- circle fire pc multimedia bay — awesome, turn my office into a disco
- self rewinding pneuma hose reel — another one i could actually use, at halloween time my garage is a mess of pneuma hoses
- the worst flashlight ever to take to a hotel room
- Wi-spy spectrum analyzer
- pico projector not available yet but awesomely small.
- Bosch impacter — another thing I actually could use
- Bloomframe – the window that turns into a balcony. Just because.
- usb ipod mixer — another just because. i am not actually sure what all this thing does.
- The viewtainer — stupid name but useful actually
- hdmi switch — another one i bet i could actually use
Archive for March 12, 2007
Products I Want But Do Not Need
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Products
US no longer technology king
BBC NEWS | Business | US ‘no longer technology king’ … and the new king is … Denmark???
I can accept the US losing its lead but…Denmark??? Did Bluetooth wipe out the Internet when I wasn’t looking?
OSU 92, Memphis 76
OSU finally shows up. You had the sense that OSU had 4-5 chances to really put this game away and finally did. Not a perfect game, but certainly their most complete game. And nice to see Dorsey shut up.
More stuff I don't need but want
- Audio-Technica AT-LP2Da : LP-to-Digital Recording System — rip your LPs. I don’t have many LPs left tho…
- WiFi blocking paint — though I might really like WiFi enhancing paint
- Beam compass heads — OK i could actually use these and at $15 not an unreasonable buy
- The trixbox — overkill for the home but I am still enamored of
- Tool silverware
- Super Tiny Indoor RC Plane
- $50 compound mitre saw. OK I could really use this too.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Products
Recent books — an eclectic mix
- Remainder by tom McCarthy. The tale of a severely brain injured man attempting to recover his life. Vaguely promising premise but I could never really identify with the main or secondary character. Certainly a unique tale though.
- The Shia Revival by Nasr. i am not very well educated on modern islam — sunni, shia, wahabi, sufi, all means little to me. this was a fine first book to read — explained enough of the history to understand the genesis of the various strains, and explains the regional politics that are intertwined with the divisions in islam. and brings it all forward to the current situation in iraq, iran, and the rest of the middle east. a very helpful text. i am sure this author has some biases, it would probably be smart to read a few more texts to get a start on understanding the current conflicts.
- Creative concrete ornaments for the garden by Hunter. Nice intro to basic concrete techniques. Purely decorative uses, not for structural elements.
- About Alice by Trillan. Short soothing sweet read about lifelong love. Quietly inspiring. Calming.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Books
Ignition blog roundup
- Andy gives kudos to ops and test folks. Hear Hear.
- Rahul likes this discussion about the declining value of content. Not totally sure I buy it, aggregators are valueless if there is nothing to aggregate. But an interesting discussion.
- Rich finds an even better online chinese dictionary. I am learning every day from Rich these days.
- Dave on yp pricing and the coming collapse
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Ignition
Web2.0 — Over and Out
EarlyStageVC: Web 2.0 – Over and Out — great article. Hard to get excited about Web2.0 ideas, they have entered the realm of the ordinary. When a startup says “we are going to have a social network and user generated content and feeds and etc etc etc”, it is about as distinctive as saying “we are going to have an office with a copier and a fax machine.”
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Venture
Vista reliability monitor
Is Vista Reliable? Using Vista’s Reliability Monitor — useful tool. My Reliability Score was at 10 the first day I started up the system and has dropped every day, I am now at 5.02. In my ~4 weeks of running vista on one machine, i’ve had
- 11 Miscellaneous Failures — “Disruptive Shutdown” — whatever that is
- 6 Windows Failures — “OS Stopped Working”
- 4 Application Failures — “Stopped Responding”
- and a whole load of failures that vista hasn’t recorded for some reason. Daily app hangs. a half dozen BSODs. One reboot where Windows told me my BIOS was no longer ACPI compatible (went away on next reboot).
Oh and I still have never been able to get a print driver working for the printer shared by the XP machine in my office. (So how do I print? You’ll find this hilarious. I open up a remote desktop connection to the XP machine and print the file from that machine.) And any number of apps I have tried to install aren’t Vista compatible.
Early early halloween planning
One thing I have plenty of is fog. Between my whole yard fog system and my 4-5 point fog systems, i have fog galore.
This year I’d like to do a little more with fog and lighting. Fog Machine Vortex is one idea i may try. Another I am working on is to project a ghostly image onto a dense area of fog – kind of like fogscreen but way cheaper.
Not clear that artificial intelligence will ever be worth it
The latest fad in creating machines that can learn — Learn Like a Human. I’ll bet now that if we ever learn how to create a human-level aritificial intelligence, it will take just as long to train as a human takes, and it will be just as opinionated and judgmental and arbitrary as a human is.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Science
Using biological processes to assemble electronics
Scientists collaborate to study biologically assembled quantum electronic systems — interesting, lots of people think about how to embed electronics into biological systems or how to use electronics to control chemical processes — here are some people doing the opposite, using biological processes to assemble electronics at the nano level.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Materials
More stuff I don't need but want
- Toolmonger Finds: Snap-on’s New Micro Pneumatics — small pneumatic tools.
- Yoggie, the miniature security appliance. Not sure why, it is just cool.
- A bookshelf made of…books.. Wonderfully recursive.
- The linksys kiss. Kind of a dvd player but with some media extender wireless goo whacked on the side. I wonder if 3 years from now anyone will still have a vanilla dvd player — i wonder if we won’t all have various combo devices (game consoles, media extenders, etc) instead.
- Unbreakable screwdrivers
- Wood case computers and peripherals — Suissacomputers, Woodcontour. Probably a really bad idea but cool.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Products
Need a cheap flash editor
Download.com has quite a few, Koolmoves has been downloaded a ton and is reasonably priced. You can get the macromedia/adobe tool but even at educational pricing it is very expensive. COffeecup firestarter is another reasonably priced choice.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Software
Ignition Blog roundup
- Network Magic gets some love up at eHomeUpgrade | Why Network Magic Kicks Windows Vista’s Butt in Networking and File Sharing Usability
- Andy loves referral hiring
— spontaneous support for jobster - Rich has all the blackberry pearl tips and blackberry games info
- Phil cranks out another version of Beyond411 for the blackberry. He also ponders the ineffectiveness of googlebase
- Martin (an ignition alum) has made another clean tech investment
Google and copyrights
WhoseTube? Viacom Sues Google Over Video Clips – New York Times — one has to wonder why this is limited to video material. If I am the owner of say the “Ford Mustang” copyright, or “The Who” copyright, or the “Nike” copyright, why do I let Google profit off the search results for these terms? Shouldn’t I demand complete control over the results page and any revenues associated with it? If it was my copyright and I had worked hard to market it, I don’t think I’d understand why Google was allowed to make money off of it.
More Products I Don't Need (But Want)
- Tong Family Blog: Camcorder Recommendations — rich does a nice job of reviewing high end video cameras. for the 27 minutes of filming i do a year, i don’t need any of these, but…
- A projector with an ipod dock! Who doesn’t need one of these.
- The USB flute. And to the writer who sneers at “rocking out (with a flute?)” — go dust off your Jethro Tull LPs.
- Etymotic earcord winder. OK I might actually need this.
- MoGo mouse. This looked very cool when I saw rich with it.
- Super Paper Mario for the Wii. Mario. Wii.
- A chumby of course
- The Vectrix 3-wheeler because it is just awesome.
- The Callaway FT-i, this is all that separates me from Tiger Woods. (I kick myself that I’ve never invested in a golf enthusiast company, because golfers will buy anything).
- The MSR Reactor because you never know when you need to cook in gale force winds.
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Tags: Products
VC transparency
Via Techcrunch, TheFunded which tracks feedback on VCs by funded companies. This s awesome, more transparency and communication is always good. I note Bessemer is rated highly, I’m on a board with some Bessemer folks and I would have to agree, they are great. I hope all the Ignition portfolio companies rate us, and rate us honestly.
Today's bracket link
Hack the Bracket – Statistics and analysis to help you pick your bracket. — found via SI, a really quality matchup-by-matchup analysis. The buckeyes look pretty safe in round 1.
Telenav slammed on my cingular blackberry
A TeleNav! app was slammed on my blackberry today. I didn’t ever install it, it just showed up on the homescreen. Basically a kind of spam from cingular I assume.
Anyway i tried it. It wasn’t terrible, but I can’t see why anyone would bother, the google maps app is so much better. The telenav app is a bit of size/speed pig, it doesn’t show traffic data, no satellite views, no white/yellow pages lookup, an annoying upsell ad on the front page. I deleted it.
Baja car tours
From Dave, Wide Open Baja — 4-7 day tours of Baja in off road cars.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Vacation