Gadgets

Becks at Unfogged and Scott Lemieux both wonder why the hell the New York Times publishes articles like this.

FOR some people, the most elusive aspect of owning a vacation home that sits beyond big-city borders isn’t finding the time to enjoy it. It’s finding someone to service the deluxe appliances inside.

“We called Viking over the holidays every year,” Rosemary Devlin said of her half-decade-long (and mostly futile) efforts to schedule manufacturer service for her mutinous dishwasher. The appliance was installed along with a suite of Viking cousins when Ms. Devlin and her husband, Fay, whose main house is about 20 miles north of Manhattan in Irvington, N.Y., built their six-bedroom ski house on Okemo Mountain in Ludlow, Vt.

The Financial Times (which has its biases, but is still in my opinion the best newspaper out there), has an entire bloody weekend supplement devoted to this kind of stuff, with the classy title How To Spend It. While a fair number of its readers are presumably City types who can afford the pieds-a-terres and fancy toys lovingly detailed in its pages, I would imagine that most of its readers aren’t. Someone who I was chatting to about this recently suggested that it’s an aspirational thing; while most of its readers can’t afford this stuff, they’d like to be able to, and are more likely to buy a newspaper that allows them at least to daydream about it. Or perhaps the marketing types think that readers would prefer to be addressed as if they were in a position to “Spend It” even when they aren’t. Any other plausible explanations?

This thing just arrived from the future.What can I say? if this is the RDF, sign me up.

Update: If you think I’m a Mac fanboy, check out these photos of the faithful worshipping the holy relic (it’s behind glass, naturally) at the convention. A Durkheimian moment for the brushed-metal set. They look like the apes in 2001 gazing at the monolith.

I’m sure I used to be good at parking a car, but the older I get, the worse I get at it. So I was rather excessively excited to see that Lexus have invented a car that can automatically parallel park. The link is a few weeks old, so apologies to those who find this kind of news old hat.

Thanks to all for their advice . I’ve just ordered a MacBook (white, 13 inch, 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo, with 1 gig of memory and an 80 gig hard drive).

So here’s a topic on which CT readers are bound to have opinions: which laptop should I buy? Or, more exactly, what should I be looking for? Productivity-wise I need a machine that will run a LaTeX implementation—currently I use MiKTeX plus WinEdt on my desktop machines (XP based) in the office or at home—but just about anything will do that. And I’d like something that will be generally OK for surfing, playing the occasional video-clip or mp3, but that’s about it. And, of course, wireless is essential (though I’ve got a spare wireless card for a notebook as it happens … it came packaged with my router). How much memory? What size HD?

I had thought about making the switch to Apple, having seen a grad student’s neat little iBook. But since Apple is moving to Intel and their low-cost laptops haven’t yet made the switch, that seems a bad choice at the moment. (If I’m wrong about that mattering, then I’m sure some Apple-fan will set me right.)

I see that the left sidebar now has a permanent link to Eszter’s Frappr Map of Crooked Timber readers (scroll down: under Frenzy of Renown). Add yourselves (if you want to and you haven’t already – especially if you come from Africa, South America, Eastern Europe or Antarctica).

Wow! Just had my first Google Talk conversation. I’m sure most of you are old hands at this voice-over-internet stuff but it was my first time. Set it up, invited some friends and then up pops a mate from Novosibirsk (equipped with headset) for a chat, as if he was just down the road. It works, it’s simple and easy to use. Fantastic.

I am guest-blogging over at Lifehacker this week while regular editor Gina Trapani takes a breather. Lifehacker is part of Nick Denton’s Gawker Media empire that has managed to make money out of blogging. (We’re not all in it for the $s as you can tell by the lack of ads on CT, but it’s nice to know that some people who don’t necessarily have other main sources of income are able to pull it off.) CT readers are probably most familiar with Gawker’s Wonkette, but there are about a dozen Gawker sites at this point addressing all sorts of topics.

Lifehacker focuses on ways to make your life more productive. Many of the posts feature downloads (e.g. Firefox, Flickr), shortcuts and pointers to helpful Web sites. There is a whole category of advice pieces as well ranging from how to deal with various situations at work to ideas for getting things done more effectively.

If you have any lifehacking tips, please send them along to me this week by writing to tips@lifehacker.com.

For those in Chicagoland or those contemplating a visit, here are some fun goings on over the summer. I still consider myself relatively new in the area so I’m still actively on the lookout for what goes on here these months. I’m very impressed.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve already had the opportunity to go see a Gospel Music Festival, an Art Fair and participate in other outdoor celebrations. Much more is ahead. The free Summer Dance program started at Grant Park this past Wednesday. It runs until the end of August. On Wednesdays they have a DJ. On Thu-Sun they first offer free dance lessons and then have a live band for dances ranging from Polka to Swing, from Bachata to Waltzes. Given that I have been spending increasing amounts of time in dance classes, this is an exciting and fun opportunity. A propos dance, this weekend is the annual Chicago Crystal Ball national dance competition. I’ll be there although only for part of it since I’m hosting friends over the weekend and we’ll be exploring numerous areas of town. No, I won’t be competing at Crystal Ball, but I’ll be cheering on friends who will.

Next weekend (24-26th) will be the Wired Nextfest for all of us interested in the latest gadgets. I think from there I’ll head straight to Grant Park for that evening’s ballroom session.

A bit later in the summer will be the Chicago Outdoor Film Festival also in Grant Park. This event it free as well. They will be wrapping up with Star Wars on Aug 23rd. Sounds fun.

I have found the following resources especially helpful in finding out about goings-on and keeping track. I recommend them as sources of additional amusement:

• City of Chicago Events page
  
• Upcoming.org’s Events listings (this should be helpful also if you are in another metro area in the US)

Dan Drezner pre-empts a post I’ve been toying with writing for the last couple of weeks by discussing the usefulness of Douglas Adams’ Somebody Else’s Problem Field to the understanding of international politics. There’ve been books on Star Trek and International Relations Theory, Harry Potter and International Relations Theory etc, etc. Why hasn’t somebody written the Hitchhiker’s Guide to International Relations? Adams made far punchier contributions to the understanding of IR than either Rowling or Rodenberry; not only the SEP Field, but the Babel Fish theory of the effects of globalization.

The Babel fish, said the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

The poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

I used to be an Apple fan (even own one of the original bondi blue iMacs) but my experience with the iPod has made me disgruntled with the company. I am among the unfortunate many (way too many!) whose iPod gave up service extremely quickly. The battery just died one day for no apparent reason. The iPod was still under warranty so I took it to an Apple store. It took some convincing for them to take a look without charging me the basic $50. Then, after several days, they confirmed that the battery had, in fact, died (brilliant!). Then, after another week or so, they let me know my new iPod was ready for pickup. Unfortunately, my new iPod gave up service soon after as well. By then I was past the warranty period (how convenient for Apple). This time I can’t even tell if it’s the battery. It just won’t recharge and won’t do anything. (It is almost as if there was something comforting about seeing something break in a physically visible manner so you have some idea behind the puzzle. I almost wish I had dropped the thing at some point so I would have something to blame.) I had not used it much, maybe about a dozen times before it gave up service. This whole experience has been quite frustrating, especially for a gadget that costs several hundred dollars.

I am now looking for diePod alternatives. Other companies have not done quite the same job in marketing their products so I am not sure what would be a good option. I am actually considering just getting a memory card for my Treo 600 (a positive review of which will follow at some point) and using that as my mp3 player.

Bottom line: to avoid frustrations, I highly recommend staying away from the iPod![1]

UPDATE: Clearly, Apple’s got battery issues all over the place. It looks like my experiences are not a fluke.

¹ Of course, in the grand scheme of things I realize this is not that big of a deal. But if one can avoid such annoyances then why not do so?