After arriving at Las Vegas airport I remember being really impressed by the ample places I could charge my laptop and even my USB devices for free. In recent memory it took quite a lot of skill and patient preparation to be in the right seat at the right time to get the only outlet near your gate. Now it seems everyone has a laptop notebook and the airports have responded accordingly.

Imagine my surprise as I was walking though the terminal to see the Charge Carte beckoning to me…

A singular device with almost every type of charging cable available to cater for the person who rushed out and forgot their charger. You now have the option to get a quick charge for the most popular devices (includes Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, LG, Kyocera, Blackberry, Palm, Siemens, Sony-Ericcson, Nextel, iPod and iPhone).

Sounds like a good idea … until you see the price Charge Carte is charging ;)

As the closing on my house gets closer and closer I am starting to think more and more about the various digital services that are available in the greater Columbus area.  I think FIOS would have been my first option (up to 30 Mbps downloads and 5 Mbps uploads), however, this service is not available in any part of Ohio.

I am fortunate, however, to no longer be under the tyrannical rule of Buckeye-Express, who have made some kind of pact with the City Toledo to ensure that no other cable company competes on a level playing field. The two main cable providers in the Columbus Ohio area include, Time Warner (TW) and Wow Cable, with AT&T U-verse filling the role of young upstart.

I cobbled together the following information based on the cable companies web sites. TW has the advantage in the estimated download speeds and have a better price point than WOW cable. I am not much of a premium channel guy so the free channel offerings are not drawing me in to the WOW service. AT&T has 2 free receivers in addition to the DVR box which more than makes up for the $15 difference in the price offered by Time Warner cable services.

Info: As of 3/9/2008

So what intrigues me the most? AT&T U-verse! which by all accounts is powered by Microsoft Media Room. Hanselman mentioned this last year but they were not taking orders back then, they are now in full swing apparently. I am fascinated by the potential integration to my PC viewing pictures and\or music and videos, I am assuming through Media Center or some kind UPnP services.

I need to ask more questions about the potential Xbox 360 as it seems to be able to act like another receiver, I am definitely jumping the gun here as I do not have an Xbox yet, but with the current rumors about an increase in 360 storage I am tempted!

Of course the actual device software is designed to be a DVR interface with a dynamic MultiView (multiple picture-in-picture) capabilities that will allow you to have up to 16 Picture-in-Picture (PIP) ... I need to see that before I believe it.

My wife is pushing toward the AT&T solution and simply waiting for the phone service to be available in the near future. I think the choice has been made for me ;)

I did not have the time to watch the entire speech by Bill Gates, if your time is a premium like mine check out this 5 minute highlight!

A fascinating announcement by Warner Brothers should ensure the demise of the HD-DVD format and thereby allowing Sony to enjoy its first real format victory. In a move that seems to echo back the historical figure of Benedict Arnold, Warner Brothers has jumped ship from HD-DVD to Blu-Ray!

It was Warner Brothers support of an alternate form to Blu-Ray that started this whole thing in the first place:

In March 2002, the forum voted to approve a proposal endorsed by Warner Brothers. and other motion picture studios that involved compressing HD content onto dual-layer DVD-9 discs.

I must admit that my decision was made when Warner started distributing the Complete Matrix Trilogy in HD DVD format, together with Sony's propensity to lose format wars I thought Blu-Ray would lose for sure. When the triple layer (51Gb) out did the dual layer of the Blu-Ray (50Gb), with almost identical production costs I thought for sure that it was over.

Now that the Matrix will no longer be available on HD-DVD I am on the Blu-Ray band wagon!

John Lech Johansen is a genius, as one of the more infamous hardware hackers in Europe (he may be State side now) he has been responsible for some of the major hacks in recent memory (specifically DVD encryption). So his comments on the effects of Apples recent update on his how famous iPhone hack (which you can use with any carrier) are ... interesting.

I was expecting that the iPhone firmware update would simply relock unlocked iPhones so that they could only be used with AT&T. I was wrong. As you may know by now, after an unlocked iPhone has been upgraded with the 1.1.1 firmware it will refuse to activate with any SIM. The technical evidence so far indicates that this was intentional by Apple. Although the iPhone is still alive, it’s completely useless. It’s essentially a brick.

Has Nokia or Sony Ericsson ever bricked or refused service on an unlocked phone? Not that I’ve heard of, and if they did, they would have been quickly sued in several countries where consumer rights are more strongly protected.

Did Sony ever brick PSPs over homebrew software? Did Microsoft ever overwrite someone’s BIOS with garbage because they detected an illegitimate Windows installation?

In light of other things Apple has done lately, such as adding an encrypted hash to the iPod database to lock out non-Apple software and disabling TV-out on the iPod unless the 3rd party accessory you’re using has an Apple authentication chip, it’s evident that Apple is well on its way to become one of the most consumer hostile tech companies.

I was going over the things that are actually new with the iPhone, and the only thing I could come up with was that it has a touch screen as the primary interface (which is cool!).

I was looking at comparing iPhone and Windows CE but someone beat me to the punch. I think there is an alpha geek somewhere that is just deciding what becomes the next big thing, regardless of what exists. I am not sure who decides what is cool these days but the CE has been boasting these capabilities in small mobile devices for a while, it seems to me that marketing, and primarily, hype is even more relevant than the product itself.

Until I watched this video I honestly thought that the iPhone represented a paradigm shift in mobile devices. It is an improvement to be sure but is it changing the course of tech history? If the hype is to believed, then yes.

"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." - Oscar Wilde

I think Blockbusters recent decision to back Blue Ray may be the first nail in the coffin for HD DVD. It seems that the studios are preferring the Blue Ray format and people will flock to technology with the most availability. I would have honestly thought that HD DVD would have taken this battle, just because the name immediately tells you what it is ... I guess not!

I am still going to wait on prices to slide just a little more for High Def TV's so I am happy to watch this little battle play out to its vicious end game. It will be interesting to see how this will effect the sales of the HD DVD for XBOX 360. It looks like Sony using Blue Ray with PS3 was that right call.

I love the convenience of laptops, the portability, the 'I am cool' factor, however, I have consistently balked at anything smaller because it simply becomes impractical to use for long periods of time.

Case in point is the recent release of the FlipStart. It really looks good but the problem is not in the looks, the battery life, or the CPU.

Take a long hard look at this picture and tell me what the problem is?

Who in their right minds wants to write anything of significance with their thumbs. It is just not natural. I have spent a tremendous amount of time attempting to ensure that my QWERTY typing skills are adequate for today's world of business only to be reduced to using my thumbs!

To be sure there are some nice mouse like artifacts that make using the FlipStart tolerable, but this is not a solution for typing more than a couple of sentences, and this is not just me. If you follow an SMS message thread you will see that people just do not want to type whole sentences on small devices (e.g. lol, btw...).

I do have a proposal, if not a solution, that may make things a little easier and faster for everyone. It does not require that you ditch all your hard earned typing skills.

One handed typing using the Half QWERTY, Half Keyboard layout.

Promote a keyboard scheme that is basically half the QWERTY keyboard as in the following diagram. This would allow you to hold the device in your left (if right handed) and type with your right. To get to the other half of the QWERTY layout you would have to use flip function but that is the point at which you would need to learn new skills.

I do not pretend to have run any practical test on this system myself but there are people out there promoting and using this system.

"A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad ... and a bad one will turn the bonniest into something worse than ugly." - Emily Bronte