Appliances suck up a lot of energy

If you live in a typical U.S. home, your appliances and home electronics are responsible for about 20 percent of your energy useage, says the U.S. Department of energy. As record heat grips much of the country - the temperatures in Detroit are expected to exceed 100 degrees Tuesday - utility companies are urging us to cut back on the use of appliances and air conditioning.
Here are some suggestions on how to cut electricity use as recrod demand threatens to cause service outages during the heat wave.
And here’s more information than anyone needs on how much electricity a computer and monitor gobble up.

Video review: Nike+iPod Sport Kit

The new Nike+iPod Sport Kit has made it harder to find an excuse not to exercise.
Below is my NBC-TV video review.

Two items: Amazing talent and a dubious fashion trend

I have two you-gotta-see-this! items to share with you as submitted by my always eagle-eyed Web scouts.

First, the talent. Bernie Buchta caught this You Tube video that is so amazing I’m sure that - even if you saw it the first time on TV - you’ll not only watch several times but call everyone nearby to watch and be amazed, too. (Before hitting play, shrink the browser window down to avoid distortion.)

Then, a rather dubious fashion trend that apparently is big in Japan right now as noted and passed along to us by reader Michael Maurer. Bet you share this one, as well…. BUT… as reader Ron W. points out… the photos are fake. Funny. But fake.

Has the satellite radio bloom faded?

Sure looks that way after XM Satellite Radio posted its latest results.
They show losses of $231.7 million or 87 cents per share in the three months ending June 30, versus a loss of $148.8 million or 70 cents per share in the comparable period a year ago.
But much of that was expected as absorbed charges for restructuring its debt.
What is more alarming to investors is that instead of 8.5 million to 9 million customers the company had been predicting by year’s end, it now expects between 7.7 million and 8.2 million.
Whether that is because of slowing auto sales and a jumpy economy or a dwindling appeal of its services is not yet clear.
I’m shopping for a new car and XM comes free for three months. I’ll take it, of course. But after that, I’ll be hard-pressed to pay $12 a month for sat radio. Not with gas prices now well over $3 a gallon. I bet I’m far from alone.

Here comes Zune

Zune is Microsoft’s hoped-for iPod killer. Microsoft says we’ll see the new Zune personal music player by Christmas. They’ve even put up a rather bizarre Web site to tout its coming.
Zune, says Microsoft, will be a “family of hardware and software products” that let a community of users “explore and discover music together.”

Recycled cell phones for developing countries

ReCellular, outside of Detroit, is the cell phone graveyard. They get millions of donated phones and batteries, from resources such as Best Buy, Radio Shack, etc., and fix them up to resell to third world countries that need them. Over 100 million cells phones that could be recycled end up in consumers’ closets each year and this local company has found a neat business niche.

Emergency preparedness site

The conflict in the Middle East, the continuing dangers of terrorism and the tornados, flooding and wildfires recently experienced in parts of the country have prompted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to update its Web site.
The redesigned Ready Web site includes updated emergency preparedness resources, including special preparedness information for pet owners, senior citizens, and individuals with disabilities and special needs. It also provides Americans with increased state and local information so they can learn about the types of emergencies that are more likely to happen in their area and the plans that have been established to deal with these emergencies.

Synchronizing Web browser bookmarks

A major frustration when using different computers is not having our favorite bookmarks with us. I can solve that problem for you today.
Try downloading the Foxmarks extension for Firefox. Amazing.
It works with Foxcloud, a free ftp service. It synchronzes Firefox bookmarks across all of your computers, no matter what platform they use.
I’m running it on Windows machines, two Mac laptops and my G5 desktop.
Bookmarks are stored on a central server and once they’re synched between your different machines, changes in the bookmarks on any machine are reflected on the others.
Simplest way to get it is to open Firefox, go up to Tools on the menu bar, select extensions and do a search on Foxmarks. Close the browser and then reopen it. The first time through gets you a free account on Foxcloud. It grabs your bookmarks and stores them on a central server.
Then Open Firefox on all your other computers, get and install the extenson, enter in your new Foxcloud account login info and you’re done.
You don’t have to do a thing after that. It automatically synchs all those bookmarks behind-the-scenes.

Video sharing craze

First it was blogs… then podcasts… then social networking. These days, the hottest thing on the Internet is Video Sharing. And sometimes… make that oftentimes… it's pretty bizarre.
For example, have you seen what happens when you put Mentos candy in a bottle of diet coke. On the video sharing site Your Tube, there are dozens and dozens of amateur videos be shared, downloaded and viewed by hundreds of thousands. So nuts is everybody over this that two guys have even created dancing fountains of Mentos and Diet Coke madness.
And that’s just some of the content on You Tube, probably the site with the most buzz these days. Google – what don’t they own these days? – is naturally in on it. So is a site called Eyespot. Just do a search on “Video Sharing” to find more.
And what you will find is that… for free… you can post your own home videos. Vacation shots. Sports highlights. Silly stuff.
If you have a camcorder and use the free video editing software that comes on your computer, you can do this. Simply sign up with one of these services and upload your video. Just like that you’re a star.
Here's my NBC-TV "High Tech Talk" report on the subject:

President Bush’s swear word streaming online

When you are the President of the United States, there really is no such thing as a private conversation, as George Bush learned Monday morning at the G8 Conference. He was talking to Tony Blair about the violence in the Middle East and let loose an “S” word that was only too clearly picked up by a nearby microphone.
In a matter oh minutes, scores of Web sites edited and posted the clip, streaming it 24×7 for anyone with a browser to witness.

Homeland Security updates emergency preparedness site

The conflict in the Middle East, the continuing dangers of terrorism and the tornados, flooding and wildfires recently experienced in parts of the country have prompted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to update its Web site.
The redesigned Ready Web site includes updated emergency preparedness resources, including special preparedness information for pet owners, senior citizens, and individuals with disabilities and special needs. It also provides Americans with increased state and local information so they can learn about the types of emergencies that are more likely to happen in their area and the plans that have been established to deal with these emergencies.

Beware of digital dirt

With all the media talk about online governmental spying lately, a similar alarming issue involving private industry is starting to get some online traction.
Techdirt cites a recent study that shows more than a third of employers have eliminated a job candidate after digging up digital dirt through postings uncovered through online snooping of chat rooms, social networking sites like Facebook and blog postings.

The Techdirt blog has been all over this issue, too, noting that trolling Web sites and open groups where opinion is posted lets employers compose a digital record that can serve as your “inadvertent resume.”

I often teach a class to journalists on how to background people through the Internet and it’s amazing what we have found about school board presidents, corporate leaders, even the reporters themselves. Through search engine queries of discussuon groups and public data bases, we’ve easily uncovered political views, sexual proclivities and opinions about controversial social issues that provide a pretty comprehensive personality profile on the people we spot checked.

So it’s no surprise that corporate folks would do similar checks before investing in a new hire. And if they’re doing it, so, you can be sure, is the government.

It all gets back to what my Mom used to tell me: Don’t do or say anything that would embarass you if the whole town read about it in the newspaper tomorrow. On that Net that means that anything you post can usually be found by anybody. That is, afer all, why we call it the World Wide Web.

Next Page »