The Lance J. Technoweb

I have heard that users of the iPhone aren't as happy with their battery life when compared with BlackBerry owner experiences. Since both devices use the same battery technology, it seems that either the devices have substantially different power efficiency numbers, or that iPhone owners make more use of their device. So I've looked at some commonly available statistics to see if I can determine if people use the iPhone more than the BlackBerry. The results are astounding. NetApps has recently published their "Mobile Web Browser" statistics, and it looks like the iPhone accounts for roughly 64% of all mobile web sessions (April 2009). In contrast, the BlackBerry accounts for 3.1% of mobile web sessions. So we know out of the gate the people use their iPhones more than BlackBerry users. But this simple statistic doesn't show everything: According to ChangeWave Research 's December 2008 market share numbers, the iPhone acounts for 23% of the smartphone ma...

Today I got around to measuring the electricity consumption of the cable TV box that is in my home - a Comcast Motorola DCT-3412. It's an HDTV Cable TV box with DVR. Is this "powered off" cable box costing American taxpayers hundreds of millions? I measured the box's consumption by plugging it into my awesome Kill -A-Watt power meter and measuring the wattage. Surprisingly, I found that my cable box consumes just about as much power when "off" than when "on"! Here's what I measured with my Kill-O-Watt meter: "Power Off": 30 watts Watching TV: 31 watts Recording TV: 31 watts Playing back a recorded program: 31 watts Why provide a power button when it makes so little difference in power consumption? Who knows! Electricity Cost So I did some math to figure out how much 30 watts of consistent power use costs, using recent prices for electricity around here: (17¢ per kwh x 30 watts x 8760 hour...

If cable TV customers experienced over-the-air digital TV, the cable industry might lose a good chunk of their customers. Here's the story: A few weeks ago I decided that I was going to convert some old home VHS videos to DVD, and so I went shopping for a simple DVD recorder. I figure a DVD recorder would be more useful, less frustrating, and more fun that some video gadget for my PC. SoI logged onto Amazon and I bought myself a DVD recorder. And just for fun, I bought a model with a modern digital TV tuner inside. I've never played with over-the-air digital TV, so this was my chance. Well, the DVD burner works pretty well (more on that in a subsequent post). But I really want to talk about the Digital TV tuner. In short, over-the-air digital TV is something that the cable TV companies must have a lot of fear of. When I was a kid, we watched all 7 local channels - Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 25, 38 and 56. Yeah, there were other channels, but they were totally unwatchable. And e...

I'm really quite tired of the Spam that looks a lot like advertisements from Saks Fifth Avenue. Here's the story: I have an email address that I only use with my friends. I don't hand it out to retailers, and I don't reply to anyone I don't know very well with my email address. However, somehow I got on a mailing list that is sending out "Saks Fifth Avenue" related advertisements on an almost DAILY basis. I've never shopped or purchased anything from a Sak's store of any kind, yet someone has decided that I deserve an inordinate amount of information about stuff I'm not interested in. Did someone steal my email address off of one of my friend's address book? Was my address published on-line and scraped from somewhere? Did someone somehow get ahold of my email address and sell it to some "bulk email" agency? I certainly don't know, and these spams don't even make a claim on where they got their list. All I know is th...

Yes, you read the headline. Apple's next big event, to be held on September 9th, is called "Let's Rock". And the image included within their invite seems to show a silhouette of an iPod listener jumping off of a rock. So what's this all about? Clearly it is about an iPod with new GPS capabilities. Take an iPod, add a GPS receiver chip (like the iPhone), and install a few hundred megabytes of map data (like most handheld GPS units have) and you have a fully capable Apple-branded handheld GPS. The GPS market has quickly turned into a HUGE market, and it would be silly for Apple to ignore this market. And there is no doubt that Jobs thinks that he can do a much better job than Garmin, Magellan, and TomTom. Couple that with the fact that virtually all of the GPS devices out there leave much to be desired in terms of usability, extensibility, and update-ability. An iPod-style device will address all these issues, and can undoubtably be priced to radically change ...

I was overhearing a conversion on the train today, and it was so crazy that I feel the need to repeat it here. The context: A middle-aged guy was advising a friend on buying a Mac: They're working on creating an Office for the Mac, but its very hard because a program can't use files. The Mac doesn't have a file system - that's why it doesn't have a C: drive. A program can't store files. Oh, it does have a file system, but its locked down, so each application has to use a special API to store files. They lock it down in order to protect the system from viruses - that's why it doesn't get them - but without a real C: drive, it's extremely difficult for programmers to write software for it. I mean, hackers have found a way to get to the file system, but as soon as they access the file system it voids the warranty, because viruses could then multiply. Plus they want to protect the iTunes files from being stolen. I found it odd that the advisor knew s...

My trusty Belkin 802.11g router started having problems the other day. When surfing through Google Maps, the router would stop communicating with the Internet. Restarting the router was the only way to correct the problem. It would lock up, and no other computer would be able to reach the Internet. Internal LAN connectivity continued just fine. I have the latest firmware updates, so that wasn't the problem. So then I turned off the Router's "enerprise-class" Firewall, and that fixed it! The firewall was described to me to be a "stateful packet inspection" type of firewall. Turning it off address the reliability problems - now - no more crashes so far!