Category: Tech

Logitech 50% off

Hot on the heels of Logitech Squeezeboxing their CEO out the door, I got this e-mail offer for half-off any single Logitech product.

I suspected it might be a phish, so rather than click on the link in the ad that went to logitech-newsletter2.com, I went to logitech.com to look at the Squeezebox Touch, an item that I’ve been very interested in, but not for $300.

I doubted the discount code in the e-mail ad would work, but whatta ya know… it did.

So I ordered it and will hook it up to the living room stereo, where it will sit next to a 25-year-old turntable. Slacker is one of the music services Logitech has, and lately I’ve been listening to their BBC Radiophonic Workshop station. It has all sorts of stuff, from classic British movie and TV themes to avant-garde jazz to sound effects.

Stupid !@@!$@#$##$%^ idiots!

Verizon FiOS workers are on strike. I don’t know if one of them screwed up the TV schedule, or if TCM’s information was wrong, but I set the DVR to record an old, rare movie for somebody — something that isn’t available on video — and it recorded only the first hour of it! AAUGH!! I am so sick and fu*king tired of damned stupid mistakes like this. If we are now supposed to be recording based on program data and not time, THEN THE DATA HAS TO BE !@#$%^&* CORRECT!!!!!! Or, if the running time is in doubt, as was the case here apparently, at least record too much, and not too little. I am REALLY PIS*ED OFF about this!

Follow-up: Tonight, the FiOS DVR listed G-Men from 1935 as the movie at 8, but the original 1932 Scarface was shown. The entry on TCM’s web site was correct. Somebody, somewhere, is screwing up.

In living color

RCA CEO David Sarnoff was a ruthless businessman. His great insight and accomplishment was seeing the potential of broadcasting as an entertainment medium and making network radio and television a reality. But Sarnoff didn’t hesitate to steal technology, as he did from Philo T. Farnsworth, and he crushed the great inventor Edwin Armstrong, who had been a close friend.

Having said that, RCA’s engineers did an exemplary job of creating the all-electronic NTSC color television system that was backwards-compatible with existing black & white sets. It was Ampex, however, that introduced b&w video tape recording in 1956. Two years later, RCA modified an Ampex deck so it could record in color, and the amazing results are in this video. If only this technology had been available during WWII, we would have an entirely different historical perception of the era.

Information on the restoration of this historic recording is at this link.

FCC confirms FiOS delivers as promised

Ars Technica reports that the FCC has studied internet service provider speeds and, no surprise to me, found Verizon FiOS to be the best in America. Not only does it have the fastest throughput, the speed is consistent throughout the day.

Speaking of FiOS, a few weeks ago I talked about trouble with the battery that keeps the FiOS landline phone working during a power failure. We lost power for a few hours this past Sunday, due to “animal contact with equipment” according to the power company, and the battery was OK during the entire outage.

Revue review

The Logitech Revue with Google TV now costs a mere $99. The Revue has been a flop and the hope is the price drop will make it possible to compete with the Roku 2 and Apple TV. The Revue has some quirks, but it puts Google Chrome on an HDTV screen, and that recommends it for those whose viewing distance relative to the screen size makes text legible.

The Endurance of Bluehost

My former web hosting service, iPower, was OK until it was bought out by Endurance International, which is in turn owned in part by Accel-KKR. As iPower’s technical problems became more chronic, I prepared an exit strategy by getting an account with Bluehost. But I waited too long to jump, and iPower cut me off for using 30 GB of my unlimited storage. I was forced to spend an extremely stressful weekend doing nothing but making the switch.

Bluehost’s founder, Matt Heaton, had a definite “my way or the highway” attitude, but the service was reliable, if not necessarily fast. The servers are over-committed — according to Domain Tools I’m one of almost 3000 sites sharing a single server, although many seem to be junk sites or placeholders (dograt.net is a placeholder). To speed things up I added caching in WordPress and switched to memory-resident PHP processing on the server.

Since the start of this year there have been rumblings that Bluehost was sold to Endurance International. There was a widely circulated announcement of the iPower buyout, but there’s been no notice of Bluehost being sold; however, Heaton has said goodbye: It’s been a blast!!! Now its time to move on… So something is up at Bluehost.

Because of my bad experience with iPower, I’m on the lookout for trouble with Bluehost, and lately I’ve been finding it. This weekend the site went down at least twice. The SQL database server was offline yesterday, and the server was unavailable when I got up this morning. When I tried to log onto the management console, I saw this message:

Refusing to allow you to login because your server box468.bluehost.com is not responsive enough right now. Please allow a little time for responsiveness to return before trying again.

Bluehost offers something that I had thought was a great idea — a Pro plan for $20/month that supposedly provides more CPU and memory, without resorting to a VPS (virtual private server). I was seriously considering switching to this plan when my account comes up for renewal next month, but if Bluehost is now part of Endurance International I’m worried about the service’s policies changing and its reliability slipping.