Gear

The G1 gets covered by the Guardian. The new GACL phone was launched today by T-Mobile.

What happens after TV’s mainframe era ends next February? That’s the question I pose in a long essay by that title (and at that link) in Linux Journal.

It’s makes a case that runs counter to all the propaganda you’re hearing about the “digital switchover” scheduled for television next February 17.

TV as we know it will end then. It’s worse than it appears. For TV, at least. For those already liberated, a growing new world awaits. For those still hanging on the old transmitter-based teat, it’ll be an unpleasant weaning.

I’m not a car nut — I could never afford to be, lacking both the money and the time — but I do enjoy and appreciate them as works of arts, science, culture and plain necessity. So, about a month ago the kid and I joined Britt Blaser at the Concours d’Elegance in Newport Harbor, looking at an amazing collection of antique cars and motorcycles, all restored or preserved to a level of perfection you hardly find in new cars off the production line.

We also got to hang with new friends from Iconic Motors, who are making a very hot little sports car designed and made entirely in the U.S., mostly by small manufacturers of obsessively perfected goods. Took a lot of pictures of both, which you’ll find by following the links under the photos.

This is mostly true:

This one is my fave.

There is no business I wish more that I had thought of than Despair.com. Just freaking brilliant. And humbling.

Clicking on the picture above will take you on a slideshow tour of the Grand Canyon, shot from the right side of an LAX-bound 757 that departed from Boston. I have no idea what movie was showing at the time; though I do know I refused, as I usually do, to close my windowshade to reduce ambient light on the ancient crappy ceiling-mounted TV screens. The scene outside upstaged the movie in any case, as it has been doing for the last several million years, as the Kaibab Plateau has pushed its dome upward and the Colorado has stayed roughly where it had been since the many millions of years before that, when it wandered lazily across a flat plain.

As ranking canyons go, the Grand Canyon is almost too grand. It’s freaking huge. From the air I find it far more dramatic to peer down into its narrower regions, such as the one above, which is early in the Colorado’s course through the canyon. The series follows the canyon from east to west, from not far below Glen Canyon dam and the Vermillion Cliffs area to Vulcan’s Throne and Lava Falls, where relatively recent flows have slopped their blackness down across the canyon’s iconic layer-cake strata.

What is most amazing to me about this corner of The West is that it was obviously placid through so many time stretches across the last almost two billion years. The West is painted with the colors of long periods of relative quiet, as sands and silts and gravel and cobbles were deposited by braided rivers and transgressing seas.

All of the Grand Canyon’s strata were laid down before the age of dinosaurs. Younger layers such as those comprising the Vermillion Cliffs to the East, the Grand Staircase upstream in the Glenn Canyon area, in Canyonlands, Arches, and most of Utah’s most colorful layer-cake displays — Bryce, Zion, Capitol Reef, Cedar Breaks, San Rafael Reef and Swell — are comprised of younger rock eroded off the top of the Kaibab Plateau.

Some of the shots were taken with my Canon 30d, and others with my tiny PowerShot 850. which does a better job of shooting straight down through the window. Its smaller lens distorts less through the plane’s multiple layers of bad glass and plastic windows. And the display on the back lets me shoot without looking through an eyepiece. It’s not perfect, but not bad, either.

I still miss my Nikon Coolpix 5700, which took lots of great pictures out plane windows, and was frankly much better at that job than the Canon, mostly because the Coolpix’ objective lens was smaller (again, better for looking at angles through the terrible optics of plane windows), and partly because the camera’s flip-out viewer allowed me to hold the camera to the window at angles I could not put my face, but where I could still see and frame the view.

Eastern Greenland blows my mind every time I fly over it. This last trip was no exception. Imagine Alps, Rockies, Himilayas, buried up to their nostrils in snow and ice across an expanse of Saharan dimensions, all of it moving, less an ice cap than a great spreading mound of blue and white, all of it heavy as magma, hard as stone, abrading away at the mountains, leaving horns and scarps protruding above the whiteness. At its edges icebergs calve off constantly and in great profusion, suggesting a bovine maternal quality to the great mound itself.

Anyway, it’s past the equinox and gaining on the winter solstice, so the sun was quite low when we flew over Greenland en route to Denver from London last week. Still, the subject was still there. Amazing sight.

The best table radio I’ve heard in years is the Cambridge Soundworks 705. It’s solid and friendly-looking, with an old-fashioned round dial and a nice soft feel to the reduction gears inside its knob. (All three of its knobs feel good, actually.) Sound on AM as well as FM is outstanding, especially considering its small size. It’s mono, but only through its excellent speaker. It’s stereo though the headphone jack, so you can hook up to external stereo speakers if you like. The internal antenna works well, and it has a jack for an external one if you want to inprove reception. I think it’s a bargain at $99.99 from HiFi.com (Cambridge SoundWorks’ website); but they have it for $20 less at the company’s warehouse store in Needham. Comes in three colors: black, white and gray. I like the white.

Also from Cambridge SoundWorks, the PCWorks speaker system has been selling for years at $39.95 or something. Right now it lists for $10 more than that. The warehouse in Needham has it for $36-something. I’ve bought maybe five of these over the years, usually for service as laptop sound systems. People are always astonished at how good they sound, especially for the money. There’s a shoebox-sized bass unit, tiny (2.5″ square) right and left speakers, and a volume control in the cord that runs from your source (typically a portable MP3 player or a laptop, but anything with a headphone jack). The speakers cables and audio source cable are all long, which makes it easy to spread the speakers far apart or to hide most of the gear somewhere. Comes in white and black.

Want cheap HDTV? Combine that PCWorks speaker system with a low-cost LCD monitor like one of these from Costco, which start at $199. Plug the two into your HDTV set-top box and you’ve got an HDTV for less than $250. That’s kinda what I did yesterday when I needed to test our new Verizon FiOS (fiber optic) installation. We don’t have a TV of any kind here, but we have a PCWorks speaker system and a ViewSonic 22″ 1680 x 1050 display that cost in the low $200s from Costco. It was a jury-rigged setup, but something of a revelation: together they look and sound fabulous.

Last but far from least, the You-Do-It Electronics Center. If you’re a hardware geek who’s lucky enough to live near Boston, this place is Shangri-La. They don’t have everything, but it sure seems that way. (Look Honey, they sell capacitors!) Last night I grazed there for half an hour (way too short a time) picked up a cheap Y connector (RCA male to 1/8″ female) and a nice Uniden cordless phone with a headset jack. Works very nicely too. You can’t miss the neon signage peering over the northbound entrance ramp to 495 I-95/128 (see comments for the correction) at the Needham interchange. Finding the store is a lot harder. Clue: take the street next to the Hess station, and just look around the industrial district behind there.