I support that suddenly have that number. The call center drones all insist that I must have furnished the number. It is on their screen, is it not? They dialed, did they not? I have given generously in the past, have I not?

The Free Software Foundation, bless them, has not pulled this trick yet. I hope the fused dataset can only be read with non-free tools. They survive to get money from me for another year.

Thomas Wolfe says you can't go home again. Certainly not if you lived in most US mill towns. My local telco says you can still call.

blog by reference

I started reading The Register's archaeology piece on the British 'Liberator' laptop last night and I blew my entire time allowance for original reporting. Go read that piece instead. Their entire history series is uniformly readable. Better, it is surprisingly non-conspiratorial. That's a difficult trick to pull off when looking back on dead, incompatible machines.

If you are looking for a way to keep your houseguests civil over the long holiday weekend, I suggest the game 'Chronology'. Players maintain a timeline of cards. On each turn, they must place an event, like invention of the safety pin, correctly in their timeline. Gameplay stops when a player builds a timeline of some predetermined length. If you buy one of the more deluxe editions then you can remove all the sports and popular culture cards and still have enough decent technology cards left over for a game!

Many of the best cards are dated from patent applications. I can imagine a free, online version of this game that just draws patents from USPTO. You would probably want to exclude any patent filed in the last thirty years.

I'm sure that The Register merchandising team is already hard at work on a special edition 'ROM expansion pack' for this game. I hope it available in time for Christmas. I think it should come in either a collectable colorburst crystal tin or a reproduction of the Liberator's pleather case.

Colorburst Crystal
Photo credit: allelectronics.com

brace

Text entry remains a challenge on mobile devices.

Apple's iPad provides an on-screen keyboard that is better in many ways than real keyboards on real computers I've owned. It is not good at punctuation.

The keyboard supports multi-touch. This means that a user can hold 'shift' plus a letter or '#+=' plus a symbol and get a shifted version of the key. This is certainly more natural than the modal on-screen keyboards on several earlier systems.

Unfortunately, the 'ABC'/'.?123' button remains quasi modal. You cannot hold it down with one finger while selecting punctuation another.

Fortunately, Apple provides a completely unnatural alternative. You can press 'ABC'/'.?123' and slide your finger across to the (shifted) key you want. On release, the keyboard returns to its original state. If you never need a piece of punctuation more adventurous than '@' then you shall never want.

If you should ever need any of the Holy Punctuation reserved for Programmers then you will certainly want. The 'ABC'/'.?123' is not properly multi-touch aware. You can press '.?123','#+=',and '{' together and get a curly brace. Your keyboard will not return to its original state on release. Worse, you cannot use the funky 'electric slide' gesture from the alpha keyboard to get a curly brace at all.

The C language was developed not that long before the famous 1972 break-in at DNC headquarters in the Watergate. Little evidence exists to support a link between these events aside from persistent rumors that 'C' is, in fact, a programmer's pun for 'Water'.

Well connected C programmers in 1972 might have used a VT05 video display terminal from DEC. They had access to the glorious range of ASCII punctuation right at the keyboard though some shifting was required.

Years later, affluent home hackers at their Apple ][ machines were early victims of Steve Jobs' War on Punctuation. That keyboard supported enough punctuation to enter C trigraphs and not much more. No curly braces, no square braces.

Apple II+ keyboard
Photo credit: Bilby

Even the Commodre PET's crude calculator keyboard and the Atari 400's appalling membrane keyboard supported square braces. Modern scholars see that Jobs didn't invent keyboards without punctuation. He merely perfected them.

Quick 'C' punctuation can be brought to the iPad in just about the same way it has been brought to the masses for forty years -- with multigraphs.

In 'C', users with censored keyboards could use '??(' for '[', '??<' for '{', and so on. The idea, at least, still makes some sense in the iPad era and many shortcuts can be entered as quickly as with the iPad's own keyboard.

Go to 'Settings'->'General'->'Keyboard'->'Add New Shortcut...' and you can build modern di-,tri-, and n-graphs for your favorite missing marks. I frequently use the four following shortcuts:

lcb -> {
rcb -> }
lsb -> [
rsb -> ]

Apple could fix this situation easily by making the '.?123' key a multi-touch peer of 'shift'. They could do it without introducing any of the virtual silkscreen frenzy of contemporary Android keyboards. Not a single pixel on-screen need change.

eager reader

Tuesday's 'VHS' column resonated with some readers. In our review of 'Super 8', I summoned the ghosts of 'The Goonies' and 'Blow Out'. Both are great films. Until today, I could think of nothing at all that they had in common.

Today's Gizmodo ad for a nasty 3M pico projector brought my review back to my mind. It, too, summons ghosts of cinema past to lorem ipsum up however many words 3M paid for. The first two were 'The Goonies' and 'Blow Out'.

I think the odds of that specific evocation are probably not as long those of Pirate Willie's treasure being real. I do think they are pretty long.

I like cosmic balance. I'll keep it going by reposting my own thoughts on pico projectors  from my September piece 'ewaste: big picture':

> As far as I can tell, most of the recent
> innovation in the projector market
> is in 'pico-projectors'. These take
> some of the very same DLPs used in
> more expensive projectors and pair
> them with 50 lumen LEDs. This seems
> like an attempt to move down-market
> without first having a market. These
> projectors still cost hundreds of
> dollars and typically can't produce an image
> larger than a cheap laptop in a room
> with any ambient light.

I stand corrected. Gizmodo's  3M projector is (up to) 60 lumens, not the 50 I so disparaged. $299 from Amazon. They do make a big deal out of the DLP.

Unfortunately, the 3M is actually kind of interesting. They market it as a 'streaming projector' but the stream is courtesy a Roku stick that sits in a pocket in the back. I think the stick is the Roku 3400R Streaming Stick ($99 from Amazon). The projector contains its own battery and powers the stick. 

That's almost interesting. These new sticks look a bit like beefy USB thumb drives or 3g modems but they are actually a new thing -- HDMI sticks. They hang off a male HDMI plug, draw power from an attached display, consume content over wifi and excrete video. This is as close a device as has yet been constructed to Douglas Adams' 'Babel Fish'. I don't care to consider the theological implications.

Here's the actual interesting bit. Roku's not the only fish in the HDMI stick waste lagoon. There is probably an entire Chinese factory that does nothing but make new factories to build Android HDMI sticks like this. $55! Yow! 3M actually built a cheap, projecting life support system for Android sticks and they just haven't figured it out yet.

3M? Are you (or your Gizmodo lackeys) reading? I'll take two and I'll call you in the morning. Contact me in the comments below and I'll stuff some Android in there and give you a spiffy review. Just don't expect me to claim a viewing distance of up to 120 inches.

Once you guys finish that, build your (up to) 60 lumen projector into a recessed retrofit ceiling fixture (like this) with a short-throw lens and I'll buy several to use as digital wall washes. That would show those sissies over at Philips just where they could stuff their ZigBee lightbulb.

Sorry for the insane consumer electronic product planning spasm. Bunnie is busy hacking DNA and someone has to pick up the slack.

prewaste

Ewaste is not a destination. It is a process. The process is most visible for me during staging, the phase where the broken and the useless take up enough valuable space that a trip to a recycler is in order.

Woot helped me bring some new ewaste into the house recently. They ran a special on Audyssey Lower East Side Media Speakers. I bit. I forgot that good things do not need special sale prices. These speakers now inhabit an ewaste phase that I don't really have nailed down in my evolving taxonomy. I own them. They don't do what I wanted them to do. I am now condemned to have them wander the house in absurd alternate use cases until they ultimately betray me by confusing or electrocuting some other family member.

I have been using Apple's AirPlay for home audio since the feature turned up in their original Airport Express base stations. I have several small zones and I don't ask much of my speakers. I have tried several times to find a decent pair of powered speakers that can be configured once, set high on top of a  bookshelf or cabinet together with the Express, and forgotten.

I think Apple missed a decent bet by not supporting USB speakers on the Express. They have always included a full size powered USB port that supports a narrow range of printers and one esoteric, obsolete USB remote control dongle Keyspan.

I tried for years to just use the Express as a USB power supply for cheap USB speakers that supported an aux. input. I then just patched the analog output of the Express into the aux. input of the speakers. This always worked for a while. The Express power supplies were never up to the task, though, and
several died after a few months of this treatment. Irritatingly, the first one lived long enough for me to taste success and hook speakers up to all the rest. They all died before I figured the speakers as culprits.

I want USB speakers because I want a single-outlet solution. I have several sets of the discontinued Logitech Z-5 and I'm quite happy with them though I can no longer find them new. I want the Express over other third-party AirPlay boxes because I know that I can put them out of reach and not worry about them for years at a time.

I eventually solved the power problem and kept a single socket with the PlugBug from Twelve South. The PlugBug sits against an Apple powerbrick-shaped object and interposes between the wall and the hidden female power receptacle inside an Apple brick. It effectively adds a USB charge port to your brick. The original Express units used the same replaceable power tip that Apple has supplied with laptop bricks for more than a decade. Apple's new Express units use a new design that eliminates the removable tip and makes the PlugBug unsuitable.

The Audyssey speakers seemed appealing. They are not too big, not too ugly, not too expensive (at Woot's price), and they include an optical SPDIF port that shoud accept digital tunes directly from the Express. They are also available. That's a big advantage over the Z-5.

The Audyssey speakers are not USB powered. I give up. The PlugBug is really no different than an outlet splitter anyway. The speakers have a volume knob that the Z-5s lack. I usually place speakers out of reach or out of sight and the volume knob doesn't get much use. I actually added inline attenuators (headphone volume controls) to the Z-5s so that I could statically balance my zones. The Audyssey knob could eliminate that hassle and small expense. In any case, the attenuator wouldn't work with SPDIF.

The crippling flaw is that Audyssey put a small microswitch behind the volume knob. You have to punch that switch to hear sound. The speakers turn themselves off half an hour after they decide the music is over. You have to punch the button again to hear music. There is no auto on. There is no remote. These speakers are useless as hidden AirPort speakers.

Audyssey does not acknowledge this as a product planning failure. They may actually think it was a good idea. With one cheap microswitch they were able to segment their product family into a cheap media speaker line for computer dorks who put up with flaws like this all the time and a more expensive line for proper AV types. They may have even missed a trick. They could have left the auto-off in their more expensive products and added an even more expensive Crestron add-in that could automatically poke the button and rotate the knob for you.

I surfed review sites and forums briefly in search of relief. It was typical forum fare. I was either right but out of luck, or I was wrong and symptomatic of obese Americans because I would not get up to press a button, or wrong and symptomatic of coal-burning Americans because I hate energy saving modes, or wrong because I was trying to do whole house audio without fully funding some audio peddler's new spinnaker.

Perhaps Google will place an Audyssey ad next to this post and pay me a dollar if you click it. If I get ten ad clicks from this post, I'll take the speakers apart and defeat this auto-off or kill them trying. I'll post the result here.

VHS

I have never had much luck with VCR repair. If you are stuck with a dead Betamax deck then I can't do anything for you but send you over to the Lancia forums. They have been keeping betas alive despite the odds for decades. Mostly coupes though. If you have a dead VHS that you wanted to revive for the sole purpose of screening 'The Goonies' then I may have a suggestion. Get Netflix for a month. Watch 'Super8'. Steven Spielberg, executive producer to both, probably gets paid more through Netflix than through your unheralded cassette march. Be kind to the man. Don't rewind.

I have small children. I don't get out much. I only saw 'Super8' two days ago. Worse, I didn't immediately recognize the 1979-era scene as vintage. J. J. Abrams may have been content to merely direct franchise reboots back in the (most recent) Star Trek era. He has since rebooted himself as a producer of that signature line of modern cinema. Sinofsky may now be deep into a stealth-mode startup. He should be comforted in his dotage by the now positive connotations of  'reboot'.

A reboot in a tricky thing. The 'omnishambles' (total sop to my UK readers) Star Trek approach to this is to alter the timeline and advance a new story. Pirate Willie was above all that and his Goonie followers are as well. Better to just rename the whole thing and backdate it by six years as well. In the present political climate, pirates are probably best described as (illegal) aliens anyway. Storyline transformation complete!

Actually, there is 5% more storyline unique to the modern retelling. The entire gimmick of Goonies The Younger is that our intrepid kids capture something on film they were never supposed to see. I must admit that I'm a sucker for that gimmick. I loved it in 'Blow Out'. It works less well when the footage is of an alien that is about to make his destructive presence known to the entire town, film or no film.

'Super8' sets the '79 vibe not just with a headstone for the slower viewers but also with subtle AM radio references to TMI. Apple plays along in their subtle way by autocorrecting 'or no' above into ORNL. Awesome.

Ditch the deck. Have one last Goonies weekend. Screen 'Super8'. It even has a fat kid.

UPDATE: I didn't mean to so completely reboot Mike Ryan's interview-style shtick so completely so soon. The entire extended Ryan clan has had a tough week. First Paul with last Tuesday's election, then Jack and his beloved CIA with the recent Petraeus flap. Now Mike with my failure to adequately google before blogging.

montessori

I just watched 'True Grit', the promotional video put together by the Western States Montessori Conference. Though set in the late 19th century, somewhat before Dr. Maria Montessori's elevation to Saint, the role of an early Montessori education in the development of protagonist Mattie Ross is clear.

I highly recommend this film if you are on the fence about a Montessori education for your child. As the WSMC explains in their literature, fence sitting and fences generally remain divisive topics in the American West.

proposal

I'm neither journalist nor lawyer nor public policy scholar but I do have a prime lens on my camera and I drink a prosumer gin. So that's something.

I'm a gadget blogger. I have never used marijuana and I don't hold any patents. Now that I have established my bona fides, let me say that our present intellectual property dysfunction has been on my mind for some time. I think I have figured out a way that our system could actually do someone some good and invite reform simultaneously.

Marijuana initiatives will be appearing down ballot on a lot of rickety folding tables in just over two weeks' time. The Commerce Clause (Santa's evil alter ego) and Preemption make these present initiatives irrelevant. The next ones need not be and the answer might be patents and exhaustion doctrine.

No state can avoid the federal Controlled Substances Act that appears to preempt any effort to legalize marijuana. Neither California nor South Dakota could alter their state markets for existing cultivars without an almost immediate effect on interstate markets far beyond these new, local markets. If Maine or Oklahoma had the power to project their laws beyond their borders, they might be able to define the interstate market as null and limit the applicability of the CSA.

Here's my quick and easy path to marijuana legalization and the Supreme Court:

0. License the Monsanto Roundup-Ready patents.

1. Genetically engineer a visually distinctive, Roundup-Ready strain of marijuana.

2. Patent the strain.

3. Assign the patent to the state.

4. The state makes a limited patent license grant to growers, distributors, and buyers in exchange for royalty payments. The terms of this license prohibit use or possession outside the state and impose every manner of post-sale limitation available. The state has every tool necessary to eliminate any effect on the inter-state market.

5. The state and Monsanto vigorously enforce their respective patent rights.

6. The state and Monsanto profit!

One of the apparent weaknesses of this plan is its dependence on post-sale limitations but we live in exciting times. The Supreme Court announced earlier this month that they would hear the appeal of Bowman v. Monsanto (thanks kanebiolaw). If the Court finds that a sale of a self-propagating entity need not exhaust patent rights, then a state could be off to the races.

Monsanto, you know where to send the check. I'm still at the same address.

States, remember to thank ERCOT and its predecessor organizations for artfully dodging the Commerce Clause since 1935.

Feds, go do patent reform or you'll wind up on the wrong side of this absurd marijuana legalization scheme. The core dispute in Bowman v. Monsanto is not rooted in biology. It's rooted in self-reproducibility. The very idea that software patents not subject to exhaustion could become the law of the land is completely insane. Our current copyright and patent system shows that policymakers have been smoking something for a long time.

update now

I travelled last week to give a talk about the role of Vaudeville in consumer electronic keynote adresses in the early twenty-first century. I normally take a straight man with me for these addresses, both for the classic comic role and to flip powerpoint lantern slides for me.

I travelled light this time and used Keynote on my iPad to deliver slides. I connected a third-generation AppleTV to the conference room projector and used AirPlay mirroring to beam the slides from iPad to projector.

This approach actually worked and I learned a few things in the doing. The first thing I learned came a week or so before I arrived. My hosts at the Center for Neo-Victorian Studies have projection equipment that sits at the leading edge of 1987 interconnect technology. Their VGA cables are thinner than a human wrist but somehow deliver resolutions that rival the pricey IBM 8514.

My AppleTV sadly does not support this visual beast. The second- and third-generation boxes drive only wimpy HDMI digital signals. My third-generation box drives 1080p. I solved this problem with a brilliant little box from Kanex that takes HDMI from the AppleTV and converts it to VGA. The box is really no more than a bulky cable. It is powered from the HDMI port. It works. Slides from Keynote wound up sidebar-ed and letterboxed. I started to fight it and instead found a zoom button on the projector remote that got me close enough to an answer. I suspect that a better answer exists. As far as I can tell, my scenario is the intended use case for the Kanex adapter.

The AppleTV is about the size of six walnuts
(pictured with Betty O'Shannon for scale)
Photo courtesy your correspondent

I got the signal from iPad to AppleTV by using the Personal Hotspot feature on my LTE iPad. I pre-associated the AppleTV with the iPad's SSID before I left home. I didn't want to put any of my devices on my host's network and my personal experience with AirPlay or any other mDNS technology on public networks is spotty at best.

I found the iPad much more comfortable than many dedicated (and much lighter) presentation remotes. I appreciated the simultaneous display of speaker notes, though it's just not my mode to look at them.

Every presentation remote I have ever used has ultimately led to Presenter Induced Oscillation -- a phenomenon related to Pilot Induced Oscillation -- where a remote or key click is somehow missed by the presentation machine and the presenter spends five or six clicks back and forth to regain control of the talk. Many pilots have successfully ejected from uncontrollable PIO situations. Many have not. Presenters rarely choose to bail out. Most just ride that talk down into the ground.

The iPad was perfectly controllable. My talk was not embarrassment free. I got everything booted and associated. I got an image on the projector. It was not the image of my first slide. It was a dialog box from the AppleTV telling me that a software update was available. It asked if I wanted to update now or update later. It did not go away. I realized too late that I had left the Apple IR remote in my hotel  room. Fortunately, someone among my hosts had an Apple IR remote and the episode cost me only five uncool minutes.

Apple has prided themselves for years on the visual unobtrusiveness of their products. My Apple monitors have an LED to indicate that the monitor is OFF, not ON, so that I'll never catch a stray eyefull of distracting indicator while working. Do the consumption classes not deserve the attention lavished on the creatives? My Airport base stations subtly change their indicator color to indicate new firmware versions. My iPhone puts a little badge on the settings icon to do the same. Why a faceful of unavoidable dialog from this little box?

I consider the experiment a success but I do not recommend it. Even if your software is up to date and you have your remote stuffed in your pocket, the best case for the Apple TV AirPlay streamer is that it will blast your audience with movie posters for whatever adolescent flicks are at the top of the iTunes payola chart for a few moments before your slides come up. I think it looks about as professional as pulling foils from a My Little Pony Trapper Keeper.

deep funk

The memory of beating an Apple wireless keyboard to death (see ewaste) was still in my mind two weeks ago as I worked on an epic ewaste manifesto dedicated to my outgoing Novatel MiFi 2200. That memory was somehow on the mind of my replacement Apple wireless keyboard as well. Bluetooth promised gadgets that could talk to each other. Apparently they do. Word spreads.

After weeks of good behavior from my bluetooth gadgets, my replacement keyboard decided to avenge its cousin. It switched itself on inside my laptop bag and, together with a co-conspiring Incase Origami Workstation, pinned its backspace key down.

The entire post disappeared. I spun into a deep funk that is only now ending.

The Origami is otherwise quite neat. The Apple keyboard snaps inside securely. The case switches easily from keyboard cover to iPad stand. Amazon reviewers complain that the little Velcro patches are glued poorly to the plastic case. This is also my experience. The patches secure the Origami in either mode. I have glued them back on twice.

This post (may it last long enough to be read) was composed on the iPad using the on-screen keyboard. The best keyboard is the one you have with you.

gallifrey

Long experience has taught me that this has to stay a gadget blog. I know that once I stray into gadget/Tycho Brahe territory it's only a matter of time before we're all Tycho all the time. No need to trouble yourselves figuring out the monetization story for a Brahe blog. It's dismal.

I mention this only because Tycho Brahe and Doctor Who are obviously one and the same. I mention this, in turn, because a colleauge recommended 'Breaking Bad' to me a couple of years ago.

'Breaking Bad' is brilliant. It is filmed as if it has the resources of an entire state-run broadcast empire behind it. Beyond that similarity, it shares something else with the modern Welsh re- (re-re-re-re-re-re-re-) incarnation of The Doctor. The Doctor requires a companion so that the Doctor has someone to explain things to. That's twenty five percent more subtle than just grasping the lens hood of the camera with both hands and speaking directly to the audience.

Breaking Bad requires Saul the Lawyer for the same reasons. Imagine -- just for a moment -- that The Doctor needed a lawyer more than he needed a companion. What a show that would be! Dick Wolf may not have been the first to imagine  'Law and Order -- Gallifrey' but the potential is obvious. Dick? Are you reading? Call me. I'll be on the morning train to Cardiff.

ewaste: express

I usually like to play it cool in public. I cultivate the impression that I've been an Apple user since the Macintosh IIfx. The truth is that I'm an Apple user since the ][+ but I left the fold and I didn't return until 2001.

I wandered in the intervening years. I became a NeXT addict just after it was fashionable and just before the color machines arrived. I wouldn't have fished a IIfx out of a dumpster, let alone one of the machines hawked at Sears or one of their wretched StyleWriter serial printers. Even now, Apple still can't let go of that era. I typed 'stylewriter' above and my iPad autocorrected it for me. I would have disavowed all knowledge.

I moved to Ted Ts'o's boot/root 2-floppy linux distribution when that was the mode and stayed on that wagon for some time. I drifted back to Apple only after OS X shipped from the factory on a machine. Mine was a late 2001 iBook. I think I went back just for reliable wake/sleep and for the internal WiFi.

The clean lines and reliable hardware of the iBook may have pushed me back into the pool, but I had already dipped a toe. Apple's AirPort was amazing. I got one of the original graphite base stations not long after their release and used it together with Lucent Orinoco cards in Linux machines. The Mac-only configuration was a turn-off but a third party client was available. Several contemporary accounts dinged Apple for rebadging the Lucent RG1000 access point or for the relatively primitive KarlBridge software.

Those reviewers missed both the biggest upsides and the biggest downside of the  graphite. The biggest upsides were that it was a straight rebadge of someone else's concept and therefore was not encumbered with a pile of hopeless AppleTalk garbage. It worked with just about any client and any 802.11b card. The biggest downside was that Apple took somebody else's concept and removed the ventilation. Apple's access point appears to have actually used the same motherboard as the Lucent unit. An analogous product from HP did the same. Search for 'airport graphite bad capacitor' and you'll get thousands of hits on articles or posts about repairing bad capacitors in these units. Search for 'rg 1000 bad capacitor' and the closest you get is a link to an article that talks about repairing blown caps in the Apple version of this product!

The Apple version of this product probably outsold the Lucent version and it certainly sold better to the individuals likely to repair their own devices but I don't think this is the only explanation for this disparity. I can only find one useful link anywhere to a user who is in any way dissatisfied with the reliability of the RG 1000. I suspect that the RG 1000 had a better thermal story that Apple didn't copy. Even though they share a motherboard, the Apple packaging is radically different.

What does this have to do with the ancient history of Apple products? Many of them since the ][+ have been plagued with overheating problems. Examples include the Apple III, the Macintosh 128k, the Power Mac G4 Cube, several models of iMac and Mac Mini, and many Apple accessories. My own experience with modern Apple towers is that some huge portion of the total cabinet volume is consumed by fans and heatsinks. These machines have never overheated on me.

I'm sure they have learned that there are three types of quiet computers: passively cooled computers, computers cooled with slow turning fans, and dead computers. They have a line of machines to cover every corner of this market. Quiet is a core part of their brand identity in exactly the same way that visual simplicity is. I truly admire their commitment to quiet -- just not the part where it pushes past a commitment to correct functioning. This product philosophy extends to their peripherals and accessories as well.

Today's ewaste item is the last of my 802.11g Apple Airport Express base stations.

For a few years, I popped these the way some people pop Chiclets gum. I think I lost four to overheating in three years -- all in locations with good airflow. I kept replacing them only because a seamless AirTunes (now AirPlay) experience was available nowhere else.

My own luck is better with the newer 802.11n units. I have no experience with the very newest units that resemble the second generation Apple TV. My original graphite base station did die of bad capacitors. I replaced them and the unit worked for several more years. I tossed it only when I gave up my last modem in 2004 -- sadly too long ago to merit an ewaste entry of its own.

Here's a Kickstarter idea for the intrepid: As soon as Apple announces a new passively cooled device, introduce a designer heatsink to match.

A bright future on Kickstarter
Image credit ebay seller 'fiatinc'
Used without permission

knife fight (2)

In the first installment of this post we waxed nostalgic about the HP 7475 and flayed ProvoCraft for their knife cutter that prints money but only for ProvoCraft. This installment is all about the Silhouette Cameo.

ProvoCraft started with an unformed block of public sentiment towards Cricut and has spent the last seven years whittling it into a tasteful single digit salute. On the other hand, Silhouette is a virtual unknown. Silhouette America was incorporated only three years ago, in Utah, as a subsidiary of Graphtec America. Silhouete existed in some form as a product family under Quickutz before then but I suspect that they sold a rebadged Graphtec machine.

Who is Graphtec? Graphtec America is a subsidiary in turn of parent Graphtec in Japan. That firm appears to be no part of the Greater Salt Lake Metropolitan Craft Mafia that controls the entire I-15 corridor from Salt Lake City to Orem. I dare not speculate publicly about the rumored Yakuza-GSLMCM tie-up that floods the US market with smuggled craft materials. Graphtec appears to be an actual successful company that has built a business that sells real products to grown-ups who use them the way they like. They have been at it since 1949. So far, so good.

The Silhouette Cameo machine appears to be derived from Graphtec's earlier CraftROBO machine, itself derived spiritually from Graphtec's main line of industrial cutting machines. The Silhouette Cameo is clearly a response to ProvoCraft's Cricut. It represents a measured response. The main innovation in the Silhouette is a bundled application, Silhouette Studio, that lets new users start cutting quickly. That application knows how to take your credit card number and generate a series of nearly painless little charges for the same kinds of unimpressive little shapes that Cricut forces you to buy bundled together on an expensive cartridge.

If Cricut is your evil cable company, then Silhouette is the mythical a la carte cable that many seem to want. I don't want either of those things. I just want to cut the same kind of simple SVG file that nearly any web browser can show. Silhouette Studio can't do that unless you introduce it to your friend Ulysses S. Grant. With that dirty transaction out of the way, Studio is happy to open as many as perhaps three quarters of the SVG files you have lying around. Three quarters is not a bad ratio for SVG interoperability in my experience.

I get my files from openclipart.org. I can't say enough about what a great resource that site is. It serves public domain vector art exclusively. They have a simple service to rasterize the images on their server for casual users who lack a tool chain for that. It's absolutely the thing for Free software.

Once you click the buttons for cut, load media in the cutter, and adjust the knife depth to match the on-screen prompts, things happen pretty quickly. I haven't yet has a serious feed or cut problem. The basic operation is the same as the Cricut machines or the HP 7475. The head moves in one direction across the piece and a pair of rollers move the work back and forth. For knife cutting on paper, the work is fixed temporarily to a sticky mat that holds all the newly freed pieces in place. This mat is not necessary when drawing or when cutting some stocks that are themselves fixed to an adhesive back.

The Silhouette Cameo offers one big hardware advantage over the Cricut mini. The Cameo includes a small image sensor next to the cut head. This sensor can locate registration marks on a printout and align cuts precisely with matching images printed on the sheet. This seems to work well when it works but I have found it to be finicky. It may be very sensitive to print quality and ink bleed in the paper. I intend to try some of the more troublesome papers in a color laser printer to see if this helps.

A triceratops cut by the Silhouette Cameo
(pictured with Sparky for scale)
Photo courtesy your correspondent 

I haven't yet tried the cutter with Inkscape or other tools. Look for an extended review once I get that working. What I have is a device that seems reasonable enough to be worth the effort of figuring out. The Silhouette Cameo isn't going back anytime soon. I was able to use it to cut decorations for a child's birthday party. They looked good and made my eldest happy. What more can I say?

knife fight

I threw out my HP7475 during a move about 15 years ago. I didn't look back until this month.

HP7475 plotter
Image credit: HP Computer Museum

The statute of limitations is long past for me to use this in our regular ewaste feature. It's a bad fit in any case. The 7475 weighed a bit more than 15 pounds. I think junk that large is really more than ewaste. The plotter really should have been decommissioned and struck from the register of ships.

It was a great machine, though bulky and slow. HP had ditched the entire line a few years earlier. I got the unit used and never used it much.

I've had two different 2D cutting machines in my house in the last month. Each of these machines is a pale, though much lighter, imitation of the 7475. These cutters, a Cricut mini and a Silhouette Cameo, cut thin stock with a knife. The 7475 drew with one pen at a time but could automatically switch pens from a six pen carousel. A blade holder is still available for that machine that would allow it to do the job of these newer cutters.

The first of the new machines was the Cricut mini. I don't think I can find the polite, neutral language to summarize the Cricut business concept in a way that minimizes our total liability. I can imagine another company, though, with the slogan "We don't think our customers are stupid, we know it!". If that company also thought that its customers were filthy pirates, that company would probably build hardware and software that looked and acted like the Cricut mini.

Earlier machines from Cricut were configured to allow users to breezily install expensive cartridges that contained licenses for some shapes and then cut those shapes into a variety of materials without the need for a PC. The 'mini' machine eliminates all those buttons and frills. It requires a PC, Cricut software, and an Internet connection to use the machine.

I never intended to use the provided software. I thought I would just use it with Inkscape or a standalone tool to cut SVG dinosaurs for my kids. ProvoCraft, the concern behind Cricut, uses a very simple protocol for these devices and helpfully encrypts the link so that users can know exactly where stand with the company. ProvoCraft has always encrypted the link but earlier machines did a poor job that was widely cracked. A number of tools exist for those models that allow them to be used in just the way I imagined.

I'm not a filthy pirate. I'm not misusing a machine sold for below its cost. The cutter head transport reminds me of the Commodore VIC-1525 printer. The head has depth adjustment that must have been lifted directly from that printer. That printer was cheap and nasty even by 1980's home micro standards. I'm sure that ProvoCraft is not selling this device at a loss. I have no interest in cloning or even using their cartridges. I just want to cut and draw like it's 1989.

After I discovered that the existing open tools wouldn't work on the machine, I decided to try ProvoCraft's tool. I thought that it might do until intrepid hobbyists sorted the openness issues.

The Cricut Studio program isn't really a program. It's an Adobe Air wrapper for the Cricut website that lets that web app reach out and touch your printer over USB. No Internet? No program!

I ran the app and tried to create an account on the Cricut servers so that I could get started. I got a message that told me that the Cricut Studio beta program was full. This was for the only software that works for this device. Awesome. I called customer service. They told me that today was the very first day for their new website design and that I should probably try again later. I actually did manage to contain my rage long enough to try later. Just as I thought I was about to succeed and cut a square on some paper, the app decided that my firmware (version XXX) was too old and needed to be updated to a newer version. I allowed it to proceed. The printer came back online reporting firmware version 0.01.
Unsurprisingly, the software decided that this was too old and that an update was needed. This loop
continued until I unplugged the machine, put it back in its box, and whisked it back to the store.

Provocraft placed me and their other users at the mercy of terrible application software. Lots of firms do that. Provocraft placed me at the mercy of incompetent web administrators. Lots of firms do that too. Provocraft went farther. Provocraft pulled off an amazing triple Lutz the likes of which Utah hasn't seen since the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. They broke their app, their website, and their own hardware in a single, fluid motion. I'm at peace now. I no longer hope that someone broke their ankle on the landing.

I missed the HP 7475. It had a serial port. You could talk to it with a terminal program. You could drive it from Lotus 1-2-3 or gnuplot. E.T. could probably have connected it to a Speak & Spell with little difficulty.

I ordered the Silhouette Cameo from Amazon while I was at a traffic light on my way to return the Cricut. It arrived in about a day. In about a day, you'll be able to read the next installment of this piece. Only reograph brings you tape-delayed live blogging.

long term wrap up

Texas Instruments had shelves stocked with their Speak & Spell for Christmas 1978. That groundbreaking handheld electronic tutor retailed for under $50 ($176 in today's money). Those original machines weighed about 475g empty and another 275g with the batteries installed. They measured 10 by 7 by 1.3 inches. Each had a VFD display that could be read outdoors, a monaural speaker, and sturdy plastic case with an integrated handle. They ran for hours on a set of batteries.

A later Speak&Spell model
Photo credit Bill Bertram (CC-BY-2.5)

A 'new iPad' is weighs 650g and measures 9.5 by 7.31 by .37 inches. Wrap one in Apple's 'Smart Case' and it packs on an additional 150 grams and about .3 inches in each dimension. Those cases are available in a vibrant orangish red. If you are of a certain age, this package may remind you more of TI's toy than it evokes the Alan Kay 'Dynabook' concept to which it was so often compared at launch.

The Dynabook concept dates from 1968 and was certainly known outside PARC by the time Speak & Spell development began at TI in 1976. TI engineer Richard Wiggins credits colleague Gene Frantz with overall product design for Speak & Spell (here's a 2008 interview with Wiggins). I can find no contemporary account in which Frantz or TI credit PARC with influencing either their ideas for children's computing or their specific product design. Their similarity may be simple coincidence. TI was certainly in no position to build Kay's complete Dynabook but neither was PARC nor anyone else.

We play a long game here at reograph. Other gadget review sites only have the stomach for long term reviews that last a few months. We keep our powder dry. I've been working on a review of the Speak and Spell for the last 34 years. That review is nearly complete but our editors have that piece timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the S&S in 2018. Today's iPad probably won't seem as dated as a Dynabook by then but the iPad will probably never more closely resemble S&S than it does today.

I just gave iPads to my children and the similarities between these devices was a substantial factor in my decision. S&S had a profound effect on me. It was as close I came to a computer until I got a TI 99/4a for Christmas some years later.

The S&S was sophisticated but it was certainly not a computer. I think kids hiding under the covers with a S&S managed to learn as much about what computing could be like as did users hunched at a 99/4a in the basement. In 'Points of View', an anthology assembled in tribute to Kay on his 80th birthday, Adele Goldberg recalls that Kay used to tote a completely inert cardboard mockup of his Dynabook to conferences. I imagine that some of what was obvious to Kay would occur also to users of the slightly more functional S&S.

I briefly considered just giving eBay S&S units to my children. The S&S is well past its 'use by' date for new users. Though it was made in Texas and the iPad in China, several complete revolutions in product safety in the last 30 years mean that the iPad is probably safer.

When a S&S was unwrapped in 1978, it could have put its owner a decade or more ahead of their parents' technology base. I think the next most advanced device at my home was an APF Mark 51 scientific calculator from 1975. The S&S showed it to be a mere abacus. The same is no longer true and my kids know it. There is no chance they would accept a couple of old orange boxes and my nostalgia and leave me my own iPad.

The APF Mark 51. A mere abacus.
Photo credit ebay seller rr9.
Used without permission

Mark Prensky might say that the S&S made me a 'Digital Native'. If he's right, then I probably also have dual citizenship with the Republic of Muppet Show. If I'm a digital native, then my children are developing into 'Digital Spaniards' (you read it here first) who will consolidate power together with their playmates and have us all under their thumbs in no time. I'm happy to help. I wonder what their El Dorado will be. Maybe it will be Sunnyvale, where the streets were once lined with unsold HP TouchPads.

The S&S showed the promise of portable electronic computing to millions. Such is the power of misunderstanding. I knew neither that its vocabulary was extremely limited nor that it could do only a few simple tasks. S&S had a slot in the battery compartment. What went in the slot? More! More of what I did not know but wonderful ideas flowed into that void of ignorance. I'm not yet sure that the iPad is delivering on that promise. Though the iPad is clearly an amazing computer, there is less room for my kind of misunderstanding. To start, there is no slot. Further, it came in to the world as a larger cousin of an iPod, not the smaller cousin of a proper computer. I think it is perceived largely as a leisure device for casual buyers and as a companion device for small number of professional buyers. I think Amazon agrees. An Amazon search today for "ipad case with stand" returns thousands of real matches.  Most of these stands allow the iPad to be held upright so that video can be viewed without having to hold the device. The search for "ipad case with keyboard" returns a quarter of the matches. A search for "ipad case crocodile" returns six hundred and nine. The iPad is a established as a leisure device. I think that part of the professional crowd must be IT people who have turned a quest for their lost S&S into a paying job.

It may seem unfair to hail S&S as a prophet of computing and fault the iPad for six hundred crocodile cases. After all, the iPad can actually be made to compute useful things. TI didn't market S&S as a computer. They did better. They made it in the mold of an authority figure and marketed it for children. Electronic grown-up? There's got to be a positronic robot brain in there somewhere. TI was clever and shipped the future. Apple's iPad could have been this and more. Instead, it is merely amazing. Apple included a chess program, a calculator, a C compiler, and an electronic version of the World Book encyclopedia with early Mac OS X machines.  The iPad includes a number of apps from Apple that can't be deleted. Maps, calendars are there. Photo viewers and video players are there. A pretty great web browser is there. Email, messaging and address book apps are all there. You can take simple notes. You can make the wallpaper be any picture you want. There is something called 'Game Center' that I cannot make disappear. No calculator is present.

The iPad and iPhone, together with Google, Wikipedia, Wolfram, Amazon and others, are clearly delivering on the promise of portable, connected electronic knowledge. Knowledge and computing may have been part of the same nebulous future in 1978. The Dynabook certainly runs them together into the same narrative. Several vendors sell all of Wikipedia wrapped into an app for iPad but I still haven't seen a great platform for computing turn up in the App Store. 

A report earlier this year suggested that Mathematica would make its way to the tablet but nothing has been heard for months. Apple themselves were (or are) part of the problem since before the iPad debut. Several developers have put small programming environments or ports of entire home micros in the app store only to have them bounced or pulled.

The developers at 'manomio' reported in September 2009 that their Commodore 64 emulator for iOS had been pulled from the app store because crafty users could enable the built-in BASIC. That app is back with ROM BASIC included. The developers have been reeducated and the app remains focused squarely on vintage games and in-app purchases. Scheme, Python, Lua, and other languages including BASIC have all become available since Apple relaxed at least the enforcement of some obnoxious restrictions on developers. More than a few seem like novelty items. Kay's own Smalltalk and Squeak are notably absent. Scratch is nowhere to be found, though intrepid users can download the source and build it themselves. Apple will hit you for $99 for the privilege of putting it on your iPad. Search for iSqueak on the app store. It's a $2 virtual dog toy.

Strangely, Apple themselves provide an amazing programmable environment in Mobile Safari but do little to advertise it this way.

I'll keep working to turn the iPad into the children's device I imagined 34 years ago. I wonder if my children's own dreams will be influenced in the process.

Bonus resources:

* A TI 99/4 timeline (here)

* 'A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages' (here)

ewaste: big picture

The origin of the phrase "It's always Friday somewhere" is now lost to antiquity. The prominent American nacho chain "TGI Friday's" tried to adopt this as their own slogan. It was a disaster. They were forced to change it almost immediately to "In here, it's always Friday". The best restauranteurs, wardens, and casino operators know that you have to keep your patrons focused inward until it's time to turn over the table/cell/stool.

Americans produce domestically almost 80% of the Fridays they use. The Friday deficit can be attributed mostly to office workers who simply assume that COB Friday and SOB Monday are really the same thing. They are not. The extra Fridays it takes to cover that weekend work have to be made somewhere and the shocking truth is that many are made by totalitarian regimes under primitive conditions. China alone spans five geographical time zones but shows only a single time zone to the outside world. Where do all those extra Happy Hours go? They are stolen by the millions from impoverished rural farmers and sold on shady exchanges around the world.

Does your favorite watering hole now offer one dollar rail drinks from five to close? How do you think they are able to extend the traditional two hour Happy Hour? With stolen ones. That's how. You will never look at 'Breakfast Served All Day' the same way after you've seen the conditions in a morning mine in the jungle run by the Columbian cartels.

Some of you may have noticed that our traditional Friday feature 'ewaste' didn't put in an appearance yesterday. Don't worry. It's here and we are bringing it to you now using an ethically harvested and fairly traded Friday afternoon culled by Laplanders from the endless sun of a high arctic summer day.

Today's ewaste offering is a ScreenPlay 4805 DLP video projector from InFocus. I bought this projector as a refurb directly from InFocus 2004 or so. It's DLP chip from TI offered much higher contrast than the LCD projectors of the day. The 4805 was one of the first budget home theater projectors. It boasted a native 16:9 aspect ratio and a double-speed color wheel to reduce rainbow effect.

The 4805 had several flaws. Strangely, for a projector, the one that irritated me most was not glaring. It was more of a whine. The cooling fan ran all the time. Even when the projector was shut off with the remote. The fan wouldn't stop until the cord was unplugged or the mechanical power switch was thrown on the side of the unit. I kept mine mounted inverted near the ceiling and this was always a pain.

Bulbs were expensive, but no more so than for other projectors of the time. I think I put about five thousand hours on the unit and went through just one bulb. The projector was not bright and would have required room darkening window coverings in any room before sundown.

The projector went on the ewaste pile not long after it died. A single expensive part failed. These projectors have a tiny 'light tunnel' about an inch long and a quarter inch on a side that takes light from the bulb assembly to the DLP optics box. That tunnel is made from four pieces of mirrored glass that form the tunnel. The pieces touch only at the corners and were held together with glue. If the projector gets just a bit too hot, the tunnel comes apart. Mine did just that. Some replacements were available on EBay for around a hundred bucks but I had little confidence that a replacement would arrive intact, survive installation, and then continue to function for long.

I don't expect to replace the 4805 with another projector. I paid about $750 in 2004. For that price today, I could buy a 50" LED backlit LCD TV from Toshiba at Best Buy. That's almost as large as the image I used to project. The cheapest 1080p projector from Best Buy is $799.

I'm not surprised that flat panel prices have fallen. The apparent ongoing collapse in prices is no more amazing than the regular semiconductor miracles to which I have become accustomed. I am amazed that projector prices have not fallen to match. TI may enjoy a monopoly on the MEMS mirror arrays that make DLP work but there should be no corresponding limits on LCD or lamp technology for projectors. Where's my 8000 lumen 4k LED projector for $300?

There are no such projectors because there was never a market for them. As far as I can tell, most of the recent innovation in the projector market is in 'pico-projectors'. These take some of the very same DLPs used in more expensive projectors and pair them with 50 lumen LEDs. This seems like an attempt to move down-market without first having a market. These projectors still cost hundreds of dollars and typically can't produce an image larger than a cheap laptop in a room with any ambient light.

For me, it makes no difference how a 50 inch picture can best be generated today. I switched from the 4805 as my primary media screen to a 27 inch iMac. I haven't looked back yet. I haven't listened to the persistient rumors of an integrated Apple TV. I have paid much more attention to the forthcoming 50th anniversary edition of Lawrence of Arabia. Ask me again in November what I think about a large screen.