Techoti

The results of a new survey on browser usage are making the rounds and creating quite a stir. Apparently, those using Internet Explorer are dumber than those using Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox. I think Opera users are now collecting Mensa cards.

The study apparently collected IQ ratings for a sampling of various web browser users and reached these startling conclusions. One must assume that those conducting the survey were all using a combination of Opera and a home-grown web browser, which makes them smarter than a combination of Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

Surveys like this make people like me angry because they appear to be designed solely to promote a particular point of view. Yes, the folks at AptiQuant found what they were looking for. Bully for them. Too bad they understand nothing about Web browsers and how and why people use them.

Now, I have noticed that champions of this browser or that have quickly leapt up on this side or that of the browser debate. Some feel vindicated: of course they’re smarter for using Firefox. Look at all those extensions. Chrome, with its 19%, is obviously for smart people. Anyone who gets their Web browser delivered with an operating system must be an idiot.

It’s all ridiculous.

Here’s the thing: Using this browser or that does not  make you smarter.  Doing things that are difficult or that require mental acuity, that makes you smarter. In the case of Web browsers, the best of them are those that make surfing the web easy, not harder. They take away confusion. Sure, some can allow you to see under the hood, customize, even use beta versions that are maybe not ready for prime time. But for average people good web browsers get out of the way.

Virtually all the Web browsers we use today strive to almost hide themselves from view. This does not engender confusion, it makes web browsing easier.

So, why would it be important for one browser or another to be for smart people? The best web browsers, and I count Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox among them (even Opera), are the ones that make Web browsing  easy for people who do not know much about technology.  Who were not first in their class. Who do not know how to code HTML and do not care. The best web browsers are the ones that anyone of any level of intelligence can master in a matter of minutes. I think Internet Explorer falls into that category. So does Chrome. Firefox? Well, it’s getting there.

It might also be argued that smart people use the easiest Web browsers, too. They appreciate a tool that makes using the Web easy by being almost transparent, so they can get back to doing the things smart people do.

—Lance Ulanoff

Some years ago I decried the use of cell phone cameras for capturing important life moments like a wedding or graduation. These days, you wonder why anyone who simply wants a decent point-and-shoot digital camera doesn’t just buy a decent cell phone. 

I’m not saying cell phones are perfect cameras. They still lack decent zooms and have lenses that are considerably smaller than your run-of-the-mill digital camera. Still, with wide-angle lenses, autofocus, decent resolutions, they more than get the job done. Plus, unlike most digital cameras, these phones are, obviously connected. Getting your picture from point-and-shoot to share is easy and we all do it every single day.

Would I ever make a cell phone my only camera? No. At home, I also have a powerful (yet still portable) Sony NEX-5 digital camera. It goes well beyond, not only your average cell phone camera, but your typical point and shoot, as well. With it I can change lenses and manually adjust settings like aperture and shutter speed. Images captured with it blow way those from cell phones and point and shoots alike. That said, I have to admit that I probably take more pictures with my cell phone because it’s always with me.

The other night I took a couple of shots of the New York City skyline and Brooklyn Bridge (from the vantage point of the South Street Seaport) with my Apple iPhone 4’s 5 megapixel camera. The pictures look quite good and I’m happy to share them.

Big career moves involve more than a few scary decisions and acts, but one of the biggest is, perhaps, migrating your contacts from the office to your personal accounts. I’ve had a contact file that’s been growing since I started building it on Instant Recall (a DOS program) in the early 1990’s. IR transformed into DayTimer Organizer in the mid-90’s and then, when DTO died in 2004, I grudgingly migrated my contacts to Microsoft Outlook.

As I prepared to leave my post at PCMag, I realized that I’d want to have access to the 2000+ contacts on my personal e-mail service of choice—Gmail. Outlook 2007, which I’ve been using at PCMag for almost three years, lets you export your entire contacts directory to what’s known as a CSV or comma separated file. Gmail readily imports CSV files from Outlook, Yahoo, Hotmail and others. It also does a nice job of de-dupping and maintaining detail fields like address, phone, Private and even categories and notes.

The import job worked flawlessly and now Gmail has all of my contacts. This, in turn, had an unexpected benefit. It made giving up my corporate BlackBerry, which gave me easy access to mail and my contact database, much easier than I expected.

I was about to step off a corporate-supported cell network for the first time in a decade and I worried that I wouldn’t have the same, transparent access to my contacts. You know, you dial a number and the contact appears or you get a call and their info is pulled from the contact database, email auto-fill with address selections, etc. In other words, it’s good to have your contacts plugged into the device. However, when I got my new Apple iPhone 4, one of the first things I did was set up my primary e-mail account. Naturally, it’s now Gmail. I specified that I’d be using the service for my contacts, too.

Bingo: My personal iPhone sees all my gmail contacts and expertly integrates them to the whole of the mobile system. This is easy. This is how technology should work—all the time.

Up until the leaked/unearthed Facebook iPad app story earlier this week, I was in the camp that thought the Facebook experience through Safari was good enough. Well, let me clarify that. I actually wondered aloud when Facebook would finally deliver its own iPad app and usually get the unbidden response: “They already have an iPad app, it’s on Safari”. My knee-jerk response? “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

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I just took Visual.ly’s Twitterize Yourself infographic engine for a test drive. It’s pretty cool. The infographic about my Twitter habits and overall Twitter profile is below. Let me know what you think.

Is it too meta to write about Tumblr on Tumblr? I’ve already grown accustomed to changing themes as readily as I change pants and the other little nuances of the not-quite-a-true-blog, but totally free, Tumblr. There are the odd, in-posts notes of approbation, follows, and promotions for other people’s Tumblr postings, the wildly varying controls depending on theme and the utter shock of not being able to do a damn thing.

I haven’t run my own blog in years. With PCMag.com as my bully-pulpit, there was no need. Yet, now that time is coming to an end, and I need to maintain an online presence, as well as a place to, well, put my stuff. And by stuff I mean random thoughts, deep ponderings of the tech world at large, images, drawings, musings, you name it, Techoti will have it. I chose Tumblr because I’d noticed others in my sphere using it. It was at one approachable and elegantly pliable. I had a sense that the barrier to entry was very low and that I could make the platform do the things I wanted it to do.

I had a domain and with Yahoo’s small business domain service by my side, was able to apply it to a Tumblr URL and even mask it so the destination simply says www.Techoti.com. It was easy. Too easy.

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Redoing a bathroom is a job that comprises a thousand different decisions. One of the biggest is which granite slab you’re going to throw on top of the vanity. Granite is heavy and you can only check out massive sheets of it at granite yards. Most are almost six feet wide, almost as many feet long, more than an inch thick, and weigh hundreds of pounds. 

Standing under a blazing sun in 100-degree heat yesterday morning, we compared our tile samples to dozens of giant granite slabs. Finally, we found something and the salesman marked it as ours. 

Before we left, my wife ran back to the slab and snapped a few digital photos. Sometime later at home, she grinned at me and told me she had a crazy plan. My wife is not prone to crazy ideas, so I couldn’t image what she was talking about. Minutes later, she called me into our under construction bathroom and showed me: She’d opened the photos on the PC, e-mailed the images to herself and opened one up on her Apple iPad 2. Then she held the iPad to against the tile wall in approximately the same position as it would sit on our new bathroom vanity. Then she placed it on the in-shower bench (the second spot where we’d use the same tile). Thanks to the size of the screen—much larger than a digital phone—the iPad’s shape (essentially a slab) and the screen’s shiny surface, effect was surprisingly good.

Holding it there, my wife smiled to herself, clearly satisfied that we’d made the right decision in the granite yard.

My wife is no tech geek, so I’m kind of proud she came up with this idea. It’s like something I’d think of. Wonder what other “crazy” ideas Apple’s iPad will help her cook up.

I’ve been reading through Playboy’s 1987 interview with Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs. It’s fascinating. He’s just as brash, confident and enigmatic as he is today.  When asked why someone would buy a computer in 1987, he responds, “The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network.” They guy is talking about the Internet before there was an Internet (at least for consumers).

That was pretty wild, but then I read this exchange between Playboy interviewer David Sheff  and Jobs and it triggered a memory:

Jobs had just explained how the telegraph and Morse code, which were developed  in the early 1800’s, never made it into “every American Home”. It took the phone, which relied on the same technology, to change things. In Job’s world, the IBM PC was the telegraph and the Macintosh is “the first ‘telephone’ of our industry.”

Jobs continued, “And, besides that, the neatest thing about it, to me, is that the Macintosh lets you sing the way the telephone did. You don’t simply communicate words, you have special print styles and the ability to draw and add pictures to express yourself.” 

Sheff responded: “Is that really significant or is it simply a novelty? The Macintosh has been called ‘the world’s most expensive Etch A Sketch’ by at least one critic.”

Job’s deflected the question, responding, “ Imagine what you could have done if you had this sophisticated an Etch A Sketch when you were growing up.” But I realized that I had heard this criticism before, not with the Macintosh, which was released in 1984 while I was still in college and not paying much attention to tech product reviews. Instead, that charge was leveled again in this century at Apple’s newest premiere product, the Apple iPad, in 2010, and not just by one outlet:

Apple updates Etch-a Sketch

Apple releases world’s most expensive Etch A Sketch

It made me wonder if these guys thought they were actually being original, and if Steve Job’s laughed a little to himself when he read these posts about the iPad. 

I remember when a remake came decades after the original movie. Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town was produced in 1936. The abysmal Adam Sandler remake, Mr. Deeds, waited until the new century. Superman the Movie arrived in 1978. The poorly received Superman Returns in 2006, almost 30 years later. These films are generations apart.

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When I was a child, “antique” meant something at least 100 years old, everything else was known simply as “used.” Today, no one really talks about antiques any more. Instead, we’re obsessed with nostalgia, especially, anything to do with our own wonder years.

Perhaps that’s why collectibles are so popular right now. Everyone collects something, and usually something closely associated with their teen years. The 60’s, 70’s and 80’s were the golden years for television shows and movies that spawned an avalanche of product and comic-book tie-ins. Those who grew up watching this entertainment are now well into middle age. As you grow older, it’s only natural to look back with increasing fondness upon the gadgets and entertainment of your youth. All this explains the growing popularity—and frequency—of toy and comic-book fairs.

I recently had the opportunity to attend one of these affairs. The mid-sized ballroom at a local hotel was lined with vendors peddling, among other things, G.I Joe toys from the last 40 years, hundreds of vintage Star Wars toys, virtually every Transformer ever made (a Big Mac transformer!), classic comics (some from the 1940’s), and more. Snaking through the displays were collectors, who wound their way around the wares over and over until they discovered that one hidden bit of vintage plastic or paper.

Here’s a look at some of the more interesting and unusual stuff I found.

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I’ve been looking at this photo I took with my new Sony NEX-5 digital camera for a couple of weeks, trying to figure out how it caught what appears to be two exposures at once. It looks to me as if this was either two quick exposures sandwiched together or as if the shutter stayed open long enough to capture 1) the initial blast—the sharp part of the image, and 2) the post-blast light trails as the firework faded away. But that would mean the shutter was open for a half second or more and, if that was the case, there’s no way the central blast could be so sharp—even with optical stabilization.

I decided to look at the Exif data for the image to see if there were any clues to what, exactly, the camera did to capture this image. You can see them here. As you’ll note, the image is made up of just one exposure. Perhaps, the camera caught two explosions at two different firing stages, though the bright burst seems to be in the middle of the other one.

What the Exif data did tell me that’s interesting is that this flash-free image was shot at a high-speed 1600 ISO level, which probably accounts for the sharpness and is also pretty remarkable considerign how little noise there is in the image.

By the way, I did not use a tripod to capture this shot. I just stood very, very still and let the camera’s auto-setting choose the exposure and shutter speed. Overall, it did a pretty good job. Next project: Sports photography.

Oh, the things you discover by following the United States Patent and Trademark Office feed. Like this little tidbit: Apple filed for a liquid-cooled laptop patent system way back in 2007 (though most people didn’t report on it until 2008), and finally got it on July 12. 

The patent was pretty straight-forward. A pipe, some liquid coolant, a pump and a way to slough off the heat generated inside the laptop to the cooler, outside world. The graphics depict a laptop nobody would build: it’s just a squarish, boxy thing. That’s to be expected, though, since the drawing’s only puprose is to illustrate how the liquid-cooler would work.

Apple’s Macbook Air, introduced in 2008, is far too thin to accommodate a liquid-cooling system (isn’t it?), but perhaps a future Macbook Pro could benefit from this newly patented technology. My bet? They never use it.

What do you think? 

Yes, we all know that NASA’s Space Shuttles will end their days in a variety of museums, but isn’t it fun to imagine what they might be doing when the museums are closed—or perhaps before they all settle into their final resting places?

A little more than a year ago, I stood on the shore of Turing Basin (it’s like a tiny lake) in NASA’s Kennedy Space center in Florida as the Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off for its penultimate flight. It was a bucket-list moment for me. The shock waves pounded my chest as the shuttle roared skyward and I clumsily sought to simultaneously capture photos and video of the event. The photos are glorious. The video. Meh.

All this is to say that I know what it’s like to be there, to see the Shuttle do its miraculous thing. To feel the collective “ahhh” of spectators and NASA employees alike. It’s an engineering feat of herculean proportions that’s made every one of the over 130 launches possible and this last one so special.

As a child of the 60’s and 70’s I thought America would always be reaching for the stars. We landed on the moon so often that I imagined I might live there one day. Mars seemed within our grasp. The launch of the Space Shuttle program was, I thought, the last piece of the puzzle, the one that would allow us to start missions from space and then head to the outer reaches of our solar system. Hyperspace, Warp speed, whatever you call it would be just around the corner. I recall wondering if I could survive a long cryogenic sleep. I realized quite quickly, though, that waking up with the knowledge that everyone I knew was likely dead was not for me.

But I digress.

NASA’s Space Shuttle program is done. Atlantis, which left the earth at roughly 11:30 AM EST this morning will return home one last time and then be readied for installation at the Kennedy Spacer Center, which, as I learned when I was there, has a lot of awesome space ships, gear and history there.

When I mentioned my sadness over the end of the shuttle program, many were quick to remind me that it’s old, costly technology. The private sector, they promised, would pick up the slack and give us better space vehicles that could fly far more frequently. We, with the help of our private partners, might make it to an asteroid yet.

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