A real find

Canary Wireless (http://www.canarywireless.com/), a Chicago company, has made its entrance into the gadgetry market with a clever new tool for checking for WiFi networks, the $50 Digital Hotspotter.




The innovation here is that the device has a LCD screen that not only gives you a signal strength rating, but also the name of the the network and -- most crucially -- whether it is encrypted.

The typical $20 keychain-type finder gives you a string of LED lights to let you know that there is a wireless signal and how strong it is. If you are in your local coffee house or at an airport, that might be enough. If you pick up a signal there, it most likely means there's a public network. But in many locations -- a hotel lobby, for instance, or a conference hall -- you might actually be picking up the company's private network. Digital Hotspotter will let you know whether there is an open network around you.

A tap of a little button on the front of the device turns it on; it shuts off automatically. Tap the button again and it will re-scan to see if there are other networks in your vicinity. Each tap cycles you through all the networks it can detect. It is not uncommon in these days of WiFi congestion for another network to mask the signal of the network you actually want to use.

Digital Hotspotter is a little bigger than I would like -- it's larger than most mini-MP3 players -- so it is going to have to be stashed in a gadget pocket on your laptop bag rather than in your own pocket. But if you are dependent on WiFi to stay in touch on the road, Hotspotter is a valuable addition to your road warrior's tool kit.

More gift ideas.

Not the most romantic gift all of all time, perhaps, but Kensington’s MicroSaver Alarmed Lock, a cable with alarm for notebooks will give road warriors protection for their laptops when traveling. Kensington pioneered the notebook security lock -- which is why that slot on your laptop is called a "Kensington slot" and by now they have the concept down pat.


Convenience and time-saving can be a good gift. The IRIS Business Card Reader II – a small scanner and companion software designed to – surprise! – read business cards is the answer to the age-old problem of what to do with that stack of cards you have been collecting over the years but didn’t really want to take the time to transcribe into your electronic address book. It’s available both in Windows and Mac flavors, and if you do careful comparison shopping on the Internet, you should find both for under $100. For those who are constantly searching for WiFi sources to connect to, Iogear has a keychain sized finder device that tells you whether there is a signal in your area. The finder won’t tell you if the WiFi network is open to you, but it will tell you whether there is any point in taking out your laptop to try.

And while you are shopping for others, you probably ought to give yourself a gift also. I recently discovered the most useful 30 bucks Microsoft Outlook users can spend: Anagram (getanagram.com), nifty software that lets you select text in the e-mails or on web pages and instantly convert them to Outlook contacts, tasks, notes, or calendar items. A real time-saver.

The Supremes lay down the law -- sort of

The U.S. Supreme Court, which was deeply divided in multiple ways on the Ten Commandments, has been perfectly clear on one of them: "Thou Shalt Not Steal" copyrighted material.

In MGM vs. Grokster, a unanimous court found that the peer-to-peer ("P2P") networks established by Grokster and StreamCast Networks encouraged illegal uploading and downloading of copyrighted music. The high court declared: "one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties."

The Supremes went through some pains to do their homework on the nuisances of the technologies and marketing techniques at play, But more than anything their decision brings to mind the late Justice Potter Stewart's famous observation in a 1964 pornography case: Stewart noted that while the legal definition of pornography was convoluted, "I know it when I see it." In this case, the high court looked at the Grokster and StreamCast products and what they saw was theft.

Intellectual property rights in the digital age, in fact, bears a striking resemblance to pornography law in the '60s -- the nature of the problem kept shifting faster than the law could keep up and the line between legal and illegal grew increasingly murky. Tiring of the seemingly endless parade of cases on the issue reaching the high court, the justices finally set up a standard under which some of the decision-making on porn was left up to trial juries while broader principles were left to judges and appeals courts.

At the time, neither civil liberties advocates nor anti-pornography activists were happy with the ruling -- and they still aren't -- but the flood of litigation reaching the Supreme Court slowed. (Admittedly, in recent years that may be more a factor of Internet porn replacing the local smut shop.)

In Grokster, lower courts had thrown out the lawsuit citing the 1984 Supreme Court "Sony" decision that had OK'd VCRs on the grounds that technology that has a legitimate use cannot be banned. The Supremes upheld Sony but rejected its use as a blanket legal defense and added the new test of whether the company is marketing the technology in a manner that encourages illegal use. Again, this is the same path as obscenity law where a 1965 ruling held that the publisher of material that was not necessarily obscene itself nevertheless could be convicted because he promoted the material as smut.

One wonders, given this parallel legal evolution, what the court would rule in a case in which someone developed technology to let users hack into a pornographic web site.

But I digress. There is more than whimsy in the porn-P2P analogy. "Adult Entertainment" is the one branch of show business that not only has adapted to new technologies but has prospered because of them. Videocassettes, DVDs, cable TV, and now streaming video have generated returns far beyond those possible from showing dirty movies in seedy theaters or at stag parties. Digital video has sharply reduced production costs and increased profit margins. The Internet has proven to be a far more effective distribution system than sleazy bookstores.

One lesson here, of course, is that sex sells. No doubt when technology reaches the point where media disappears altogether and content is beamed directly to the brain, the porn industry will be the first kids on the block to cash in.

But the other lesson is that technology can be a boon to the entertainment business, not a threat. XXX producers went after the video and Internet marketplaces themselves and put a stranglehold on it while their more respectable brethren sat back and let the pirates make the first moves.

Apple Computer with its iPods, iTunes Music Store, and aggressive marketing of them has done more to build a legal digital music business than the music business has done. Record companies, in fact, have forgotten the tricks of their own trade. In the days of vinyl records, customers would happily pay disproportionately more for a single than for an album just to avoid being stuck with filler tracks. This is, after all, how "one-hit wonders" came to be. The music industry could have recaptured the singles market by embracing digital encoding and the Internet. Instead they are trying to put the digital genie back into the bottle.

When the dust settles from the Grokster decision, the music and movie industries are left with two fundamental realities: first, the high court has only ruled against blatantly illegal behavior; legitimate technologies still are legal. Second, the music industry is still looking at poor sales while the movies' box office receipts are in a slump and at the end of the day the Grokster decision isn't going to change that.

What's Really Behind the Apple-Intel Alliance - New York Times

Face it, until MacIntel machines actually ship, everyone is just reading tea leaves. The Tea Leaf Reader of Record has a couple of useful clues here, though:

-- Confirmation from IBM that it wanted Apple to pay more for developing its chips. This supports the view that a key incentive for Apple to make the move was a better financial deal from Intel.

-- Analyst expectations that Apple will move to 64-bit Intel chips. Current processors handle 32 bits at once, 64-bit chips, as you would guess, chomp 64, thereby increasing computer performance. The technology is supposed to be the Next Big Thing in personal computers, but Intel's efforts have not be especially successful to date. Driving sales of 64-bit chips looks like Intel's motivation for courting Apple.

What's Really Behind the Apple-Intel Alliance - New York Times

A camera in your pocket

As a writer, I have never been fond of the old "a picture is worth a thousand words" thing. But, after all, the column was about digital photography.

These should illustrate a few of the points.

Here is the skyline of Boston shot from a balcony along the Charles River:



Lots of foreground, and not much of the skyline. So, let's crop the photo and blow it up, so we get a better look at the Citgo sign:



But as I said, eventually if you blow a digital image up too much, the picture breaks into individual pixels, which looks like this:



A camera with more megapixels helps you get higher quality blow-ups. This is the Canon SD-500 reviewed for the article:



Note the slight wedge shape and rounded edge on the left. That, says a Canon spokesperson, is to make room for the 7.1 megapixel sensor.

A smaller and less expensive alternative is the 5 megapixel SD-400. Note that it is perfectly rectangular:

Speaking of fried laps...

A little personal experience entered into my thoughts about Apple's processor needs. When shorts-wearing temperatures abruptly arrived in Massachusetts, I discovered that resting my PowerBook on bare skin was not a happy combination. A couple of "yelps" and "ouches" later, I was surfing the Web looking for a solution.

Found a good one, as it turned out. Rain Design in San Francisco (www.raindesigninc.com) makes a terrific lap stand called -- inevitably -- "iLap." It comes in sizes for 12, 14, 15, and 17 inch notebooks, as well as 15 and 17 inch widescreens. Prices range from $50-$70 -- it's not inexpensive, but sometimes you really do get what you pay for.



iLap is made of substantial aluminum stock, a sharp contrast from similar products I've tested that bend and crease at the slightest movement. At the back, iLap has a padded and hinged u-shaped arm at the back, which props your laptop up at an ergonomically correct angle. Used in your lap, the padded arm sits comfortably around your knee.

At the front, there's a thick, rounded cushion that does triple duty: cushions your lap, positions the keyboard properly with respect to your hands, and acts as a wrist rest. This will work well for most users, although if like me you are, ahem, waistline-challenged it may push your laptop a little too far from your body.

The cushion is attached with Velcro and can be detached to let you use the iLap on your desk. There are cheaper solutions for the desktop, though. To justify an investment in an iLap, your primary need should be as a lap desk for a laptop. Think of desk use as an added bonus.

As for me, I'm heading out to my patio and taking my iLap and PowerBook with me.

Why Macs will have Intel inside

Here's what the much-ballyhooed decision by Apple Computer to switch to Intel processors really means to you: future PowerBooks will be faster without scorching your lap.

There may also be quieter Mac desktops and an outside possibility that the price gap between Macs and Windows PCs may narrow. Moreover, you might want to think twice about buying a new Mac until the new hardware hits the market. But pretty much everything else is of concern only to the companies involved, their shareholders – and those of us who write about technology and always are pleased to get a new issue to cover.

Apple's decision on processors is an issue that truly can be said to have resulted in "heated debate."

Computers are like glorified toaster ovens: turn 'em on and they generate heat. Processors in particular gobble up energy, with heat as the inevitable byproduct. That heat, meanwhile, is an enemy of the circuitry and can cause operational glitches.

Hence when you look inside a desktop PC, you will find multiple cooling fans, heat sinks (metal devices that pull heat away from a component), and ducts to manage airflow. For notebooks, the problem is even more serious because there isn't room for all those heat-management components. Plus, high energy consumption in a laptop means battery life takes a big hit.

Heat is a particular concern to Apple because many of its best-selling desktops such as the iMac and Mac Mini use small form factors that make them more like notebooks. In addition, Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs famously disdains cooling fans because they are noisy and he wants Macs to be whisper quiet.

Apple's problem in a nutshell is that the PowerPC chips that drive its computers are too hot to handle.

While its leading desktops run IBM-produced "G5" (fifth generation of the Pocket PC) processors, the chip is too hot and too power draining to use in a notebook. So Apple's PowerBook and iBook notebooks are stuck with the older "G4" processors made by Freescale Semiconductor Inc., a Motorola spin-off. Even so, heat is such a problem, especially with the metal-cased PowerBook, that an entire category of computer accessories has grown up around the need to keep Mac laptops from frying users' laps.

Tim Cook, Apple's VP of worldwide sales and operations, was widely quoted earlier this year when he called a G5 PowerBook, "the mother of all thermal challenges." Given that Apple is paranoid about leaks of its product plans, it is clear in retrospect that the company was going public with its displeasure with IBM for not making a laptop-capable G5. According to published reports, IBM had little interest in doing so because the company is losing money on its Apple sales and is focusing its processor efforts on the more lucrative game console market.



If all that weren't enough, the whole rationale behind the PowerPC was that its design made it inherently faster than Intel architecture. But instead PowerPC chips have lagged behind Intel's in speed, forcing Apple to put two processors into its flagship Power Mac G5 desktops, which of course makes them run even hotter.

With neither IBM nor Motorola/Freescale interested in building a new processor to keep Apple's products competitive with Intel-powered units, Apple didn't have a lot of options other than to switch to Intel. (These being publicly traded corporations, it would be more correct to say that there was no interest on terms acceptable to both sides.) Some analysts have called this a risky move. Perhaps, but hardly less risky than trying to sell new PCs without new chips.

The transition to Intel processors is really much more of a marketing problem than a technical one. Apple's OS-X operating system is based on Unix, a corporate OS that is regularly used on Intel PCs. Moreover, Jobs confirmed that the company has already produced Intel-compatible OS-X versions. The company announced a utility called "Rosetta" (as in "Rosetta Stone") to allow software designed for the PowerPC to run on Intel Macs.



This still leaves Apple with three problems.

First, what kind of software support will the new platform get? Rosetta may or may not be adequate – often such utilities degrade system performance – and software vendors will need to rewrite their applications. Microsoft and Adobe, the two biggest vendors of Mac software, both announced that they will produce "MacIntel" versions of their products. But smaller companies may not be able to afford to do that. Mac's base of software developers already is much smaller than Window's, and this might not help. There could be counterbalancing gains, however, from Windows-Intel software manufacturers finding it easier to do Mac versions of their applications.

Second, the Mac mystique may take a hit. Already jokes are appearing on the Internet suggesting that Apple should change its slogan to "think not-so-different." In recent years much of the hardware in Macs such as video cards and expansion slots has moved to Wintel standards. With the adoption of Intel processors, an Apple box will be little different from a Wintel box. Apple will have to demonstrate that, with equal hardware, it still has advantages over Windows. Note, though, that the devil always is in the details – Apple and Intel did not specify what chips were involved in the deal, and it always is possible that Intel might whip up something special for its new customer.

Third, in the short term Apple faces the tough prospect of moving product that it has just declared obsolete. The first units are due to hit the market within a year, with full conversion by the end of 2006. Some current Mac users may rush to buy up the remaining PowerPC units either to protect their current investment in software or to be sure that they get a "real" Mac before they are all gone. Most users, though, will hesitate about investing in lame duck equipment.

My advice to consumers for now: wait and see.

All personal computers are obsolete the moment you buy them; it's the nature of the beast. Typically, you would expect a PC to keep up with performance standards for about two years and be adequate for most purposes one or two more years after that. The 18-month timetable for MacIntel falls far short of that. On the other hand, a platform shift such as this rarely goes perfectly and you rarely want to be the first kid on your block with new designs.

Neither Apple nor the major software vendors have disclosed any information about their upgrade paths and policies. Also it is hard to imagine that Apple will be able to avoid discounting the prices on existing hardware.

I don't see any huge danger that if you do buy a Mac now you will be stuck with unsupported hardware and software. But it's like when a car is in the last year of its run and is about to be replaced by a new model. You want to keep your eye out for the “Limited Edition” package or the “Special Incentive” offer to be sure you get the sweetest deal.

Satellite radio equipment

Here's what the units look like.

This is XM's MyFi:

And here's the Sirius Sportster:

Welcome

Sometimes there is more to say about a topic than my column's space allows. That's what they make blogs for. So please look here for more details.

The blog's title, if you are wondering, is Peter Falk's famous line in his role as the deceptively disorganized TV detective Lt. Colombo. Murderers abruptly realized they were in trouble when the sleuth asked his "one more" question.