Posted on December 14, 2009 by Scott. Filed Under Culture, Florida, Technology | Leave a Comment
This is so embarrassing.
Audio cassettes make comeback
Audio cassettes are making a comeback because elderly listeners are rejecting new technology.
After years of dwindling sales in the face of competition from CDs and digital downloads, the death knell for the format was sounded two years ago when retailers stopped stocking cassettes.
However, record companies are now releasing music on tape again due to growing demand from more senior music fans…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/6803099/Audio-cassettes-make-comeback.html
Vinyl records I can understand, they often sound better, but cassettes? This must be a result of age-related hearing loss or too many Led Zeppelin concerts.
Sunday – while sitting in church – I realized that I was the only old fart using a hand-held web-thingy. One of the reasons I go to this particular Unitary Church is the free WiFi. I use my iPod Touch to look up words and references and take notes during the service and discussions. It keeps me from saying anything stupid or dismantling the chairs when someone starts droning about their private, non-consensual hallucinations.
In such a liberal community though you’d expect at least some cyber-geezers. Among the few people I know who are my age, most are also tethered to internet devices so it was a surprise to discover so many other old hippies insist on consuming their content through streaming oxide rather than streaming mp3s. As this demographic becomes a larger percentage of society I can but hope we balance out the old-school tech-deniers with agile tool users who appreciate the century in which we will all die.
Tagged with tech.
Posted on December 13, 2009 by keola. Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Posted on November 26, 2009 by Scott. Filed Under Cornwall, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Cornwall has been crowned the UK’s best holiday destination at a travel-industry awards ceremony.
The county claimed the British Travel Award title from the 2008 winner, the Lake District, following a public vote. It last scooped the award in 2006.
Tourism accounts for 25% of Cornwall’s economy and is also the county’s largest employer.
About five million people visit the area every year and latest figures show that visitors spent £1.6bn in 2007.
According to VisitCornwall the county has more than 300 beaches and 40% of visitors go to The Eden Project during their stay making it the county’s most popular attraction.
Industry and business experts have praised the county for reclaiming the title.
(more)
Posted on November 22, 2009 by Scott. Filed Under Florida, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Airplane people are a fascinating sub-population in every country, especially here in America where human-powered flight was fledged.
I’ve always been interested in these jockies of stick-and-wire aluminum boxes, with their checklists and shiny toys. Both of my parents flew, my Dad got his hours in bombers, before Mom bought her own Cessna 150 and ran the Fixed Base Operation (FBO) in St. Augustine.
While those who drive big airliners or top-gun military hotshots are paid to put holes in the air, the guy quietly polishing his Cessna on a sun-baked regional runway has more personal incentive. He’ll give you an endless list of reasons why he pissed away his savings on the FAA and pay for mechanics and insurance just to keep an ancient airframe flying. But the real reason may be what dragged us out of Africa millions of years ago.
The surviving adventurous among us become our heroes and leaders. Noble troublemakers have the potential to define humanity. When times get tough, the last thing we need are frightened caretakers; it is the disciplined risk-takers who usually win wars and grow business.
Out on the apron, most of the commuter planes are gone. Even the big Gulfstreams are out. The little airport in Palm Coast rests between weekends and holidays. The empty tie-downs will be filled with bread and butter Cessnas on Friday afternoon. Vacant parking spots outside the Highjacker restaurant will eventually fill with Porsches and station wagons loading for the last leg of a long commute. Inside, the crustier airmen swap stories around the bar or discuss table manners with their kids over the best burgers in town.
Private pilots have a unique combination of cowboy abandon and terminally compulsive behaviour. Within the constraints of the guiding principle (”Don’t fuck up!”) hides a childlike need for challenge and a joy of life – perhaps the result of constantly seeing life from a godlike altitude. Three hundred and sixty degrees of horizon is sure to calibrate your perspectives correctly.
While many pilots are ex-military and others fanatics by hobby alone, they all share the soldier’s unspoken understanding that mortality is less than a breath thick. Beneath life’s thin skin lurks an unforgiving bitch who waits with infinite patience for that one wrong move so she can turn you into a pile of twisted black metal.
Looking out past the trees, I see a Piper coming around on final, engine winding up in the cool, thick air. A hanger door grinds shut over rusted rails, keys jingle and a pickup roars awake. The sunset tips the tall grass beyond the runway orange hanging on the day.
Tagged with culture Florida.
Posted on November 19, 2009 by Scott. Filed Under Florida, Mainland, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
As the mists clear, a faint scream is heard above the soft mumble of the sea. It’s Scott, the vanished Blogger who once again finds his keyboard among the palms, poor people and pines of northern Florida.
Florida is where you go to die, get laid or throw away your money on a virtual reality ride where Michael Jackson gets eaten by a huge mouse. How can anyone live in a state that features large, meat-eating lizards? In Florida, rust is a food group. Almost everything here is either poisonous, dangerous or imported from South America on a boat under the cover of darkness. Napoleon took one look at this place and sold it to pay for a winter vacation in Moscow.
Stay tuned, there must be some culture here some place.
Tagged with Florida.
Posted on November 4, 2009 by keola. Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments
My wife has been having issues with her older Mac laptop, and and examination determined that it was indeed on its last legs. Not being able to afford to buy her a new Mac laptop right now, I looked around for options. Getting her a Windows or Linux box was not at option, so began to explore the possibility of building her a Hackintosh – a netbook that would normally run Windows or Linux, but was capable of running OS X as well.
Boing Boing has a chart comparing various netbooks and what functions worked and did not work when OS X was installed on them. From this chart and additional research I determined that a Dell Mini 9 was the most likely candidate to attempt this on. I ordered one directly from Dell online ($340 with 16G SSD), and purchased a copy of Snow Leopard at the UHH bookstore to install on it.
I also located several tutorials on how to install OS X on the Mini 9, but this one seemed to be the most recent and easiest way to accomplish it. After the Mini 9 arrived I borrowed a large jump drive, copied the installers on it, ran the NetbookBootMaker, and had no problem at all getting the OS X installer working. After restart the normal configuration dialogs showed up, and in no time I was looking at the OS X Finder on a 9″ screen. I was suprised at how quickly it boots up – significantly faster than my MacBook Pro. It has frozen on startup just once, but a simple restart was all it took.
My biggest fear was not failing to get OS X installed and running, but how my wife would take to this smaller netbook after using a 15″ laptop for so long. She loved it – what a relief.
There are rumors on the net that Apple will disable the ability of OS X 10.6.2 to run on Atom processors, like the one that the Mini 9 runs. If that is correct then this one may be stuck on 10.6.1 indefinitely – at least until someone in the Hackintosh community figures out a workaround.
UPDATE: It appears that 10.6.2 may not specifically disable computers running the Atom processor.
Posted on October 21, 2009 by keola. Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Posted on October 1, 2009 by keola. Filed Under Uncategorized | 8 Comments
The folks at the Aloha IBU blog have an interesting post with links to videos of people in Germany during Octoberfest, and they are lamenting the lack of beer in Hawai‘i. Not only ignorant but insulting. They asked for a Hawai‘i version to respond to it, so I offer a verse:
Updated:
Verse:
He Guiness ko ka ‘Ailiki The Irish have Guiness
No Holani ka Heineken And Heineken is from Holland
He pua Tahiti ka Hinano Hinano is a Tahitian flower
He aha ko Hawai’i nei? What does Hawai’i have to offer?
Chorus
He mau pia no ko Hawai‘i Hawai‘i indeed has beers
He mau pia hu’ihu’i a ‘ono! There are cold and delicious beers!
He aha ko Kelemania? What does Germany have?
Ko’eko’e ka ‘aina, ko’eko’e ka pia The land is cold and the beer is tasteless
Verse 2
E ko Hawai‘i nui akea To all across great Hawai‘i
Malo‘o i ka mehana la Parched in the heat of the day
E kena i ka wai hu’ihu’i Quench your thirst in the cool
‘amepela no Hawai‘i nei. amber waters, from Hawai‘i
Cheers!
Posted on September 27, 2009 by keola. Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
I’ve received a lot of great feedback and compliments from people regarding the development of the Hawaiian language interface for Google. Mahalo to everyone who sent notes of congratulations for the accomplishment and recognition from the Governor’s office. I would like to address one element that came out in several stories, including the announcement by the Governer’s office, on this development. In these stories, it was stated that “Hawaiian has become the first native American language available through the “Google in Your Language” program”, or something similar.
Hawaiian is not a native American language, and in the press release that UH-Hilo sent out we never claimed it was. There was a short FAQ section at the end of the release that stated “The only other Polynesian language interfaces available are for Maori, the native language of Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Tongan. No translations have been completed in any native American language, though some are currently being translated.” The reason for the addition of this statement was to show how few indigenous and endangered languages have taken advantage of the GIYL program, and hopefully encourage advocates of those languages to look into providing Google in their languages.
A few of the newspaper stories that came out early on misconstrued this statement and stated that Hawaiian was a native American language. Though there is great diversity among the indigenous languages of North American, Hawaiian is not closely related to any of them. Many native Hawaiians object to being classified as native Americans for valid reasons. If my inclusion of that bit of information regarding NA and Polynesians contributed to the misunderstanding that led to Hawaiian being mistakenly identified in these stories as a native American language, I apologize.
Tagged with google, hawaiian, Olelo.
Posted on September 20, 2009 by keola. Filed Under Hawai‘i, Technology | 1 Comment
About two years ago I blogged about the connectivity problems we had at our home in Kurtistown, and how we came across a wireless provider that solved our issues, Advanced Wireless Systems Hawai‘i, and showed what lengths it took to get wireless to our home (see picture below).
All was well for the first 18 months of use, and about 6 months ago we began to experience slower connectivity, which eventually devolved into sporadic connectivity with periods of nothing but message os “cannot reach server”. After putting up with this for a few months I finally called AWS, and after three visits by their techs over the course of a month, we’re still not much better off. We had decent (300-400Kbs) connectivity for short stretches (10-15 minutes) followed by stretches of no connectivity at all of 5-8 minutes). This past week one of their techs pointed our antenna to another access point to the south-east of us which is closer to us than the previous access point was, and while we have better speed when the connection is working, we still have infuriating periods of no connectivity at all.
Their main tech guy is blaming our area and trees, but I’m not really buying it. I could see trees causing variation in connectivity speed, particularly in times of rain, but not the long periods of no connectivity. Also, the behavior is exactly as it was when it was pointed to a different access point. Hmm, maybe the trees that were playing mind games with us previously have cousins between us and he new access point.
I’m considering getting a wireless router from MobiPCS and their Hele system to see if they are any better. We have Mobi phones, and while their service is not that great in our area, I’m hopeful that it will be better than what we have.
