Category: Tech

Nifty gifts

I don’t consider myself to be a particularly good gift giver, but a couple of my sisters can have a knack for finding fun and/or unusual presents. For Christmas my sister Jean gave me a Peanuts wall clock that plays the “Linus and Lucy” theme on the hour, but not when it’s dark. It’s hanging in my office now.

My sister Marianne found some cool things this Christmas. 3D Holiday Specs look like 3D glasses, but when you look at Christmas tree lights with them you see them transformed into Santa’s face, or snowflakes, or stars, etc. It’s fun seeing which patterns give the best effects.

Something else Marianne found, that’s both fun and practical, is a type of wallet I’d never seen before, made of a folded sheet of Tyvek. Mighty Wallets come in all sorts of designs, including some with Star Trek themes. Highly recommended!

Ho, ho, ho Nöelco

One of the Christmas gifts for my son this year is a Norelco rechargeable razor. Norelco is a unit of Philips in Holland, the company that introduced Compact Cassettes, LaserDisc video, and co-developed Compact Discs with Sony.

In the 1960’s Norelco started to advertise using a stop-motion animated Santa in their holiday TV commercials. When I was a kid I looked forward to seeing the Norelco Santa. Here’s a video survey of his appearances through the years. The first voice you’ll hear is one the all-time great announcers, Peter Thomas, born in 1924 and, from what I can tell, still working.

Norelco’s Santa disappeared in the 1990’s, but this year he made a digital comeback.

Christmas Eve!

This is me, Christmas 1976, shortly after I had my first paying radio station gig. My brother-in-law Marc is in the background…

… and this was what I was reacting to. A beautiful, old Zenith console tube radio that my brother Jeff gave me. He traded an enlarger for it. (Back in the age of analog photography there were these little things called negatives and to make a print you had to… oh, never mind.) Years later, I had it refinished and restored.

The radio was one of the last made before war production took over, so it was 35 years old on that Christmas Day, which was… 35 years ago?? Yike! I’m not going to think about that and instead I’ll go get some ‘nog.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Fe Fi Fo FiOS

I’m one of the lucky ones who has Verizon FiOS. Not only is the Internet service the best there is for American consumers, HDTV is also the best it can be, because the system delivers the signals exactly as they are received, with no re-compression. I do have one quibble, however, and that’s the HDTV DVR. It pretty much sucks. So it’s good to see that Verizon is working on improving their set top boxes, with an eye toward eliminating STB’s all together.

http://youtu.be/QogfVxtsOP8

And I want FiOS TV to carry BBC America in HD.

Xfinity by any other name is Comcast

Comcast is going door-to-door today, trying to get Verizon FiOS customers to switch to Xfinity. Ha! Fat chance. I gave the two sales guys a real earful, not that they deserved it personally, telling them how, in 2005, Comcast left me without Internet service for a month. A MONTH! The only thing that was working was e-mail, because it came from their own domain. Finally, after I’d pushed and complained almost every day, a technician called from a van, on his way to a substation, and I used traceroute to help him find the dead gateway.

Comcast offered no credit for the loss of service, so I asked for an adjustment and the request was denied. Sporatic outages continued after that, the same as they’d been previously. I got tired of resetting the cable modem, and I knew FiOS was coming to town. That was when I vowed to switch the moment FiOS was available. March, 2006, I saw the fiber optic cable being installed on the street, and I called Verizon to order service.

Since then I’ve had essentially no problems. Oh, a few times when I happened to be online at midnight the router went offline for 3-5 minutes, undoubtedly for some scheduled work, but that’s been it. As confirmed by the FCC, Verizon FiOS is not only the fastest home Internet service, it is also the only one that is perfectly consistent throughout the day.

As I told the Comcast/Xfinity reps at the door today when I refused the discount they were offering, there is NO WAY, AT ALL, I will EVER switch back to Comcast, as long as I can get FiOS in this house. Period.

P.S. By the way, my Comcast e-mail address still works. For whatever reason, it was never deleted. It’s dougpratt5 on comcast dot net. Everything sent to it is automatically forwarded to one of my dograt mailboxes.

Recovering and restoring sounds and pictures

For Thanksgiving, WBUR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook rebroadcast a program from last year, about the discovery and restoration of the Bill Savory collection of Jazz radio broadcasts from the late 1930’s and early 40’s.

[audio:http://audio.wbur.org/storage/2010/09/onpoint_0910_2.mp3|titles=On Point: The Savory Collection]

It takes a lot of technical know-how and painstaking work to copy old 78 rpm transcription records and then clean them up digitally, without losing the vitality of the original performance. Compared to dealing with old audio recordings, handling and restoring movie film is an even more difficult and expensive undertaking. Here’s a fascinating short documentary on the Chaplin at Keystone restoration project.

http://youtu.be/voEGsQj4CPs

As wonderful as it is that computers have made it possible to salvage, reclaim, and reinvigorate these materials to an extent never before possible, I wonder about the future. There’s so much technology involved, with so many different digital formats, how will people be able to see and hear this stuff in a hundred years? Which reminds me. I have VHS home videos from a full-size camcorder that I need to transfer to the computer.