PC Mag goes all-digital

Another casualty in the print media. The venerable PC Magazine has announced that it will cease print publication in Jan. 2009 and go all-digital. TechMan remembers a time when computer magazines were competing for shelf space. Now only a few are left, many coming out of Great Britain.

New Xbox Experience has arrived

Microsoft unleased the latest update to the Xbox 360 dashboard this week.  It's called New Xbox Experience or NXE for short, and it's as radical a departure from the previous version as it could possibly be.

The biggest change you'll see is the avatar.  You can now create a digital version of yourself, right down to your eyebrows and moles.  This is the way your Xbox friends will see you when they look at your profile.  As fun as they are, I found that they're not that accurate - my avatar is much thinner and better looking than I am in real life, no matter how large I try to make him.  Maybe that's not a bad thing after all.

One enormous benefit that NXE brings is the ability to create "parties", groups of friends that stay together verbally no matter what they're doing on their Xboxes at the time.  When you join a party, you can talk to the other party members even if they're in one game and you're in another.  My favorite part of this piece is that once you're in a party chat, you can't hear the other folks in the game you're playing.  Some people might think that's antisocial, but if you've spent any time online with your Xbox and a headset, you know that there are some people out there who just shouldn't have a microphone.  Enough said about that.  However, this new feature isn't all peaches and cream.  I found last night that I kept losing one or more folks from my party and I'd have to re-invite them.  There may be a couple bugs in the new system and we will probably see a patch coming soon.

Another useful feature that NXE delivers is the ability to install your favorite games to the hard drive of your Xbox.  I installed Call of Duty: World at War onto my hard drive and now the game loads more quickly and the machine has quieted down.  No more noise from the DVD drive as it seeks out the data it's looking for while the game is being played.  Of course, this won't work if you bought the Arcade edition of the Xbox 360, which doesn't come with a hard drive.

Speaking of hard drives, you'll need one to get the maximum benefit from NXE, but not to worry.  Microsoft has a program in place to help people upgrade their Xboxes.  You can read about that here, where you'll find a form you can fill out with your Xbox serial number.  If your Xbox qualifies by its lack of storage, you can get either A) a free 512MB memory card or B) a 20GB hard drive for $19.99.

So if you're on Xbox live, swing by and tell JammerX19 hello.  Just don't laugh at his avatar.

Tech Talk subject is online shopping

 This week's Tech Talk podcast deals with the safety of online shopping, including dos and don'ts. Download it at post-gazette.com/podcast

They know what you did

 With a security camera on every block and a card swipe for every entry, it soon won't be hard to follow anyone all day long, as this NYT story demonstrates.

Yahoo chief steps down

 Jerry Yang, head of Yahoo, said today he will step down. No big surprise. When you reject a takeover offer at $31 a share and your stock is now worth just over $10, you might expect a few angry shareholders..

Pages from TechMan's notebook

Jottings from TechMan's notebook:

There's enough technology coming out of Carnegie Mellon University that TechMan could write every week just about that.

But then he could be accused of favoritism toward his alma mater, when in truth he can't remember the school song (if there were one) and can barely remember the school colors (burgundy and gray?)

But recently CMU-related items popped up that are worth mention.

The first is a follow-up to a recent TechMan column about digitizing newspaper archives. Former PG colleague Byron Spice, now at CMU, alerted me to a development there that is aiding in the digitizing of books and newspapers.

You've probably seen a captcha if you have logged on to any secure Web site. It is the distorted letters or numbers you have to type back into the site in order to show you are a human and not a machine.

Pioneers in captchas were Luis von Ahn and Manuel Blum of CMU; in fact, they coined the term.

Mr. Von Ahn and colleagues then went on to develop recaptchas, a way to make use of the decoding of these letters by millions of computer users.

One of the problems with digitizing text is that scanning machines cannot read some words because they are distorted in some way. Perhaps the printing is bad or the original is torn or creased. Those words have to be read by a human.

By using those words as captchas and allowing computer users to decode them as part of a Web page security process, millions of people have been enlisted in helping to digitize printed material without even knowing it.

In the first year of recaptcha use, more than 440 million words have been deciphered, the equivalent of 17,600 books. The system is currently being used to digitize the archives of the New York Times.

What a great hack.

The second CMU tidbit also has to do with making knowledge more easily available. CMU's Dan Hood is laboring to build an institutional repository for the university -- a Web site that would contain digital copies of research published by faculty members.

Faculty members routinely publish their research, but much of it appears in professional journals that have become so expensive that even some university libraries can ill afford to subscribe.

Although the researcher owns copyright to any publication of his or her work, when commercial journals publish it, they sometimes make contractual restrictions on making the work available otherwise.

Mr. Hood is trying to give the faculty a way to easily publish research on the CMU repository and to work with their commercial publishers to allow the work to appear there at some point.

The beginnings of the repository are at repository.cmu.edu. There are some works up there now, and Mr. Hood is hoping it will grow.

The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is widely considered to be one of the greatest encyclopedias ever published. The edition that marked the beginning of the transition from a British to an American endeavor, came out at a time when knowledge was exploding.

Many of its in-depth articles were written by legendary experts including Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Muir, T. H. Huxley, Ernest Rutherford and Bertrand Russell.

The 1911 has been digitized and made available on the Web at several spots, including 1911encyclopedia.org, encyclopedia.jrank.org and en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclopedia_Britannica.

The first site has ads, the second site has really annoying pop-up ads, and the third site has many empty pages waiting for someone to transcribe the articles. All the sites are incomplete versions of the original and suffer from the ills of unedited OCR transcription. But they make fascinating reading. And all three sites allow you to become involved by correcting scanner errors.

By the way, if you ever come across a print edition of the 1911 edition at a yard or estate sale, buy it.

8-tracks held the seeds of their own demise

Purple haze all in my brain." (Pause. Click.) "Lately things just don't seem the same." Thus sang Jimi Hendrix on TechMan's eight-track tape of the album "Are You Experienced."

The pause, click, of course, was the track changing in the middle of a song.

The saga of Stereo 8, the official name for the eight-track tape format, stars an inventor from Toledo, Ohio, a business jet magnate, a car dealer with the nickname of "Madman" and a major car company.

In 1952 William Lear invented the endless loop tape cartridge as a way to eliminate the threading and other inconveniences of reel-to-reel tape.

Two years later inventor George Eash, of Toledo, brought out the Fidelipac, a cartridge that caught on in radio and was often called the "cart." Carts were used to play commercials, jingles and other short recordings that needed to be played repeatedly from the beginning.

Entrepreneur and car dealer Earl "Madman" Muntz, a nickname he got from his frenetic commercials, got the idea that these four-track cartridges could be used to play music in cars and brought out the four-track "CARtridge." It wasn't a huge hit.

Re-enter Mr. Lear, who had been off designing and building the LearJet business airplane. In 1964 he designed the Lear Jet Stereo 8 cartridge. It was different from previous cartridges in that the rubber and plastic pinch rollers were incorporated into the tape instead of being in the player.

To increase the amount of music on a cartridge, the tape held eight narrower tracks side-by-side. Using two tracks for stereo meant four programs of music could be played.

Since two-sided albums had to be divided into four programs, songs were often split into two parts by a track change, song orders were reshuffled, or shorter songs were repeated. Or there were long passages of silence. All added to the clunky "charm" of the format.

To keep the cost down, the heads of players could read only two tracks, so to switch programs, the head had to physically move. This caused the audible pause and then the click when the program changed.

All this shifting could cause the head to become misaligned with the tape and because the tracks were so close together, there could be a bleed of sound from other tracks into the one currently playing or the two channels of stereo could get out of synch.

Mr. Lear's big breakthrough with the Stereo 8 came with a little help (pause, click) from his friends. In 1965, Ford offered Stereo 8 players as an option on many of its cars and the next year on all its cars. In the early 1970s the quadraphonic eight-track or Quad8 appeared.

You might think that eight-track was killed by the cassette tape. But the cassette was introduced two years before the eight-track and the two coexisted in the 1960s and '70s.

What really killed the eight-track was its own shortcomings. Stereo 8 tapes and players developed a reputation for unreliability because of splice failures and the phenomenon of the player "eating" the tape.

As Stereo 8 began losing market share, companies tried to make the tapes cheaper by using inferior materials and the reliability declined even more. Record companies put their development dollars into cassettes.

By the time the CD came out in 1982, the eight-track was widely consigned to attics, basements and flea markets.

Late-period releases can be valuable. For example, Bruce Springsteen's "Live/1975-85" was one of the very few box sets to be released on vinyl, cassette, compact disc and eight-track tape.

The last widely issued eight-track tape, most agree, was Fleetwood Mac's "Greatest Hits" in November 1988.

But some won't stop (pause, click) believing. There is a cult of eight-track aficionados. One of the best sites for eight-track culture and lore is www.8trackheaven.com.

Sometimes the coolest tech is your own

I've always wanted some sort of at-a-glance display at my desk that would give me performance statistics on the Post-Gazette web server farm.  Dot-matrix electronic displays were always a little too expensive and having a window of numbers on my Windows desktop was a little too obtrusive for my tastes.  Over the years I tried a bunch of solutions in the middle but never found one I could stick with for too long.  But this weekend I hit the jackpot.

Make Magazine's blog is chock full of neat How-Tos and a recent entry about their USB7 6-digit LED display got me thinking about this project again.  This device connects to your PC via a USB cable and then displays six digits of text that you send to it over the serial connection.  I ordered the kit and assembled it in about half an hour.

Next came the data input.  After all, a device like this isn't any good if you don't have actual information to display on it.  I had already cooked up an ASP.NET web application to display server usage data.  I modified it to broadcast XML instead of HTML, and then wrote a consumer .NET application that sits on my PC and bridges the gap between the LED display and the web site.  Now I get data on the module every five seconds.

My next trick is to mount this somewhere so everyone in the office can see it.  Maybe then they'll stop asking me about our traffic every five minutes.

Google phone bug

An interesting bug in the new G1 phone running Google's Android

AT&T buys WiFi network

AT&T has purchased the WiFi networking firm Wayport for $275 million. The purchase gives AT&T about 10,000 Wi-Fi hotspots in Wyndham, Marriott Vacation Club and Four Seasons hotels, as well as McDonald's restaurants. AT&T has its own Wi-Fi hotspots as well. The deal will take its total to 20,000 in the U.S. and 80,000 globally, counting providers with which it has roaming agreements.