Category: Tech

A cool experiment

My son wanted a small refrigerator in his dorm room. A freezer compartment was neither needed, nor wanted. Another consideration was compressor noise. I took a chance on Haier’s NuCool, which technically is a cooler, and not a refrigerator, because it doesn’t have a compressor. The NuCool uses thermoelectric cooling, which has limited effectiveness compared to conventional refrigerators that circulate a coolant.

At home, with an ambient temperature of 68 degrees, the NuCool did fine, and even went below 37 degrees, according to a thermometer I had placed inside. But in the dorm, without air conditioning, where the room temp was over 80, the NuCool managed only 50 degrees. This morning it was in the safe region on the thermometer, but considering NuCool’s inability to maintain a constant temperature, my inclination is to return it to Target and buy Haier’s conventional cube fridge.

Follow-up: The NuCool is a success, assuming it holds up. It seems to manage a 40-degree difference in temperature, and when it was up to 50 the room was probably 90. Since then it’s held at 35 degrees, even with the thermostat turned down a notch.

Ad-vanced searching

My “real” e-mail address is on Verizon. Everything sent to a DogRat.com address is automatically forwarded to my Verizon mailbox. Verizon doesn’t provide its own web mail access, but instead uses Yahoo!

Two things about using Yahoo! for web mail are:

  • When exiting Yahoo!, the focus is taken away from the address field, and put on the search field, which assumes the next thing the user wants to do is search. Very annoying and unacceptable.
  • Lots of ads. Also annoying, but accepted.

Many of the ads feature this woman’s face, selling all sorts of different, always questionable, products. Sometimes she’s called Julie, or Candy, or whatever.

Obviously she’s not officially endorsing anything, and her image is being used without permission. She looks French, and she’s apparently a newscaster, so using that Yahoo! search field that I’m always forced into, and entering “french newscaster,” the name Mélissa Theuriau is the #1 result.

Just another web site

It’s not the Internet, which was developed under the direction of Bob Taylor. It’s not Xerox PARC, where the GUI, Ethernet, and laser printing were developed under the guidance of the same Bob Taylor, and it’s not the Wordwide Web, developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. It’s just another Web site. A Web site that only now is going to have its own data centers. It’s Facebook.

Does the human interest story behind the start of Facebook, and the fact that it’s current and has 20-something appeal, make it more worthy of a major motion picture than the creation of the Internet and the WWW? Doesn’t matter, because the movie The Social Network is coming…

I like Facebook. Has it changed my life? No, WordPress has had a much bigger effect on me personally. I’ve been on the Internet from home since early 1994, and Facebook came along much too late in my online experience for me to be awed by it.

By the way, the version of radiohead’s “creep” that’s heard in that movie trailer is by the Belgian singing group the Scala & Kolacny Brothers Choir, who I featured here a couple of years ago.

The Revolution will not be colorized

If you’re like me, you’ll think this is the most interesting thing you’ve seen today. Full color photographs, not colorized, taken in Russia between 1910-15, by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii.

Hey, wait a sec’… the Library of Congress bought those photographic plates back in ’48?? That was only a year before the Soviets had their first atomic bomb test! Some Commie sympathizer in the LoC wasted American post-war taxpayer money on Russian photos?? I’m outraged!