Tag Archives: products

Reviews

The Henri Chamoux Archeophone

It is because of Mr. Chamoux’s creation that we can preserve musical history, come down to us in the form of cylinders from the good old days. I just had a listen to a few MP3 files published by the good folks at the UCSB Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project, and I am truly thankful to Mr. Chamoux for building the machine. I am also grateful to UCSB for taking the time to preserve an important part of our heritage. There’s a Wired article on this as well, written by Rachel Metz, which is where I found out about all this wonderful stuff. (Photo courtesy of the Phonograph Makers’ Pages)

Chamoux

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Thoughts

Designed by Braggadocio

I do web design and development consulting in my free time. I always strive for quality and originality in my designs. It never fails to amaze me how people always fall for cheap, imitative designs, simply because they’re flashier.

These “web designers” promise more traffic, more exposure, better looks, more and better everything, and of course they don’t deliver on any of those things, except on the surface. Yes, the designs may be flashier, and buttons might move, or the top banner might be in Flash, and it might do something that’ll make the site owner go “Wow”, but that’s all empty. It doesn’t do anything for the site’s substance, nor does it do anything for the search engines, because the site hasn’t been properly coded for them. Or, they’ll design the site in Frontpage… The telltale signs are easy to spot: _vti files are everywhere, the page weight is large, and the graphics just aren’t that good. But people fall for this stuff!

It never fails to amaze me… It leaves me speechless, really. I compare the bragging with the product delivered, and I can see the wide gap between what’s been promised and actually created. Yet the site owners don’t see it. How can I make them see where the real value lies?

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Reviews

New Google Calendar

Just read about Google and its work on developing CL2 – a web calendar. The link will take you to a page with screenshots. CL2 will be done in AJAX, like Gmail, and it’ll be tightly integrated with it, but what I think is really cool is its integration with other calendaring products, like iCal for the Mac. Yay! Integration and information-sharing across programs is always the way to go!

If CL2 and iCal could work seamlessly, and if CL2 would provide a dynamically generated web page which would combine multiple iCal calendars, that would be ideal. What bothers me about iCal is that it won’t let me combine my Home and Work calendars into a single view when I publish them to my .Mac account. If I could do that with CL2, that would be great!

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Reviews

MonsterPod: the gooey tripod

This has got to be one of the coolest products I’ve seen so far. It’s made of a visco-elastic morphing polymer that will stick to virtually anything, and these two fellows, a father and son team, made it into a tripod for compact digital cameras. I hope they sell a whole bunch of them, it’s pretty cool stuff! Here’s their site.

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Reviews

A personal plane that flies and drives

Just caught this article on Discovery News. I’ve seen concepts like this before, but they usually looked just plain awful. This one actually looks cool, and I hope very much that it makes it to market. The fuel economy would be better than my MINI’s, and that’s impressive!

There are two photos available. The first is with the wings folded, ready to park in the garage. The second is with the wings extended, ready for take-off. (Photos courtesy of Terrafugia.)

Terrafugia 2

Terrafugia 1

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