Greg In The Desert

Smarthome has pre-released a few of dual band Insteon devices. These devices use the wired Insteon protocol and also broadcast and receive the wireless Insteon protocol. These devices also double as as an Access Point.

The new LampLinc also comes in a new housing with manual controls.

LampLinc – INSTEON Plug-In Lamp Dimmer Module (Dual-Band), 2-Pin Item# 2457D2 Price: $49.99

The INSTEON LampLinc Dimmer (Dual-Band) is a full-featured plug-in lamp dimmer that can be remotely controlled by a RemoteLinc, KeypadLinc, or any other INSTEON controller. This simple-to-use plug-in dimmer has advanced features like an adjustable ramp rate that slowly brings the lamp on, a preset dim level that stores your preferred choice of 32 brightness levels when turning the lamp on initially, as well as local control, so you can still use the lamp’s built-in switch to turn the light on and off. This LampLinc is made to be plugged into any wall outlet. This dimmer can control incandescent loads up to 300 watts.

There is also a dual band PowerLinc (PowerLinc – INSTEON USB Interface (Dual-Band) Item# 2413U Price: $99.99). I have no doubt that the remaining Smarthome Insteon devices will become dual band as well. While I think this is a great development, I really wish they would release a ceiling fan controller.

• Relaxation Drink Has Some Calling it Liquid Pot – There's a new drink being sold in Arizona — but why are people comparing it to pot? It's called Drank, and it's a 16-ounce soda drink that tastes sort of like grape soda. It's the opposite of an energy drink. Drank calls itself an extreme relaxation product, so much so, that some have dubbed it "weed in a can."
• Panel backs NASA bid for bigger shuttle budget | Reuters – The United States needs to boost NASA's budget by $1.5 billion to fly the last seven shuttle missions and should extend International Space Station operations through 2020, members of a presidential panel reviewing the U.S. human space program said on Tuesday.
• www.KOB.com – GE to close ABQ plant – A longtime Albuquerque manufacturer has announced that it will be closing its doors by the third quarter of 2010. General Electric has been manufacturing equipment for jet engines at its South Valley plant on Woodward since the late 1960s. GE spokesman Rick Kennedy says that GE is experiencing a volume decline for the equipment made in Albuquerque.
• Will Apple CEO Steve Jobs Headline CES 2010? – Digits – WSJ – Shapiro is chief executive of the Consumer Electronics Association, the same group that puts on the Consumer Electronics Show each January for the last three decades. Apple plans to attend the show’s 2010 version, marking the first time in memory the Cupertino, Calif., consumer-electronics giant will be there.
• Chandler not saying much after crime sweep – Chandler officials and resident activists are saying little about Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Southeast Valley "crime suppression operation" in their city last week. The reaction is in stark contrast to protests in other communities after Arpaio conducted similar sweeps targeting illegal immigrants. Some hint that silence is a ploy to withhold the limelight they say the sheriff seems to crave.
• A Century Plant Stalk – Quite a few century plants have shot up a nice stalks all around town. They occasionally get over 40' in height. We picked up this little one off the side of the road. Wendy has a plan to dry the stalk out and mount it beside our porch. It is impressive both how quickly these stalks go up and their strength.
• Building Rome in a Day – In this project, we consider the problem of reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web. Our aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city, say Rome, from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images. All this to be done in a day.
• The Word of Mouth KFC challenge | Life and style | guardian.co.uk – Lacking KFC's mighty pressure fryers and mindful of the need to cook the chicken right through, we were happy to follow the suggestions of double cooking. Most recommended some time in the oven after frying, but we thought we'd experiment with poaching beforehand and, as many of our posters suggested an overnight marinade in milk, we decided to use the marinade as the poaching liquid. It's worth noting for future recipes that chicken marinaded and poached in milk has an unbelievably suave flavour and texture, and that the poaching liquid thickens to create the most soothing cream of chicken soup I've ever achieved.
• BBC NEWS | UK | ‘No doubt’ sunbeds cause cancer – There is no doubt using a sunbed or sunlamp will raise the risk of skin cancer, say international experts. Previously, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) assessed sunbeds and sunlamps as "probably carcinogenic to humans". But it now says their use is definitively "carcinogenic to humans".
• Investment firm buys old Motorola site in Chandler – The prime 152-acre Motorola site on Price Road in Chandler has sold for $18.5 million in cash, and it is poised to provide the area with worldwide recognition, city officials say. There is interest from renewable energy companies, including solar, as well as firms in semiconductors and nanotechnology.

Every year during the Balloon Fiesta there will no doubt be a balloon crashing into something, usually power-lines. This year there was a spectacular crash when the “Wings of Wind” basket caught fire after running into power lines. One of the two passengers died and the pilot was badly injured. The incident occurred about 3 miles from my house at the intersection of NM 528 and NM 550.

During 2007’s Balloon Fiesta, a woman fell out of a balloon and died later in the hospital.

It seems some years the Balloon Fiesta goes on without a hitch, other years it just kinda ugly. The balloons are always at the whim of the weather and in fall the only thing you can predict is it will be windy.

Ding-dong, the glitch is dead. In a move that is long overdue, Disney (NYSE: DIS) is axing its model of producing low-budget direct-to-DVD sequels of its animated classics. In a DisneyToon studio shake-up that is no doubt influenced by last year’s infusion of Pixar’s craftsmen, Little Mermaid III will be the last of these home video titles.

Thank God!

Thank god indeed. The fool.com article continues to discuss how Disney had one hit direct to video sequel and the rest sucked. In the process, it took away Disneys reputation of quality animation.

As a fan and former stock holder of Pixar, I was worried that Disney would bring down Pixar with it’s money grubbing cheap animation. Looks like the reverse may be happening.

Does Microsoft want to make stuff for the Mac or not? Sometimes yes and sometimes no. With the announcement at MacWorld that Office would be made for at least another 5 years the answer would seem to be yes.

Speaking during Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ Macworld Expo keynote, MBU General Manager Roz Ho said the company had entered into an “official agreement” with Apple to “continue shipping new versions of Office for Mac for a minimum of five years”.

“This commitment should leave no doubt in your mind that we’re here to stay and in [this market] for the long term,” Ho told attendees.

Yet, they are no longer going to Make a mac version of the Windows Media Player

Despite pledging its support for Apple’s platform, Microsoft has backed out of future releases of Windows Media Player for Mac, and the company’s Web site now directs visitors to download a third-party application from developer Flip4Mac.

Yet, they are going to make a Mac only keyboard and mouse.

The wireless keyboard also will come with a mouse specially designed for the Mac. Slated to debut this summer, they will be sold for about $100. Prototypes are on display under glass at Microsoft’s booth at Macworld this week.

Microsoft clearly has no overall Mac strategy. Where there’s money to be made they will put out products. As the Mac market share increases (yes, I think it will increase) we will see more stuff from Microsoft. Good or bad.

The Blu-Ray consortium has decided to choose three different techniques to prevent copying content (primarily movies and music). Blu-ray is a contender to be the replacement for the current DVD standards. Let’s take a look at the three methods:

• BD-ROM: This is some sort of watermark that is put on “genuine” disk created by the manufacturer. Copies wouldn’t have this nor would the blank disk you buy to make a back up or those evil pirates in Asia.
• AACS: The is the Advanced Access Content System which will require that your blu-ray player call the mother ship before playing a disk. It checks your disk and if it doesn’t meet the security standards of the mother ship, then the player becomes unusable. Yes, your player becomes useless and it will always need a connection to the internet.
• BD+: This is a system that allows the encryption scheme be kept on the disk, not on the player. So if someone hacks through the encryption, they can make new disks with new schemes. With current DVDs, every player has the encryption scheme built in. Once it was hacked all disks were vulnerable.

Not only will you not have control over the media that you purchased, your won’t have control over your player. However, I have no doubt that there will be either crack or work around all these techniques. Either by hacking the player or the disks.

See also these articles: Register, Tom’s Hardware. The other contender is HD DVD.

Mac OS X, which has like a 100% more users than Windows Vista (because it’s not out yet), has less viruses than Windows Vista. Ok, there is some example code that show how to write viruses for the new OS so I guess it’s not a real virus yet.

A virus writer has published the first examples of malicious code that targets Microsoft’s upcoming command-line shell, code-named Monad, according to Finnish antivirus maker F-Secure. If the technology is included in Windows Vista, these could be one of the first viruses to target the new operating system formerly known as Longhorn, F-Secure said Thursday.

How convenient that this came from a company that makes antivirus software? The same thing happened a while back whenn Intego ran around saying it had found a Mac OS X virus. Nothing ever came of that either. You have to consider the source. I have no doubt that considerable effort will be put into virus in Vista however.