5Words for May 4th, 2009
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5Words for May 7th, 2009
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5Words for May 8th, 2009
Saw Star Trek, expected Tribbles…
How to research: copy Wikipedia!
Stardates for your Google Calendar.
SugarSync adds a free version.
Hulu tiptoes towards international expansion.
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TechReads for July 14, 2014
The password is dying. (Christopher Mims/WSJ)
And to prove it, Mims shares his own Twitter password (which is christophermims).
Bringing back Prodigy. (Benj Edwards/The Atlantic)
One man wants to breathe new life into a very defunct online service.
Should Yahoo and AOL merge? Will They? (Kara Swisher/Re/code)
Maybe! Maybe not!
Does anyone want a smartwatch? (Kevin Roose/New York)
Still the most important question about the whole category.
Germany considers regulating Google like a utility. (Ingrid Lundgren/TechCrunch)
Um, fabulous idea.
Samsung figures out its smartphone future. (Brian X. Chen/NYTimes)
Squeezed by China on the low end, Apple on the high end.
Sapphire screens: both neat and impractical? (Brad Molen/Engadget)
The multiple challenges of a technology Apple is supposedly about to embrace.
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At Comcast, You’re Not Just a Valued Customer–You’re Also an Indentured Servant
My friends Ryan Block and Veronica Belmont decided to cancel their Comcast service and switch to Astound, a smaller cable company available here in the Bay Area. So they called Comcast–and talked to a rep whose job was clearly not to help them cancel but to prevent them from canceling.
Here’s audio of part of the conversation. If you’ve ever had to deal with a recalcitrant rep at a giant pseudo-monopoly, it’ll leave you speechless, but not surprised. (Ryan shares more details here.)
My blood boils just listening to this, but all through it, Ryan is remarkably calm. It’s all reminiscent of a famous 2006 encounter with AOL support which was remarkably similar, except that the customer was less serenely polite than Ryan.
Anyone want to make any guesses about how often encounters like this happen? Or whether they’ll be more or less common if Comcast’s merger with Time Warner Cable goes through?
As Dan Gillmor said on Twitter…
Someone should force all members of the FCC to listen to a customer attempting to cancel Comcast: https://t.co/L5TvS3SAf4
— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) July 15, 2014
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One New Slingbox Caters to the Masses, the Other to High-End Users
Slingbox M1
When it debuted back in 2005, the original Slingbox–which let you pipe your TV signal at home over the Internet to a distant computer or smartphone–helped invent the whole idea that you might be able to watch your favorite programs anywhere. After being bought by satellite-TV hardware company EchoStar, however, Slingbox went a long time without changing much–until two new models showed up in the fall of 2012.
Now Slingbox is changing again. The two new models–the Slingbox M1 and SlingTV–are close relatives of the low-end and high-end models from 2012, the Slingbox 350 and Slingbox 500, respectively. But the M1 aims to be even more of a mass-market gadget than the 350, and SlingTV adds more features to the already-fancy 500.
I got to try the Slingbox M1, which goes on sale next Sunday. It sells for $150, which is thirty bucks less than its predecessor and is small, though not Roku/Apple TV tiny–it’s around the size of a thick paperback book.
As with the Slingbox 350, you connect the M1 to your TV set-top box using included component cables. It now includes built-in Wi-Fi, making setup a lot simpler for those of us who don’t happen to have Ethernet jacks near our TVs. In a first for a Slingbox, you can set up the box using an iOS or Android device rather than a Windows PC or Mac; the initial setup, which used to be pretty geeky, is now a lot more straightforward.
The on-screen remote for my TiVo in Sling’s iPad app even looks like a TiVo remote
Once you’re up and running, you can watch whatever TV you’d otherwise be watching on your TV on a Windows PC, a Mac, an iPhone or iPad, or an Android device. (The mobile apps are $15 apiece; the Windows and Mac ones, which are new and an alternative to watching in a Web browser, are free.) You can switch channels and otherwise control your set-top box using an on-screen remote control or by using a slick program guide built into the Sling apps.
I found the video (including 1080p HD) and audio quality to be very good over both Wi-Fi and LTE. If you’ve got a TV connected to a Roku box handy, you can now use the Sling mobile app to redirect whatever you’re watching onto the Roku–and once you have, you can then use your phone or tablet for other purposes, since the Roku can stream from the Slingbox directly.
SlingTV
Meanwhile, the $300 SlingTV–which I got a sneak peek at, but didn’t try for myself, and which will ship in late August–is housed in the same larger, oddly swoopy case as the previous Slingbox 500. (In fact, owners of the 500 will be able to upgrade their boxes to get the new features for free.) Along with component connections, it offers HDMI input and output–a feature which might or might not let you ditch the component hookup, depending on the cable channels you subscribe to and how many of them are copy-protected.
SlingTV has all the same place-shifting capabilities as the Slingbox M1, but its big new feature actually isn’t about watching TV anywhere and everywhere. Instead, the box now displays a programming guide on the TV it’s connected to, allowing you to choose to navigate your TV schedule using Sling’s interface and a bundled remote control rather than with whatever your set-top box offers.
As with the various Sling apps, the on-screen guide lets you peruse shows in a pretty gallery view, browse around a conventional grid of channels, skim through listings of specific types of programming such as movies or sports, or search current and upcoming programs. It also incorporates Rotten Tomatoes movie ratings, shows scores for sporting events in progress, and displays something called a Thuuz rating that indicates the current level-of-excitement for games.
SlingTV can also stream a couple Internet video services which happen to be its corporate cousins: Blockbuster and DishWorld. Sling says that it hopes to add others in future software updates: If the box gets major services such as Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, it would evolve into something that might be able to replace a Roku or AppleTV.
Both the Slingbox M1 and SlingTV compete with the place-shifting features of TiVo’s Roamio Plus and Roamio Pro DVRs–which work really well, although they require a major investment in both hardware and ongoing service fees. And of course, the new Slingboxes also face a bevy of purely digital rivals which let you watch TV programming on computers and mobile devices without any new hardware at all: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and gazillions of apps for specific content providers, such as HBO Go.
Slingboxes may have plenty of competition, but they also retain their niche. They put all the cable or satellite TV you’re paying for into one unified app experience, and let you watch some stuff which isn’t otherwise readily available on mobile devices, such as live news and sports. I’ll reserve judgement on the SlingTV, which won’t be available until August, but the Slingbox M1 looks good: It’s the friendliest and most affordable way to sling your TV so far.
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TechReads for July 16, 2014
Why that Comcast rep wouldn’t let Ryan and Veronica just cancel. (Adrianne Jeffries/The Verge)
Because doing so would cost him money.
Fox tried to buy Time Warner. (Andrew Ross Sorkin/Michael De La Merced/NYTimes)
Anyone who wants to buy Time Warner should read the original AOL Time Warner press release, which I annotated in 2009.
Apple-IBM deal is bad news for BlackBerry. (Ingrid Lundgren/TechCrunch)
Just what BlackBerry needed: more bad news.
Here are the sites Google is hiding under EU “Right to be Forgotten” law. (Jeff John Roberts/GigaOm)
Gone from the Google index, but not forgotten.
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The New Features in Jawbone’s Up App Are All About Eating
Thanks to wearable fitness gadgets such as Jawbone’s Up and Up24 wristbands, it’s now very easy to get some sense of how many calories you’re burning as you go about your everyday activities. But figuring out how many calories you’re consuming–and other aspects of your eating habits–is still work.
Jawbone’s smartphone apps, and the ones which work with other gizmos such as FitBit, include tools which let you log your meals. I frequently get excited about using them. And then, once I start keeping a food diary and remember how much fumbling around it requires, I slack off.
With a new update to its iOS app, Up 3.1–Android version in the works–Jawbone is trying to make tracking what you eat easier, and to help you use that information to lead a healthier lifestyle.
Like other apps with food-diary features, Up lets you specify items you’ve eaten from a vast database of choices. But now it’s smarter about helping you winnow them down.
“25 percent of the meals people log are the same,” says Jawbone’s Andrew Rosenthal. “We’re creatures of habit.” So now the app provides one-tap access to items it thinks you might have eaten based on its knowledge of what you’ve eaten in the past.
One of Jawbone’s “Meal of Fortune” infographics
It also starts to fill in suggestions based on the time of day: “If you type ‘e’ in the morning you get eggs, and edamame in the afternoon,” Rosenthal says. And other suggestions are based on the big data Jawbone has about what all Up users eat — if you’re eating eggs in the morning, for instance, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re also having toast, bacon, and coffee.
(Jawbone also used this data to create a couple of amazing interactive “Meal of Fortune” infographics which show all the common food combinations. It’s worth going over to the Jawbone blog just to fool around with them.)
The company has created its own take of the standard Nutrition Items box which appears on packaged foods: Jawbone’s version aims to make the data less daunting by doing things such as adding graphics and organizing the facts about a food item in order of desirability, with stuff like fiber at the top and sugar near the bottom.
It’s also rated food items for overall healthiness on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being ideal. (A Triple Whopper With Cheese is a 3.0; an apple is a 9.5.) And it’s working with foodstuff purveyors such as Munchery and PlateJoy to automate the process of logging information about their meals in the Up app.
Lastly, the new Up app weaves more food-related fodder into its “Today I Will” feature, which suggests customized, attainable goals for you. For instance, if it notices that you completed a long run in the morning, it might suggest a breakfast recipe with plenty of fiber.
Jawbone’s Up24 fitness band
All these new features are a reminder of a basic fact about Up which is surprisingly easy to overlook: It’s not so much a wearable device with a companion app and service as an app and service with a companion wearable device.
In fact, the only new hardware feature which the minimalist, screenless Up wristband has gotten in the nearly three years since it was introduced is wireless capability, which is built into Up24. But the app makes Up probably the richest experience of its type, and that’s only more so with this update.
In a world in which other wearables are getting ever more fancy, Up has a powerful, distinctive strategy. And it’ll be interesting to see how far Jawbone, which is presumably working on next-generation hardware, can take it.
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TechReads for July 17
Microsoft to reorg, cut up to 18,000 jobs. (Satya Nadella/Microsoft)
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How to Animate Your Dragon
A DreamWorks Animation artist works on How to Train Your Dragon 2 using Premo
Mr. Peabody and Sherman, the computer-animated movie which DreamWorks Animation released in March is–of course–the tale of a dog and a boy who go traveling back in time. So in a way, it’s appropriate that the proprietary software which the studio used to animate it, Emo, had a lot of history behind it.
Emo’s origins go back to the 1980s, an era in which computer graphics were very different than they are today, and DreamWorks didn’t even exist. It was created by Pacific Data Images, the company which, like Pixar, helped to pioneer the whole idea of digitally-generated entertainment. (PDI is now part of DreamWorks Animation.)
The next DreamWorks Animation feature after Peabody, How to Train Your Dragon 2, premiered last month. It’s the first movie which was produced using the studio’s new platform, Apollo, which includes a new animation system called Premo.
Apollo is one giant leap for DreamWorks; during a recent event at its studio in Redwood City, Calif., the company gave me and other journalists a behind-the-scenes show-and-tell.
Here’s a video DreamWorks Animation produced about the new software:
Very few computational projects of any sort gobble resources as voraciously as producing a computer-animated film. How to Train Your Dragon 2 is 102 minutes long, which translates into 130,000 frames of animation. Getting there involved 495 artists, 700 million files, 398 terabytes’ worth of data, and 90 million hours of rendering time.
And that’s just one movie. DreamWorks Animation has the most ambitious release schedule in the business: It’s currently working on thirteen features which it plans to release between now and November 2018. They’re all being done with Apollo and Premo, and the shift to the new platform is about time and money. But it also aims to put fewer technological barriers in between an artist’s raw creativity and a finished work of computer animation.
“Part of the mission was to create a more efficient way of working that would help shave production budgets,” says Dean DeBlois, who co-wrote and co-directed the original How to Train Your Dragon and wrote and directed the new film. “As it actually manifested itself, it allowed the animators to work so fast that they could go back and refine and finesse their work in this iterative process that they were not allowed to do in the past.”
The company started planning the new platform five years ago, at roughly the same time that it was beginning work on Dragon 2. From the beginning, it was a collaboration between the studio’s artists and its technologists, who worked together and aimed to create something with plenty of headroom for whatever the studio might dream up far into the future.
“We were able to say to them, ‘Don’t constrain yourself,” says Lincoln Wallen, DreamWorks Animation’s CTO. “It’s not about what the machines can deliver, it’s about how you want to work.”
Rex Grignon, DreamWorks Animation’s head of character animation–he started at PDI in 1988–says that the artists involved in creating Premo asked themselves “Why can’t I have an idea and touch the screen to get it there?” And as they hashed out plans for the new platform, they storyboarded them much as they’d do with an animated feature. “We literally cut out little pieces of paper and lists and things.”
DreamWorks’ Emo animation software
Emo, the old animation software, required animators to convert the performances they envisioned into numbers which a computer could understand. For instance, making a character smile involved entering digits in a spreadsheet-like grid to specify adjustments to a character’s facial muscles. Artists could preview the results, but only in versions which stripped out so much detail that it could be tough to tell what a scene would look like on the screen.
Premo lets DreamWorks’ artists animate by grabbing ahold of characters in a much more fully-rendered scene, using either a mouse or a Wacom Cintiq touch screen and stylus. They can nudge expressions into place, swing limbs around, and generally work in a much more direct fashion.
Me trying DreamWorks Animation’s Premo software for myself
“Once [animators] have spent the couple of weeks it takes to learn how to really use Premo, they don’t want to go back,” says DeBlois.
Animators work on HP workstations with Intel Xeon processors. Though extremely well-equipped–they have 16 computing cores and 100GB of RAM–they’re off-the-shelf models which anyone can buy. Like the rest of the Apollo platform, they run Red Hat Linux.
Beyond the new creative possibilities opened up by Premo, the key fact about Apollo is that it aims to make all the tens of thousands of computing cores at Dreamworks’ disposal–on the artist’ workstations, the studio’s own server farms, and computing resources provided by HP as a service–behave like one seamless whole. It’s a massive cloud-computing project, which the studio developed with help from Intel, which has developed software libraries which enable the sort of distributed computing which the new platform relies on.
If something needs resources, Apollo is designed to be able to throw resources at it. If it requires a lot of resources, Apollo is designed to provide that, too. The end result is that it can make things which used to take a long time happen very, very fast.
In the past, for instance, it took 20 to 40 hours to render one theater-ready final frame of animation. With Apollo’s on-demand approach to computational horsepower, “I can turn the dial and reach 24 frames a second,” says Wallen.
That flexibility also allows the studio to push its drop-dead deadlines as far as possible: DeBlois told me that it was still wrapping up Dragon 2 on May 8. On May 16, the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
Nobody sitting in a theater is going to ponder the capabilities of the software behind the story. In fact, DeBlois says that the artists wanted to make the dragons so natural-looking that folks would even forget they were even watching a work of computer animation. But if Apollo and Premo didn’t exist, How to Train Your Dragon 2 wouldn’t be the movie that it is.
Let’s end this post with its first five minutes:
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A Celebration of James Garner’s Polaroid Commercials
They weren’t the best thing he ever did, or the one which we’ll cherish the most. But with the sad news of the passing of James Garner, it’s worth pausing to remember the commercials he did in the late 1970s and early 1980s for Polaroid. And–this being Technologizer–it’s how we’ll memorialize him here.
When it came to celebrity spokespeople, Polaroid wasn’t stingy: Laurence Olivier did the first ad for the SX-70 camera, and Danny Kaye touted the ill-fated Polavision instant movie system. Hiring James Garner was a similarly classy move, but the ads he appeared in weren’t like anything which Polaroid had done before. Or anyone else, really.
If you weren’t paying attention to TV commercials back when the Garner spots first appeared, it’s impossible to understand how fresh these ones were at the time–in part because they were widely imitated and their influence is felt to this day.
The tone was irreverent, and the banter between Garner and Mariette Hartley was so snarky and snappy that what might have otherwise seemed like a hard sell–”This is Polaroid’s OneStep, the simplest camera in the world”–goes down easily. (Hartley because famous, and a generation of Americans mistakenly assumed that she was Mrs. James Garner.)
Like everything Garner did, the spots felt effortless, and defined by his personal style. If Polaroid had hired some random other guy from a 1970s detective show–Mike Connors from Mannix, say–the campaign would likely have been prosaic, short-lived, and quickly forgotten.
The ads below are all from YouTube, and the years specified are from the descriptions there. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them are off.
1977: A prototype with no Mariette Hartley, no bouncy music, and low production values.
1978: Another one which feels like a rough draft for the campaign to come.
Is that Mariette Hartley in a non-speaking role in this 1978 ad for the iconic rainbow-stripe OneStep? I’m not sure.
1978, with Hartley and the OneStep and the style in place.
1978, also for the OneStep.
Christmas, 1979.
1980, for Time Zero, an upgrade to SX-70 film which developed faster.
1980, with about as close as the campaign got to a hard sell.
Christmas, 1980, for Time Zero.
1981, also for Time Zero.
This 1981 commercial actively encourages the misconception that Garner and Hartley are a married couple.
A couple of 1982 ads from when the campaign was getting long in the tooth. Both try too hard to be heartwarming, in a way that makes me think of Kodak, not Polaroid. One is even Hartley-less.
1983, for a cost-reduced version of the Sun Camera. The dialog involves Polaroid not needing Garner and Hartley to sell this model–and indeed, the campaign was winding down.
I’m not sure why these spots ended, but Polaroid never topped them. (In fact, it didn’t seem to try–its ads got mundane, and stayed that way.) Re-watching them has always made me miss the old Polaroid. Now it makes me miss Jim Garner, too.
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I’m Going to Want a Car With Built-In LTE…Eventually
Buick owners enjoying their car’s built-in LTE in a photo provided by GM
Last week, General Motors invited me to a press event at which it showed off some new Buicks. Normally, such events involve driving new cars. But when we hit the road during this one, I willingly sat in the back seat and fooled around with my phone and tablet–because the primary purpose of the event was to demonstrate the 4G LTE broadband and Wi-Fi hotspot features built into the cars.
Across its brands, GM is being particularly aggressive about rolling out in-vehicle LTE connectivity. Most Buick models, for instance, are getting it now; all of them will have it by the 2016 model year. No other company has announced plans to put LTE into so many vehicles so soon.
GM is applying its venerable OnStar brand to its LTE service, and tying it in with existing OnStar services such as crash response and the ability to have a live OnStar rep download turn-by-turn driving directions to your car’s navigation system. Behind the scenes, the LTE is powered by AT&T.
A Buick with LTE is a four-wheeled hotspot: It can share its broadband wirelessly with up to seven devices, such as phones, tablets, and laptops. The driver won’t be using any of those gadgets on the road–right?–so the hotspot feature is of particular interest to passengers, who can use it to do stuff such as watch video or play games. (It does work whenever the car is turned on, and is accessible outside the cabin as well as inside; at one point, I connected while I was having lunch in a tent about twenty yards from the car.)
Another thing which built-in LTE should come in handy for is powering apps that run on the car’s in-dash touchscreen information/entertainment system, such as streaming audio services. GM says that such offerings are on the way. But for now, even the version of Pandora which Buicks have can’t tap into the OnStar LTE; instead, it must piggyback on your smartphone’s data connection.
Speaking of smartphones: When I told people that I was trying out a Buick with LTE and hotspot capability, several folks had the same question. Why would you want that when you can just tether devices to a smartphone with LTE and hotspot features–ones you’re already paying for?
There’s actually an easy answer to that. The LTE built into a car uses a beefy antenna on the roof, vs. the dinky one on your phone; your phone’s antenna is further hobbled by being inside your vehicle rather than outside it. GM says that the car can therefore deliver more robust reception than you’ll get on your phone.
My highly informal experiments seemed to bear this out. As we tooled around the San Francisco Bay Area’s Highway 280 during a test drive of a Buick LaCrosse, with me in back, I tried streaming Netflix on my iPad and Google Play video on my Nexus 5 phone, sometimes using their built-in AT&T LTE and sometimes connecting to the car’s hotspot. Much of the time, it worked well no matter which connection I was on. But on an isolated stretch of highway, the mobile devices’ LTE fell to one bar of coverage, and the streaming conked out. When I switched to the Buick’s LTE, I could stream hiccup-free on both devices at once.
There are other reasons why you might prefer to use the car’s hotspot than to tether devices to your phone. Tethering is a notorious battery hog; it requires you to turn it on and fiddle with the settings; in my experience with a variety of devices, it sometimes doesn’t work at all, even when the signal strength is fine. If the automobile’s hotspot just works, it would be a more pleasant way to put a tablet or laptop online than tethering it to a phone.
Then there’s the question of cost. Judging whether built-in LTE is worth the dough is a decision about ongoing data fees, not the up-front expense for the hardware: GM is building LTE in as standard equipment in part because it uses the data connection for the newest version of its OnStar services, which it charges at least $20 a month or $200 a year for.
The company offers a variety of data packages starting at $5 and aimed at everyone from people who want to use data rarely and parsimoniously to those who want to gorge on it. Some tiers cost the same whether or not you subscribe to an OnStar plan; others are the same with or without OnStar.
Here’s GM’s summary of the options:
By the standards of LTE data, these offerings seem competitively priced. But if you’re an AT&T customer and plan to use your car’s LTE every month, it probably makes more sense to put your Buick on your AT&T shared-data plan; that does’t require you to subscribe to OnStar, costs $10 a month and gives your car access to the pooled data you’re already paying for.
Bottom line: Whether you buy your data from GM or AT&T, the cost could add up quickly. And streaming video in particular could get unaffordable fast.
Having recently bought a car with no built-in LTE–a Ford Focus–I went to GM’s event a tad concerned that I’d find the technology so impressive that I’d suffer from buyer’s remorse. That didn’t happen. Unless you regularly travel with a car full of pals equipped with Wi-Fi gizmos–and can afford to supply them with gobs of data–LTE as it exists right now in these Buicks isn’t that a huge deal.
Still, I’m glad that the GM is moving to make LTE a standard feature, and hope that other auto makers follow its lead. Once millions of cars have built-in broadband, it should lead to apps, services, and features which take advantage of it in new ways. Maybe by the time I’m ready to replace my Focus, it’ll have evolved into essential equipment.
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RIP, Jim Frederick
Jim Frederick, the first editor I had during my time as a tech writer for TIME, died unexpectedly on Thursday night. He was only 42, and I’m still in shock.
The loss would be incalculable no matter what the circumstances, but it feels especially jarring and surreal given the bright future Jim was building for himself. Along with his wife Charlotte, he’d just switched coasts from New York to San Francisco in order to start a media consultancy. (I got the LinkedIn notification formally announcing the news just yesterday morning.)
Jim’s most obvious legacy will be his work as a globe-trotting journalist–the author of an important book on the Iraq war and a reporter for TIME in Tokyo and London who eventually oversaw all of the magazine’s international editions. But to me, he was my editor, one of the best I ever had.
If you were making a movie about a TIME-like newsmagazine and wanted to cast the role of a smart, capable, sympathetic editor, you’d try to find someone exactly like Jim. He was tall, good-looking, a little gangly, and, above all, unflappable. The expression on his face in the photo here, which I stole from his Twitter profile, captures him perfectly–those eyebrows, as far as I knew, were permanently arched.
Digging around his recent tweets, I just learned that he had an interest in transcendental meditation. Given his preternaturally unstressed air, it makes perfect sense: Maybe the media business would be in better shape if all of us gave it a try.
As the editor of TIME.com, he remained remarkably calm when I pushed my deadlines to the limit (and beyond). Every change he made to my copy was a carefully-considered improvement. He was good at checking in, offering compliments, imparting wisdom, and admitting mistakes. I trusted him, in part because I knew he trusted me.
Not too long after I began writing for TIME, I met Jim in person for the first time. He took me out for a drink at a bar near the Time & Life Building in Rockefeller Center, and in about 45 minutes, he told me everything I needed to know about TIME–a primer which, in retrospect, gave me as clear and canny an understanding of the institution as I’d ever get.
I last saw him in June, when we met for a beer at a restaurant in the Inter-Continental Hotel in San Francisco called Luce. (When I suggested the venue, I forgot the establishment’s name, but the reference to TIME’s founder was probably Freudian on my part.) I’d just resigned from TIME and filled him in on my plans; he let me know about his intention to come west in search of new opportunities.
He’d already visited a few startups in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, and told me that he was struck by the atmosphere. By and large, people seemed to be happy to be at work. They were energized, excited about trying new things, and not overly worried about the possibility of failure. (The vibe at big New York-based media companies can be radically different, for reasons I don’t have to explain.)
Jim asked me: Was the optimism he noticed normal in the Bay Area? Yes, I said, it was. He was so much looking forward to being part of it, and I still can’t believe that he won’t be.
The New York Observer’s Ken Kurson, who worked with Jim during an earlier part of his Time Inc. career at Money magazine, has written a wonderful remembrance of the man. I’m sure there will be many more to come.
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TechReads for August 11, 2014
Apple University revealed. (Brian X. Chen/NYTimes)
Apple’s in-house training program sounds very, very Apple-esque.
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I’m Over at Fast Company. Join Me, Won’t You?
Just a quick reminder: I’m now happily ensconced in my new gig as technology editor for Fast Company. That means that the vast majority of my tech writing will appear on FastCompany.com. To see what I’ve been up to so far, you can check out my author page.
I do reserve the write to blog here occasionally if I have something to say which doesn’t feel like a good fit for FC. And I’m updating the Technologizer Flipboard magazine with my own work as well as interesting stuff I’m reading elsewhere. But mostly, I’m over at Fast Company–and I hope you’ll hang out with me there.
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That Time I Interviewed Click and Clack
Back in the summer of 1997, I got my one and only assignment for a magazine called The Web, back when it seemed like it made sense to publish reviews and profiles relating to websites on dead trees. It turned out to be one of the most entertaining projects I ever worked on: I profiled Tom and Ray Magliozzi, better known as Click and Clack of public radio’s Car Talk.
When I saw the sad news today that Tom had passed away at 77, the memories came flooding back.
I made contact with the Car Talk team by getting the phone number of their production company. In 1997, you did that by calling directory assistance. I still remember the pleasure I took in asking for the number for Dewey Cheetham & Howe.
At least back then, snagging an interview with the brothers was tougher than you might think. They didn’t particularly like publicizing their show, and rarely talked to the press. But my timing was good: My editor, Dan Miller, had asked me to write about them because they were launching their first website. That they were willing to promote.
I conducted the interview one afternoon when they were taping their show at the studios of Boston’s WBUR. They were a little impatient with being interviewed, but smart, warm, and funny. I learned that even though the show felt like it was live–the Magliozzis’ mom sometimes called in after supposedly hearing another call on the radio–the handful of people who made it onto the program were actually chosen from 10,000 prospects a week who left recorded messages. That explained why so many of the on-air callers seemed so similar in personality and car problems. (There was a certain sort of female caller who pretty much made it onto the air several times a week.)
And I was startled to see that the Magliozzis sometimes worked from material written by others. That seemed to happen during the bridging sequences, and I don’t think it’s scandalous, since much of their funniest moments did appear to be ad-libbed–or at least not read off a script. But I see that I didn’t mention it in my story.
The best part of the assignment was that it finally taught me to tell the difference between the brothers, who I’d never bothered to think about as separate individuals before. Tom, the older brother, was a wacko who pretty much seemed to say whatever came into his head. Ray was far more low key, and prevented the proceedings from careening completely off course. From then on, I never had the least bit of difference keeping track of who was who.
When I’d finished my interview and was ready to leave, the producer handed me a cassette of me chatting with Tom and Ray. It sounded like an episode of Car Talk which I had mysteriously wandered into. I still have it somewhere–but I don’t think I have a tape player anymore.
Anyhow, here’s the story, which I just scanned in from the September 1997 issue of The Web. As far as I can tell, it’s not otherwise available online.
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Technologizer: The Flipboard Edition
Back in 2014, when I became technology editor for Fast Company, I said I was keeping Technologizer open and reserved the right to write here if I had anything to say that didn’t fit into Fast Company. As it turned out, Fast Company is a wonderful place to write about nearly anything. I’ve only posted on Technologizer twice, both times because I wanted to write about someone who’d passed away.
That tended to make the Technologizer homepage look abandoned. So I’ve flipped a switch to redirect it to my Technologizer magazine on Flipboard, which I update frequently with my own articles and worthwhile reads from around the web. If anything, knowing that it’s what people see when they go to Technologizer.com will induce me to share even more stuff.
This change doesn’t impact all the existing Technologizer posts–they’re all there, just as I published them. And I can still write new Technologizer posts–such as this one–if the mood strikes. This site has been part of my life for almost eight years now, and even if it’s not my bread and butter, it’s nice to know it’s here if I need it.
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5Words for May 4th, 2009
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5Words for May 7th, 2009
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5Words for May 8th, 2009
Saw Star Trek, expected Tribbles…
How to research: copy Wikipedia!
Stardates for your Google Calendar.
SugarSync adds a free version.
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