DogsOfWar – Page 52

Did Arianna Huffington Force Out Engadget Editor?

The bearded and bespectacled Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky has announced he’s leaving the fourth most popular blog in the country. He gives no reason and says he has a few fantasy projects he might work on. That translates to I have been fired and have no new job.

Engadget has been owned by AOL since 2005 when the founders sold the blog group Weblogs, Inc. for a reported $25M. In that time they have had steady growth and are well regarded. So, what changed? AOL purchased HuffPo and put Arianna Huffington in charge of the AOL blog empire which also includes the Techcrunch group of blogs. It seems strange timing for the editor to “leave” unless Arianna wants to put one of her own in charge or Topolsky didn’t want to go along with the AOL Way. This comes in the same week that AOL laid off 200 people.

Source and photo Engadget.

Product Review: Ooma Telo

Voice over internet protocol (VOIP) is how you make phone calls through your internet connection and is a common way of ditching traditional land line service. If you’re in the market for a VOIP solution or want to look at alternatives to your existing VOIP provider then this may be one option.

When I was looking for a VOIP solution I considered Ooma, Vonage, MagicJack and Comcast Voice. I wanted a low cost, high quality, reliable connection and did not have any need for international calling. I quickly ruled out MagicJack because it requires a computer be on at all times and that’s not very friendly to my power bill or the environment.

Vonage and Comcast offer a similar service for comparable prices. Comcast offers their Triple Play service which combines cable television, internet and phone service in one package, but for me the package includes a slower internet speed than I have with them now and I the package deal is only really attractive for the first year. Vonage seemed reasonable, but the monthly cost wasn’t better than Comcast.

The Ooma Telo on the other hand is a one time fee and has no recurring costs. The device itself is relatively small and unobtrusive. It’s a matte black finish and can be placed anywhere that you have a wired internet connection. I keep mine in the living room and plug a cordless phone base station directly into it. Ooma offers a handset but I uses a Panasonic cordless phone instead. I opted to have my original land line number ported over by Ooma and they assigned a temporary number to my device while the port was happening. Once the port was done the temporary number seamlessly transitioned to my original number.

The voice quality sounds like a traditional land line and I only rarely hear digital artifacts on the line.

The other features that Ooma offers are all accessed through their web based portal. The portal gives access to listen to voicemail, see call logs and change settings. I subscribed to a community black list of known telemarketers and have entered a few numbers into a personal blacklist of my own. You have the choice of sending blacklisted numbers to voicemail or just having them go into the void.

In case my network goes down (we are talking about Comcast here) I enabled is call forwarding on outage. When there are network problems and the Ooma device is unable to get online then all calls are forwarded to the number of your choice. In my case I send them to my cell phone.

For voicemails I have them sent to my email as a mp3 attachment and can listen to them on my computer, cell phone, on the portal or directly on the Telo device.

Overall it’s been great and has saved me a lot of money.

Daylight Saving Time Is Here

A reminder that tomorrow, or tonight depending on how late you’re up, is the time to spring forward an hour. Since the government won’t stay out of our lives and keeps messing with the date we can never predict when this will happen from year to year. Here is a list to help you get ready.

If you regularly apply updates to your computer then the electronic demons that live inside it will take care of this for you. If you don’t apply updates then you deserve the fate that is going to befall you.
Your iPhone may or may not wake you up at the correct time on Monday. History tells us that it won’t so you should plan accordingly. I’m not joking on this one.
If you still have a VCR then it’s best to just unplug it and let it go back to flashing 12:00.
Your watch will require that you pull that little knob out half way and then spin it backwards for a bit. Or if you still have that Casio then you have to hold down the left two buttons while pressing the right top button three times in a row, then release all the buttons and press Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A. Then you should be all set.
Your dog will be confused and will still want to eat at its regular time. Dogs don’t care about daylight saving time.
If you are in Arizona, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, U.S. Virgin Islands or American Samoa you can ignore all of this.

Image Flickr.

Infographic – If States Were Countries

How would the 50 states measure up by GDP if they were individual countries? To give the readers a better idea the Crasstalk infographic team compared the states by GSP (gross state product) to the GDP (gross domestic product) of countries around the world and then mapped those countries onto the states. The data is for 2010 and comes from Wikipedia. The state GSP is mapped to the country with the closest GDP without being higher (Price Is Right rules). The map is courtesy of the US Government’s National Atlas Map Maker.

States By GDP — Click the image to enlarge

Our previous infographics are here and here. Top image Wikipedia.

Your Facebook News Feed Is About to Get Angry

Hello, my name is Dogs of War and I’m an addict. I’ve been addicted to Angry Birds for what seems like a millennium and I’m powerless against those egg stealing pigs.

There is one thing I will not do though, and that is to play Angry Birds on Facebook. I have my phone with me at all times and that is about as much as I can handle. But tens of millions of you will be playing Angry Birds on Facebook and publisher Rovio hopes to make some serious scratch.

The mobile version is bird focused and has no social interaction outside of wanting to get a higher score than your friends. However, the Facebook version will give the pigs more time in the spotlight and like all successful Facebook games will feature social interaction. So, get ready to use that “hide” button to save yourself from constant updates about your mother and high school friends getting 3 stars and saving the eggs.

Picture and source: El Reg.

Photo Phriday – Let’s Get Crafty

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I know you are a group of crafty people so today we’re going to share those items of handiwork that you’re most proud of. It could be a sweater you knitted, a school project you “helped” your kids with, a barn you raised, a birdhouse you made, a wall you painted or just how you craftily arranged the twelve pieces of furniture to fit into your 400 square foot studio. Craftiness comes in all forms.

You know the rules.

To put a picture into a comment you will need to host the image somewhere. Personally, Imgur has worked well for me, but you can get them from anywhere. A warning that photos hosted on Facebook should probably be saved elsewhere. Facebook’s new image viewer makes it very hard to get to the actual photo. Images you have on another site need to be the actual image file and not the page that contains them. The files in in .jpg, .png, .gif or something like that.

In the comment box tell us a little something about the picture and then include a link as follows.

If you don’t include any text with your image then it will be put in the approval queue and a mod will have to approve it.

Top image here.

photophriday

Picture of the Night

A Picture is Worth Something or Other

Picture of the night is a new feature we may occasionally post. Tonight your job is to guess what this map is showing (other than the ol’ US of A).

Since our theme makes the header image stretched and small, here is a higher resolution image, click to enlarge.

Our winner is slackjawed_yoda. This map is the broadband availability as reported by BroadbandMap.gov. Now the next time you think high speed internet access is a Dog given right just remember that if your home is in the middle of nowhere you still have very limited options for accessing Crasstalk.

Picture of the Night

Clouds Are Not to Be Trusted

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Did you know that your precious pictures, videos and email live in a cloud and could disappear at any time? This week Google accidentally lost data for 40,000 to 150,000 users (reports vary) and is trying to restore the data. Flickr is well known for deleting photos and Facebook might remove your art photos because some old cat lady is a prude who is just thinking of the poor children. Usually photos are on your computer since you had to retrieve them from your camera, but email often exists only on your provider’s servers. Cnet has put together a video showing how to backup your data from Gmail and some other tips for backing up your other data.

The E-Book Price War is Over – Apple Won

Who decides what an e-book book costs, the retailer or the publisher? This is the question at the heart of the debate on e-book pricing. Previously many publishers sold e-books to retailers for a fixed rate and the retailer decided what to charge the end user. If the retailer wanted to make a small profit, big profit or even a loss it was up to them. Amazon seized this model since they can sell e-books for near, at or even below cost and still make money by selling other products. Amazon’s loss-leader strategy paid off and the Kindle is their best selling product ever.

However, Apple would rather that the publisher set the retail price and give the retailers a fixed 30% margin. Even though this is blatantly anti-free market nobody seemed to care in this case because iPads are very shiny and people are impressed when you have one of these fondle-slabs. Apple doesn’t sell anything at a loss or even at low margin so this model fit better with their philosophy.

Today Random House became the last major publisher to switch over to the agency model that Apple prefers.

When you listen to Apple talk about the iPad 2 tomorrow just remember what it costs you and what it costs the market.

Photo here. Source: WSJ.

Geneva Motorshow Round-Up

The 81st International Motorshow in Geneva is kicking off this week. Auto manufacturers are showing off new cars and concepts. As with most auto shows it is a mix of stunning, ugly, practical, affordable and those that we can only wish to own.

If your dream has always been to own a $1M electric car then Rolls-Royce has just the limo for you. It’s every bit as handsome, or ugly, as previous RR machines but it will get you 125 miles down the road without a recharge. Suicide doors are standard but Grey Poupon is not included.

RR Electric — Rolls-Royce Phantom Electric - DailyMail

While the Rolls-Royce styling may not be for everyone, it’s not the ugliest car in the world. That title now belongs to the AstroBionix Thor. Marketed as an “Ultimate Deployment Vehicle,” this UDV is U-G-L-Y. On the up side it does rock a 600 horse power 7.0L V8 in case you need to escape escape a mob of pitchfork carrying peasants.

An electric coupe with a bit more style and affordability is the Nissan Esflow concept. The Esflow is a rear wheel drive machine meant for two and uses the same battery pack as the Leaf that you can’t buy. It will get you through 150 miles of driving bliss and at least a dozen nods of acceptance from anyone you pass on the street.

A less practical coupe is the Wiesmann Sypder concept. If Speed Racer were to choose a car from the show this would be it. It has air intakes big enough for a 737 and headlights that could belong to an insect. It uses a V8 with 420-horse power and has no windshield. Bring a helmet and goggles.

But the car that you’re most likely to want to take on a camping trip is without a doubt the VW Bulli. Get your prescription card ready because the Micro Bus is back and it’s a hybrid! Hippies everywhere are rejoicing.

Top image here. VW Cnet. Wiesmann AutoBlog. AstroBionix Jalopnik. Rolls-Royce DailyMail via Consumerist. Nissan Esflow AutoBlog.

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