[Fri Oct 31 20:36:03 CDT 2014]

I think I may have written about this topic before, but just in case... remember the Apple iWatch? Yes, it was released less than two months ago. And yes, after hearing rumors of an "intelligent watch" that Apple was getting ready to release for years, it only took a matter of weeks (or was it days?) after it released for pretty much everybody to forget about it.

I do hear a lot about the iPhone 6, but the fact is that I sense no excitement whatsoever over the iWatch, not even among the most gadget-crazy of my acquaintances. They're simply not talking about it. They don't seem to care. And, to be honest, it doesn't surprise me. What does it have to offer? I'm not sure at all. Why bother? It's overpriced, that's just for starters. Even worse, it offers the about the very same functionality we already have on our smartphones but at a smaller size that manages to make almost everything we do on our phones amazingly annoying... all of it while you still need to carry a phone anyways (?!). Listen, I'm not saying it will never work. It may very well be the thing of the future, but not now. It'd have to come with a more solid value proposition. {link to this entry}

[Fri Oct 31 20:24:15 CDT 2014]

There's a story going around warning you about why you "absolutely need to uninstall your phone's flashlight app. I've seen it all over on Facebook, for instance. People have also asked me about it during conversations here and there. So, I suppose media has been making a good ruckus over all this. But, as usual, media tends to simplify and distort in order to gain some audience. It's not that what they say is totally false, but it's more like a half-truth. If this applies to most news, it's even more so in the case of technology news. Snopes offers a more nuanced story. Aside from the fact that the source of the story is quite biased because it has an ax to grind (the story was apparently released by a cybersecurity company that makes its own flashlight app), the behavior of these apps is no different than what most other free apps already do. In the end, it all boils down to something we all should have learned by now: there is not such a thing as a free lunch. So, when you see that an app is free, more likely than not, it's because the developer is collecting your data to sell it. However, this doesn't make it "dangerous" or "a virus". It just makes it more like what Facebook or Google already do with our data. Or how do you think they make money? {link to this entry}

[Tue Oct 28 09:32:06 CDT 2014]

Wired magazine publishes an article whose main argument is that soon Internet TV will be the only TV:

More people are watching TV online than ever—a lot more. Viewers may not be cutting the cable cord altogether, but growth in the number who want to watch TV over a different set of pipes is surging, according to a new report from Adobe. If anyone was still wondering why HBO and CBS plan to offer an online-only option, the trend is clear: the internet is where people want to watch. In more and more homes, online TV isn’t a geeky novelty, a sidelight to the traditional version. It’s just what TV looks like now.

Of course, there are still plenty of TV sets, the digital divide still keeps rural areas and lower income brackets away from this new television experience and chances are that old-style television (like old-style radio) will never disappear completely, but the fact remains that more and more people just prefer to watch TV on mobile devices (smartphones and tablets), their computers (desktops or laptops) or, when still viewing through a more traditional TV set, prefer to be "in control" and enjoy television on-demand, rather than the old-style. I know for sure that is true for me, and I barely watch any television. However, when I watch a movie or documentary, I usually turn to Netflix or YouTube. I don't have a TV set in my apartment, and only pay the cable company for Internet access. More to the point, when I bother to check and see how the younger generations watch television, it is precisely that way most of the time. So, that tells me that these changes are here to stay. {link to this entry}

[Sat Oct 18 15:35:37 CDT 2014]

If, like me, you use GNOME 3 on Linux, you may have run into an issue where the desktop environment automatically turns off the screen after a while, even if you are watching a video. To make it worse, if you check the System Settings, you will see that it's possible to change the time the system has to be idle before the monitor is turned off from a range of 1 minute to a maximum of 1 hour. In other words, that 1 hour is the longest amount of time we can go without the monitor turning itself off on us, no matter what (one wonders who's the genius who came up with this idea, by the way). In any case, if you want to disable that, and make sure that the monitor is never turned off automatically, simply enter the following from a terminal:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power sleep-display-ac 0
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power sleep-display-battery 0
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session idle-delay 0

That will take care of it. If you want a more detailed explanation, just check out this blog entry. {link to this entry}