Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Technology

  • Dave Winer Version of Previous Post

    If you don’t know who Dave Winer is, you can go to Wikipedia or more interestingly, just follow his blog.

    Lately he’s been into smaller “snack” type projects that serve an immediately useful small function.

    For example, if you want to just type a long post and have it turned into a tweetstorm, use Little Pork Chop.

    Today he built a simple way to publish in a style like medium.com. All you need is your text formatted in json format. Yes, that’s a little technical.

    But it took me a couple of minutes to turn my previous post into this:

    http://myword.io/?url=https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/285aigg7j3e23j3/post.json?dl=0

    Is it better? I don’t know. My blog template is a little old fashioned. I’ve been using it for many moons. But with no blogging platform at all and a free Dropbox account, you could produce stuff like this in no time.

    Very cool stuff.

  • It’s a New World

    One of those “master of the obvious” statements, but I’m next to my daughter who is doing her homework on her Chromebook saying “OK Google” to get information about Bedouins in the Middle Ages from Wikipedia.

    Holy crap, the things our kids take for granted…

  • Drone NYC Video

    This is a pretty nice aerial view of NYC via drone. It gets all over the city, not just Manhattan, so if you aren’t from New York you may not recognize everything.

    This is the behind the scenes video, which is also cool:

  • Elon Musk has a sense of humor…

    He did a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) a couple of days ago. He was asked this about the attempt to land the booster on a floating platform:

    Previously, you’ve stated that you estimate a 50% probability of success with the attempted landing on the automated spaceport drone ship tomorrow. Can you discuss the factors that were considered to make that estimation?

    His response:

    I pretty much made that up. I have no idea 🙂

    And in a discussion of the possible dangers of artificial intelligence, he posted a link to this video:

  • Apple Makes Great Hardware

    Their very own charger cable gets 1.5 stars out of 5 in the Apple store.

    A charger.

    1.5 stars.

    Seriously?

  • Practical Algebra

    From the NY Times:

    “The Interview” generated roughly $15 million in online sales and rentals during its first four days of availability, Sony Pictures said on Sunday.

    Sony did not say how much of that total represented $6 digital rentals versus $15 sales. The studio said there were about two million transactions over all.

    Sony didn’t say, but the math is clear. Solve for X (number of digital rentals):

    (6 * x) + (15 * (2,000,000 – x)) = 15,000,000

    Not sure why the NY Times can’t do math, that would be about 1,666,667 rentals and 333,333 sales.

  • Echo

    When Amazon first announced the Echo, it was invitation only, and Prime members got first shot. Of course I put my name in right away. So I was offered it for half price as a Prime member and it arrived almost a month ago.

    I mainly wanted to check it out. For $99, it seemed interesting just for the technology. I decided to put it away and leave it as a Christmas present for the family.

    My wife accused me of buying a present for myself (guilty) but I was pretty sure the kids would be into it. “Alexa, play Katy Perry”.

    The speaker is quite good. It works as a single speaker for pretty much our entire living area. The voice recognition is excellent. If you are a Prime member, you have access to a ton of Prime music on top of whatever you have in your Amazon music library. It also integrates with iHeartRadio and can stream a ton of radio stations. It also does math and spelling and some other cloud based queries.

    It also creates grocery and to do lists. It’s not hard to see where Amazon is going with this, given that they are getting into the grocery business. My daughters asked, “Alexa, play Fifth Harmony” (popular girl group, for those who don’t know them) and we got a playlist from Amazon Prime. But their most popular song wasn’t on the list. Tori said “Alexa, play Sledgehammer” (Tori loves to talk to Alexa). Echo replied, “playing an excerpt from Fifth Harmony Sledgehammer”. Thirty seconds later after the except ended, Echo said, “Sledgehammer is available for 99 cents. Buy now?”.

    It’s a very cool device, but pretty obvious where they are going with this…

  • Why Were You in Fargo?

    Not an unreasonable question. If you just won a Nobel Prize…

    “They’re like, ‘Sir, there’s something in your bag.’
    I said, ‘Yes, I think it’s this box.’
    They said, ‘What’s in the box?’
    I said, ‘a large gold medal,’ as one does.
    So they opened it up and they said, ‘What’s it made out of?’
    I said, ‘gold.’
    And they’re like, ‘Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?’
    ‘The King of Sweden.’
    ‘Why did he give this to you?’
    ‘Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.’

    ‘Why were you in Fargo?’”

  • And FIOS loses…

    I generally love Verizon FIOS. But tonight the internet is unwatchable, much like the Knicks…

    image

  • Minecraft Wins

    Via Curbed Los Angeles:

    No part of this story makes any sense, but we’ll tell it to you anyway

    I have no real interest in the real estate insanity of the crazy rich, but this one appeals to me in a strange way.

    The newly crazy rich creator of Minecraft beat out Beyoncé and Jay-Z for a $70 million dollar mansion in LA. Again, I don’t really care. But somehow a tech guy beating out Beyoncé amuses me…