Expensive A/V cables and roller coasters have a lot in common

Shopping online for home theater cables should be one of those activities that carries the standard amusement park disclaimer.  You know the type: pregnant women, people with heart problems or back ailments, etc., should not ride this ride. If you don't believe me, go check out the prices for things like HDMI cables, but be sure that you empty your pockets of loose change and let someone else in line hold your sunglasses.

A quick survey of the web sites of three large electronics retailers showed that the average price for a six foot HDMI cable is about $57.  Oops!  There goes your hat.  It sailed right down toward the unloading area of the Log Jammer.

A little bit of Googling revealed an excellent article from CNET on HDMI cables.  Of particular interest was this sentence:

CNET strongly recommends cheap HDMI cables widely available from online retailers instead of the expensive counterparts sold in your local electronics store.

To sum up, these cables are transmitting a digital signal, and digital either works or it doesn't.  The old RCA-style connectors on plain-jane analog cables were susceptible to RF interference but these new digital cables don't share that weakness.

The article goes on to recommend some places to buy cables online, and I was able to purchase three of them for $15 including shipping.  That's quite a difference in price, something like 91% off.

WiMax turned on in Baltimore

Sprint has turned on its new WiMax wireless service in Baltimore and is offering the service with no contracts. This could be the future for Internet-everywhere, but unfortunately Pittsburgh is not on the list of cities with WiMax in the works. 

The music-to-tech bridge goes both ways

At a Doobie Brothers concert at Penn State many years ago, TechMan saw guitarist Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, adorned with headphones and his distinctive walrus mustache, sitting on a stool wailing on the electric guitar.

That same Skunk, who was a founding member of Steely Dan and in 1966 played with Jimi Hendrix in a band called "Jimmy James and the Blue Flames," is now one of the country's foremost experts on missile defense.

Mr. Baxter is a somewhat unusual case.

His interest in music-recording technology led him to wonder about data-compression algorithms and large-capacity storage devices created for military use. A neighbor bought Mr. Baxter a subscription to an aviation magazine, provoking his interest in additional military-oriented publications and missile defense systems in particular.

He became self-taught in this area, and at one point he wrote a five-page paper that proposed converting the ship-based anti-aircraft Aegis missile into a rudimentary missile defense system. He gave the paper to California Republican U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, and his career as a defense consultant began. Mr. Baxter now has a very high security clearance, consults for the Defense Department and has chaired a congressional advisory board on missile defense.

"My big thing is to look at existing technologies and try to see other ways they can be used, which happens in music all the time and happens to be what terrorists are incredibly good at," Skunk was quoted as saying.

Then there are those who go the other way, from technology to music.

Ray Kurzweil was an inventor and businessman. His company produced the Kurzweil Reading Machine, a device for the blind that turned text into speech, which caught the interest of musician Stevie Wonder,

The pair became friends, and in conversations the musician often lamented the inability of music synthesizers to reproduce the sounds of musical instruments accurately.

Mr. Kurzweil responded by forming a company and making the Kurzweil K250, which not only imitated instruments so well a musician could not tell the difference, but included groundbreaking abilities to record and mix that furthered the technique of sampling.

Music and computers are siblings through mathematics. The world of numbers is the language computers understand and also underlies the physics of sound that creates music. But obviously there is more to music than math -- there has never been a great mathematician who was also a great musician. But there is much crossover.

If you want to go deeper into this music-math relationship, TechMan recommends "Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R. Hofstadter.

Although far from beach reading, this Pulitzer Prize-winning book explores how mathematics, music, art and human intelligence intertwine.

And while you're reading it, listen to Skunk Baxter's guitar solo on Steely Dan's "Rikki Don't Lose That Number."

Good news for Net radio

It looks like Internet radio may survive after all. The House on Saturday passed a bill allowing Net radio providers to negotiate lower fees for playing music than mandated by a government copyright board.

How we read on the Web

Thanks to Steve Rubel on Twitter for this link to a study of how we read on the Web

Setting up a new computer

Setting up a new computer is something most of us face once in a while. I ran across this very good guide to how to do it from Ed Bott on ZDNet. Ed's postings are always very good. He's been around a while.

Analog news archives in the digital age

One of my favorite web sites is reporting on Google's newspaper archives and they used my favorite newspaper as their example.

If you haven't played with this new search yet, you owe it to yourself to go check it out.  My favorite thing is to look for old Giant Eagle ads to see just how prices have changed on groceries.  And I had no idea that there were that many cigarette and liquor ads in the paper back in the day!

A second chance to show your stuff

Not long ago, TechMan introduced his first annual Technology News Quiz. But there's been so much happening lately, there's need to test your knowledge again.

Also, some of you didn't do so well on the last one. You know who you are. Do better this time or your parents will be getting a letter.

So here we go:

Apple just had a big press conference and made several announcements. What were they?

A. They're taking over Lehman Brothers.

B. They're sharing power in Zimbabwe.

C. They're bringing out new iPod models.

At that press conference, Apple also announced an enhancement to iTunes called the Genius. What does it do?

A. It does your taxes while you are listening to music.

B. It explains why Apple can do no wrong.

C. It suggests music you might like based on music you already have.

The day before the Apple press conference, Microsoft made announcements about its Zune music player. What did it announce?

A. It sold one.

B. After two years on the market, the name is still dumb.

C. It was bringing out new models.

Comcast recently made a controversial announcement. What was it?

A. Their on-demand service will now allow you to choose which rerun of "Walker Texas Ranger" you want to watch.

B. A new shopping/religion cable channel called the "For God's Sake, Buy This Junk Network."

C. It is putting a 250 gigabyte a month limit on Internet customers' downloads.

Which one of these is not the name of a new smartphone?

A. Bold.

B. Dream.

C. Whale.

Google recently released a new browser that created quite a stir. What is its name?

A. Gooser.

B. Browgle.

C. Chrome.

Microsoft also has a new browser released in beta. What is its name?

A. Internet Exploder.

B. NotVista.

C. Internet Explorer 8.

The Large Hadron Collider, which allows scientists to study the elemental particles of the universe, recently was put into service in Switzerland. What did some people fear about the startup?

A. That it would show that the universe started not with a Big Bang but with a Big Whimper.

B. That it would drive down the price of dark matter on eBay.

C. That it would destroy the universe.

A long-awaited video game called "Spore" debuted recently. What is the game's premise?

A. You are a mushroom farmer in Butler County trying to kill evil fungus people.

B. You are a mushroom in Butler County trying to kill evil farmers.

C. You control the evolution of life from single-celled organisms forward.

All correct answers are C.

9-10 right, Nice pocket protector; 7-8, You fix your glasses with duct tape; 5-6, Don't repair your own brakes; 3-4, Athletic shoes are a little too advanced for you; 0-2, You live in a cave in Afghanistan

Sandwich bag with fake mold

One for the what will they think of next dept.

10 top hacks

A list of the 10 top hacks from PCMag.com

·         Spacewar! (1961)—Computer games were pretty much unknown until Stephen Russell designed the first action-packed, graphics-based game, using a PDP-1 mainframe’s front panel switches as a controller.   

 ·         Saving Apollo 13 (1970)—This hack saved lives. After a fuel tank explosion severely damaged Apollo 13's command module, ground control and astronauts turned the ship's moon-landing module into a lifeboat and hacked a system for removing carbon dioxide from the lunar module.

 ·         The Internet Coke Machine (1991)—In the early '90s there was a fad for connecting soda machines to the Internet. Using the Unix "finger," machines were monitored to show how many Cokes the local machine had, and whether they were cold. CMU had one of the first such machines

·         MIT's VU Meter (1993)—In 1993, MIT students turned the top of a classroom building into a giant VU meter (volume units, which indicate signal strength, or loudness) that was synced to a Boston Pops concert.

·         The Greasecar (1998)—Engineer Carl Bielenberg first hacked a Volkswagen Rabbit to run on straight vegetable oil in 1998. The design was later modified by Justin Carven to run on waste vegetable oil.

 ·         DeCSS (1999)— Programmer Jon Lech Johansen, poster boy for the anti-DRM (digital rights management) fight, helped write DeCSS, which decrypts DVDs so you can play them anywhere you like. He has gone on to write other un-DRMing code, including applications to knock the protection off iTunes Music files.

 ·         Ben Heckendorn's Opus (2000-present)—Heckendorn takes large, clunky pieces of classic computing gear and turns them into beautiful, handcrafted handhelds and laptops. His most famous project was the handheld Atari 2600 game system, but he's also turned an Xbox 360 Elite and classic PC, the Atari 800, into elegant laptops.

 ·         TCP Packets by Pigeon (2001)—In 2001, a Linux user group in Norway implemented a joke protocol written in 1990 specifying how to transfer Internet data by pigeon—a 106 minute ping roundtrip! They pulled it off, but we're not too sure about the practicality.

 ·         OSx86 (2005)—When Apple switched over to Intel processors, OS X could have run on any homebrew PC system. But Apple’s engineers wrote code into the OS so that only Apple machines could boot OS X. Within months, a team of  hackers churned out software patches that create versions of OS X that will run on standard machines.

 ·         The Port-O-Rotary (2007)—Many have tried to bring the classic rotary dial aesthetic into the cell-phone age, but Sparkfun's Port-O-Rotary puts a full GSM mobile phone inside an authentic old rotary phone, with the dial, ringer and even the dial tone still functional!  It might not fit in your pocket, but it will get you lots of attention!