In my humble and estimable opinion, Inkjet's are right up there with Bernie Madoff when it comes to hoovering up your money. If you have kids, the cost of replacement inkjet cartridges during their primary school years could in all likelihood pay for an ivy league tuition. The printer companies sucker you in with ultra cheap prices on the entry level inkjet printers just like the Cellular providers get you with a cheap phone. Once they get you in for a Penny, they're into you for their Pound. Personally I am not sure what is the more usurious, the amount of coin the phone company charges for text messages or the cost of inkjet cartridges, both are blatant ripoffs. Thankfully, most of the cheap inkjets printers give up the ghost within a few years, but the intervening time will be filled with jams, agonizingly slow printing, clogs and endless trips to Staples for more ink. One Ink or two ink refills and you have probably already shelled out the original purchase price. Before you do your cost bene analysis, it has been my experience that the ink cartridges don't last nearly as many pages as the manufacturers estimates. Don't count on getting cheap third party replacement ink, the manufacturers change the cartridge design frequently and some have chips inside them that will expire the cartridge and render it useless after a period of time. Believe me, they guard this revenue with an intensity unmatched by the most bloodthirsty Yakuza. Even if you already have one, just toss it or sell it on e-bay and get yourself a decent Laser Printer. It might cost you three or four times the price of the cheapy inkjet, but a good laser printer is worth that differential many times over. There is also a hidden discount over an inkjet, the laser printer will probably come with toner. Sure the Inkjet comes with ink, but it won't last 1/20th as long as the laser toner. Bear in mind, that replacement toner cartridges are mind numbingly expensive, but they last a good long time. My Dell laser's original cartridges lasted for well over a year and my kids have by now printed off a hardcopy of the internet. If you are a professional photographer, by all means get a high quality inkjet, but your average household will be much better served with a laser,

Though not exactly new (it dates from at least the 1970's) cooking Sous Vide (which is French for "under vacuum") is gaining considerable popularity. Essentially, the food is vacuum packed and cooked for a relatively long time in a hot water bath at low temperature (typically below boiling). The resulting food can then be frozen or stored cold until it is ready to be served. When ready to be served, it is heated in a hot water bath and served as is or flash browned. The water bath is typically temperature controlled by a Laboratory Immersion Heater which can maintain temperature to within a few degree's F or less. Precise temperature control is essential as the temperatures can be a few degrees over the level where bacteria can thrive. The low temperature allows the meat to be cooked at a temp low enough that the proteins cannot form tough chains (At least that's how I understand it) The beauty of this method is that you can prepare a ton of food that requires little skilled preparation on site. This method was used to prepare 5 star food for hundreds of Katrina victims in D.C. Oddly enough Wired ran a short piece about Nathan Myrhvold (MS Chief Tech Guy) being an early proponent of the method. Also apparently French Laundry cooks their short ribs for 36hrs Sous Vide.

The Maltese Falcon is without question the most audacious sailing yacht in the world, and gets my vote for "Most Likely to Appear as a Villains Superyacht in a James Bond Movie". The last decent Bond superyacht would have been Nabila, Adnan Kashoggi's former boat. The time is right for a "Green" Bond villain, and this should be his ride, hell it's even got it's own submarine (sadly lacking frikkin lazer beams). The most impressive thing about the Falcon though is it's amazing sailing rig. Combining the best elements of the Junk Rig and Traditional Square Rigging, with a hefty dose of technology, the ship can purportedly be "sailed" singlehandedly. The sails on the Falcon automatically furl into the hollow masts, which unfortunately eliminates belaying pins and manly winches. There is effectively no "Rigging" in the traditional sense as the spars/yards are fixed to the masts which have no stays and rotate to trim the sails. Best of all it's for sale for the reasonable sum of 100m Euros, or, you can rent it for 300k Euros per week, give or take (Food and Drink NOT Included)

HP dropped the new Mini 5101 Netbook today, and I have to say it looks like a winner. HP is kindof an odd duck in the Netbook world and they have had a somewhat incoherent product suite. Their first Netbook had the form factor and design right (sporting an Apple like aluminum case and awesome keyboard & display), but it was saddled with a high price, Windows Vista and the less than stellar Via processor (rather than the de-riguer Intel Atom). HP then followed that up with a me too Netbook that offered nothing to diferentiate itself from say, the Lenovo S10 I am writing this on. Add to that a "Mini" with a 12" screen and stir. The Mini 5101 looks like the inexplicably good looking child of awkward parents. More... It has a 10 inch LCD available in the standard 1024 x 600 resolution, or you can opt for the high end 1366 x 768 sortof HD. Like the first Mini it features exemplary construction with a brushed aluminum lid and magnesium chassis and 95% full sized Macbook like chicklet keyboard. The new HP Mini has an Intel Atom processor and a unique set of Hard Disk options. The standard drives are high performance 7,200 rpm spinning disks, but optional are the first (to my knowledge) high capacity SSD (solid state disks) offered in a Netbook @ 80 or 128 gb. I could not find specs on the SSD's however and they vary dramatically in performance, given the high price of decent SSD's (The OCZ SSD I mentioned in an earlier post - which will outperform a 7200rpm drive) I suspect they are the low end, but the pricing details will reveal that. You can get the Mini 5150 with XP, Vista or some McLinux and it starts @ 450ドル. This is a pretty serious computer though, and like HP's other Netbooks and many German cars, the "as ordered" price will probably be at least 1/3 to 1/2 higher than the loss leader.

After acquiring the Buffalo LinkStation NAS, the next step was to move our photo's and music onto the new drive. Having wrestled with iTunes before and experienced the difficulty of rebuilding your iTunes library on a new machine, I hopped over to the iPod Lounge (www.ilounge.com) to search for a better way. Unsurprisingly, this was one of the most popular topics, and as usual iPod Lounge delivered a nice succinct rundown of the available options.More... The preferred method seemed to an iPod utility called CopyTrans, which promised to re-build your computer iTunes library from your iPod. Long and short, it worked exactly as advertised and everything was wrapped up in 20 minutes. WindSolutions also sells some other iTunes utilities, including one that can purportedly repair corrupt iPod files. I can't vouch for that one, but I can tell you I am very happy with CopyTrans. CopyTrans is available in a free trial version (only does 100 songs) or the unlimited for 20ドル.

and Grand Central services are about to be re-launched as Google
Voice. Currently the service is only open to legacy Grand Central
users, but Google has just acquired 1 million phone numbers from
Level 3 in Boulder. Just from the basic information on the Google
Voice home page, Voice seems to have an exceptionally rich and
deep feature set, covering the gamut of VOIP features and best of
all, it's free (at least for individuals). While it's clear that it is going
to be a slam dunk for consumers, it's less clear but potentially more
revolutionary for the Enterprise.
More...
With the addition of Voice, Google has a very wide and complete
communication & collaboration product set, but where is it all leading?
Currently, there is little integration between the various products on
the Enterprise side. The possibilities are staggering, imagine if Waves
and Voice were integrated, now you're cooking with gas, all of your
project communications Voice, SMS, E-Mail, BBS, Documents and
Instant messaging could be accessed from one place, and most
importantly searched with Google's familiar search. Why not add the
RSS feeds as well, Project Tweets, Calendar and etc. The possibilities
are really intriguing, The trouble for Google in my opinion is how to
maintain focus and avoid falling into the same trap as Microsoft, who's
Massively integrated product suite is clunky, complex, bloated and
just really tries to do too much, ending up doing none of it well. I
have no idea where this will end up for Google, but it is terrifically
exciting and I can't wait to see what happens.

If You Are Not Using SaaS Yet, You're Falling Behind, Fast....

Software as a Service and the Social Web

Two of the most important trends in Information Technology are the burgeoning ranks of mature web based hosted software applications and the Social Web or Web 2.0. Truthfully, and while a whole host of consultants would maintain otherwise, there is really nothing truly *New* about either of these things (this is true for most things in Information Technology BTW). Today's Web 2.0 is yesterday's Usenet, Chat or BBS. Yesterday's Mainframe, ASP and AOL is today's SaaS. Facebook, LinkedIn and My Space are merely more mature than earlier social collaboration and communications tools. As a small business owner, you are probably fixated on trying to figure out what you SHOULD be doing in the Social Web, and that's a good thing. Information wants to be free and tools want to be used. But don't loose sight of the forest for the trees More... In the rush to join the ranks of the twitterati and partake of the blogophoria, you're missing what I consider the most critical lesson and aspect of the whole Web 2.0 thing, and that is that these social web apps represent the first real consumerization of modern SaaS (putting aside search and e-mail). Facebook is a huge, complex and rich SaaS offering and you use it everyday without a second thought ! What happened to the traditional excuses given by IT Depts and Business Owners for not moving to hosted or open source software? Sensitive Data? Facebook knows all about you, your family and friends. Security ? Do you honestly think you or your IT Dept can do security better than Google? But I need technical support ! No you don't, you only think you do - after all how helpful and responsive was the last call center you called, chances are you'll get better help from the web anyway. Dump MS Office, Sharepoint, IIS and above all Access and then put the servers on E-bay next to Sarah Palin's plane. Loose the distraction, cost and limits of all your office productivity suites and small business software, it's holding you back.

Photo by Alecani on Flickr

The writing has been on the wall for some time now, but I think this is shark jumping time for the traditional hard disk drive, at least in Notebooks and Netbooks. Finally here is an affordable (~300ドル), reasonably sized (120GB) solid state disk with a dramatic performance improvement over HDD's.
More... Given the cost per MB advantage that HDD's still enjoy, I am sure they will still be around in desktops, though I would not be surprised if we see more hybrid solutions where the O.S, swap space and other I/O bottleneck prone data are stored on the Solid State Disk, and less frequently used files are sent out to pasture on the HDD. It would also make sense to have an algorithm to intelligently manage moving files between the two as needs arise (Hello EMC). In a RAID configuration, these things would kill ! Laptop Mag has all the test data, and a before and after performance comparison on an SSD retrofit into a two year old laptop, it's eye opening. Check it out here : Laptop Mag OCZ SSD

After years of trying to get a cheap workable storage and backup solution for our importanthome files I finally broke down and bought one of these last week. Some years back I had abad experience with an early Netgear NAS so I was a little leery of home NAS solutions, buta disk failure and continued frustrations with XP network sharing had left me despondantand desperate for a solution. I had heard nothing but good things about Buffalo, and MicroCenter had these on sale, so I gave it a whirl. Oddly enough Mr. Grey Ponytail the MicroCenter worker almost talked me out of it by giving me incorrect info about the product. Ponytail insisted that this device needed client software installed on every PC that wouldaccess it and that it wouldn't just show up as a windows workgroup member. Turns outhe was only impersonating a geek and had no idea what he was talking about, it doesn't needclient SW and it does show up as any other network device would in windows. Anyway, the setup went relatively smoothly with only a minor glitch and a stupid one at that. More... Buffalo's utility installer software needs to "find" the machine on the network, if it can't, the installer doesn't finish - better design would be to finish installing the utility SW and then run a config program. Buffalo's documentation is pretty much crap as well and doesn't even include instructions on how to swap a drive in the even of a RAID drive failure. The product itself isas advertised and exceeded my expectations for performance even on RAID 1. I also found theconfiguration using the web control panel comprehensive and well done. Considering thatthe LinkStation is only a bit more expensive than a 2 Tb USB external drive, it kindof a bargain.I'll update this post if anything untoward occurs with the box in the future, but so far so good.

I really think Google Waves has the potential to be a true game changer in the coming years. I have used Google's Enterprise Apps version for the past few years or so, as well as Picasa, Maps, Search, Sketchup, Gmail etc. All of these offerings are good in their own right, but the "Package" was lacking something that was keeping it from being coherent. I did not know it until I saw it, But I think Waves might be the missing link. Here are a couple of factors (for lack of a better word) which I think have the possibility to make this a real breakaway moment for Google.

1. While pre-web generations were focused on perfection of all things, post web folks aren't. Stay with me for a second here. High Fidelity, HDTV, ever more complex software (hello MS Office, I am talkin to you), etc etc. The coming generations, the ones who came into their formative years post millennium are more focused on convenience over perfection. Their environment is remarkably different than the one I and my cohorts matured in, in their world nearly everything is disposable and impermanent and often free. My kids happily watch a television program or movie on the computer usually for free when and where they want. The quality is lousy, but they honestly don't care. Media, communications and software are all available from multiple channels for low or no cost and are disposable. Texting is a crummy way to communicate, but it is convenient and free, e-mail and e-mail software is largely the same, ditto for cell phones, music, ipods nearly anything else you can think of. This multichannel commodity mindset has yet to hit the world of productivity and collaboration SW, but when it does it will rapidly change the IT landscape. Open standards, strong search, flexibility and convenience are all going to become a necessity to effectively deliver IT services in this multi-channel world. With Waves, I think Google is extremely well positioned to be serve this demographic.

2. Search is likely to be increasingly important in the productivity world. I for one, NEVER manually categorize any of my e-mails and excepting spam, never delete any. Why should I? I can retrieve any e-mail in seconds with search, and the same is true for documents. Any non-professional categorization (and many professional ones) are imperfect. How many times have you sat in a colleagues office waiting for them to dig through all their e-mail folders to try to remember where they put that e-mail. Now add mutli-channel multi-format communications and collaboration and stir. How are you going to effectively keep track of all that? Waves, that's how. Google has replaced the tired "folder" metaphor with the much more relevant thread or Wave's metaphor. I also happen to be of the opinion that this will also replace the "team room" metaphor popular in Sharepoint and collaboration products. Waves puts things into context as apposed to categories, the context being the communications chain. When I go back to try to get a document, or e-mail or whatever, what is more helpful? That it is in a folder or that it is in a conversation? The first thing I always want to know is the context of the thing, what are the communications on either side of it? Waves should be able to do this much better than it's competitors.

3. What universities do matters and universities do open software. IMHO, this has been and will continue to drive the move to open source. My IT colleagues are scared witless about "not having support". But forces are strongly and rapidly pushing away that fear. Increasingly crappy and expensive customer support of overly complex and buggy COTS software and a mature open source catalogue with robust online collaboration tools have nullified the actual risk of "not having support".

When all of the above is taken into account, I'd say the needle is swinging in Google's direction, slowly but surely. Agree? Disagree?

These remarkable images were captured by Thierry Legault (a very accomplished amateur photographer) and show the shuttle and HST crossing in front of the sun. The shuttle and HST were travelling 15K MPH and the event lasted less than a second. You can read more about the shot and the mission in this article by the Daily Mail.

If you have been to Venice, you have probably noticed the often intricately carved well heads in the center of nearly every campo.  Since Venice is very nearly under the salt water which fills its canals, it would seem unlikely that a simple well could provide potable water.  As it happens, they are not wells at all, they are cisterns which collect and filter rainwater.  Basically, the Venetians excavated the plaza to a depth of around 10 feet in the form of an funnel.  The hole was then lined with clay.  The well was situated at the deepest part of the clay funnel and constructed out of porous bricks without mortar.  The area inside the funnel and around the well was then filled with sand and covered with brick or stone.  Rainwater would flow off the roofs of the city's buildings into storm drains in the plaza where it would flow through the sand (filtering it) and fill the clay cistern.  Clean water could then be brought up through the well mouth.

USCG 47 Motor Life Boat
The Coast Guard commissioned the 47 foot MLB to replace the venerable 44 foot MLB which had been in service since the 60's.  The last 44 is scheduled to be decommissioned in May of this year.  The 47 footer is made of aluminum rather than steel, and is capable of around 30mph.  Like the 44 it is self righting, self bailing and the engines will remain running during a rollover.  What must be a welcome improvement, the vessel incorporates both and enclosed helm and an exposed bridge for better visibility.  Check out the video on the right to see what the boat and crew are capable of. [埋込みオブジェクト:http://www.youtube.com/v/Y3HdMe4zOx4&hl=en&fs=1]

The Leavitt-Riedler Pumping Engine (1894) is a historic steam engine and has been declared a national landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the coal-fired engine was designed by noted engineer Erasmus Darwin Leavitt, Jr. (1836-1916) of Cambridge, Massachusetts, built by N.F. Palmer Jr. & Co. and the Quintard Iron Works, New York, and installed in 1894 as Engine No. 3 of the Chestnut Hill Station to pump water for the Boston Water Works Corporation. At its normal speed of 50 revolutions per minute, it pumped 20,000,000 gallons in 24 hours.  The engine itself is of an unusual triple expansion, three-crank rocker design, with pistons 13.7, 24.375, and 39 inches in diameter and 6 foot stroke. Each rocker is connected both to a crankshaft with 15-foot flywheel and to a large pump's plunger rod.

The engine was removed from service in 1928 but remains in its original location and will soon be the centerpiece of the Waterworks Museum along with three other period steam engines.