Originally Authored April 22, 2014

I love tabs. I think Firefox’s implementation of tabs in an internet browser has to be one of the greatest, and most simple, innovations of the internet. A normal part of my workflow involves opening a bunch of tabs at one time so I can read them each later. I do it when I search Google, researching something for work or school and I do it when I’m just on my favorite sites looking for interesting news.

I typically scroll through a page of headlines or website titles, then Ctrl + click the crap out of it until there are no more interesting headlines. Once I have exhausted that page of search results or stories, I cycle through the tabs I have shotgunned into my browser and read through them. I love it.

That being said, I’m done with it.

I have slowly come to realize that this just does not work for me. I usually end up with a billion open tabs. I get tired of reading one of them because I know I have so many left to cycle through and I know the rest are all more exciting than the first. I have this mentality for a couple tabs, I find one or two sites that satisfy me, then I get tired of reading page after page. The pages that initially piqued my curiosity, now feel like a chore to read. I feel like I need to chip away at the buffet of pages I have in front of me. Come the end of the process, I feel deprived of rich content, not because I am deprived, but because I inundated my attention span with too many tabs. So now, I’m taking the internet one tab at a time and I think it will make my learning, and time wasting, experiences much more fulfilling.

Originally authored November 25, 2013

Lately, a handful of tech companies have made a day’s living off of predicting what a user will say or what that user wants to see. Everyday, people search Google for things they want to see and it is to Google’s advantage if they know exactly what the user wants to see based on their search results, often personalizing the search for that specific person. Another company, called SwiftKey, provides a keyboard experience for Android that aims to reduce the user’s keystrokes by way of predicting their next word and allowing the user to input that predicted word. If the keyboard predicts every word correctly, the user can simply press space until the desired words are on the screen, sending a text not just written with but written by the keyboard.

Apparently Google think’s SwiftKey’s method just take way too much effort by the user. Who has time to press the spacebar a couple times? In an effort to combat those wasted seconds, Google has filed a patent that will allow a user to send automated responses through email, social networking, instant messaging, and texting.

The technology is said to read your other responses and interactions of digital communication and analyze them in a way to predict how a user might respond to future posts, texts, and emails. Once the technology has performed its calculations, it sends a response for the user and prevents the user.

While some (older) folks see social media as an evil medium that prohibits all forms of face-to-face interaction, this new patent is a whole new topic for debate. How it is used remains to be seen but a couple different ways are easily foreseeable.

First, is that it would remove human interaction entirely. While that statement is probably an exaggeration, it has potential to remove the need for people to be social even on social media. For some people, that’s they only social interaction they have! This automated social media may remove even that from a person’s life.

Second, and what seems like a more viable option, is that it would increase people’s time to do things other than social media by automating the social media itself. Potentially, it could free up people from social media so they can interact face-to-face.

This second option seems a bit more viable. Most people do love their social media but there are still some obligations. The big thing is companies that need to keep their face in the social media game, posting comments and responses here and there simply to be seen as an active social media player. If a company could automate those actions, they can save man power while still being a hit on Twitter.

If and when this technology is released, it remains to be seen how users and companies will put it into effect. Perhaps it will make people less social, or perhaps just less absorbed by social networks.

Originally Authored November 1st, 2013

It’s no secret that two of the largest industries right now are medicine and technology. Naturally then, business’s heavy hitters are trying to kill two birds with one stone. It seems like a perfect match: combining what just might be today’s most thriving industry (technology), with what just might be history’s most important industry (medicine). But today, it is neither a tech giant nor a medical powerhouse entering this game.

Riddell is an American company that specializes in football apparel, equipment and protective gear. While protective gear might not exactly be medicine, the story comes to mind of the villagers who battled over whether to build a fence at the cliff or buy an ambulance for the free fallers. Riddell builds fences (i.e. protective equipment) and aims to prevent a need for ambulances, quite literally in this situation.

The system allows the user or diagnoser to see how hard a hit was, where it impacted the player, and how long the impact on the player lasted. Upon seeing these results, coaches can then go to the players and instruct them how they can hit or play so that these types of impacts are less powerful, frequent, and taxing on their heads. While that might not get you a couple more yards, it could get you a couple more years on your career or, in extreme cases, your life.

While Riddell’s system looks to be one of great value and use to anyone that plays the sport, it is not ready to make a universal impact just yet. Currently, each unit costs $150. This is not chump change and would make this a system geared toward professional and college leagues at the moment. Riddell is testing their system in youth leagues but have had no exposure further than that thus far.

All this being said, let’s get to the point: how are they doing that “two birds with one stone” thing? Well, recently they announced a new InSite system that aims to protect from, and prevent the all-too-common concussion. It is estimated that over 300,000 high school and college athletes suffer concussions each year. This estimate does not even attempt to include middle school athletes or concussions suffered from other activities like extreme sports. It is clear that this is an issue, and one Riddell wants to take head on.

Riddell has been making football helmets since 1939 and has been known to revolutionize and improve them. Now their InSite system, which is “not a diagnostic tool”, looks to assist in the protection of players. There are three main parts of the system: the Player Unit, the Alert Monitor, and the Player Management Software. These three parts work together in order to give detailed feedback about the impact a player suffers.

With the current market for their InSite system being small, Riddell has not made any huge impacts. Time will tell if they can decrease production costs and increase this products influence on today’s young athletes.

Originally Authored: September 27, 2013

Does the name CyanogenMod sound familiar to you? Well if it’s doesn’t then it’s about to, at least that’s the goal with this week’s announcement. What was once a one man hacking project has survived, even thrived, since Android’s conception and will now be known as Cyanogen Inc. That means they’re an official company and they’re not messing around. Their most lofty, and perhaps attention grabbing, goal is to be number three in the mobile market as far as operating systems are concerned, citing Apple and Android as their primary competitors.

While this Android off-shoot has had success among modders and hackers alike, the new Cyanogen Inc. may have bitten off more than it can chew. Being number three in the mobile industry means taking on and surpassing two major tech giants: Microsoft and Mozilla. While these two companies may not currently be close to Google or Apple in their mobile offerings, they do have a little bit more experience and one of them can throw money at its product for years on end.

For Cyanogen to be successful in this mobile industry, it’s not going to be enough to hope users will risk their phones by rooting and installing CyanogenMod, thus capturing a small amount of Android’s marketshare. They fully recognize this and are doing a couple things to combat that.

First, the newborn company is working frantically to simplify the installation process. Currently a user must root their phone, go through a series of tutorials and instructions in order to flash their phone and take certain steps to make sure it is done right. If it’s not done right...goodbye phone. The folks at Cyanogen fully understand this and are aiming to make this a simpler process. This would allow the adventurous to hack their phones in safety and perhaps appeal to a more casual bunch of smartphone operators (i.e. a majority of them).

For those who aren’t into modifying their phone’s software at all (again, most smartphone users) Cyanogen has a hardware company yet to be announced that is working on a deal with them. This partnership is expected to be announced “soon” but they would not name the company just yet.

Finally, another new offering from Cyanogen is their accounts feature. This allows users to setup an account and store their information in the cloud, thus being able to backup and restore things anytime they would like to.

When all is said and done, this news is nothing but good. Cyanogen Inc. coming into the scene as a seemingly real competitor to mobile OS’s means a more heated race for having the perfect smartphone OS. This company started as a mere mod and now wants to give everyone a run for their money. That’s good for not only consumers right now but also for future aspirers hoping to do that same thing. Cyanogen Inc’s success could pave for way for hacker-entrepreneurs in the future. So whether you buy into these up and coming OS’s or not, your phone will be better because your company of choice has one more guy trying to steal his customers.

I must admit that I sometimes find it interesting to check the latest and greatest tech news on engadget. Most of the time it's just reports on Apple, Google, and whatever else the internet's nerdiest nerds want to read about. From time to time they run a segment called "Ask Engadget" where they feature a user's question on there and then invite other readers to answer the question, citing any sort of experience each one might have (or usually not have, as the know-it-alls of the internet often are).

Well this week they just happened to feature my own question. Trust me, I am not the kind to constantly write in to places like this, enter competitions, or even religiously post on sites like this (or any sites for that matter). I try to keep a relatively low internet profile, hence my scarcity of blog posts and seldom advertising my blog to anyone. In fact, to most people I'd be ashamed to admit I had a blog. Nevertheless I had a good question and figured I'd throw it out there for Engadget to eat up. And that they did. Yesterday they featured it on their site, slightly modified but still featured nonetheless. Here it is in all it's glory. I've included a little background after the link and here's a disclaimer: if you're not a nerd, don't read it cause you won't care.

Best retro gaming/homebrew machine?

Before I sent in the email, I already had a pretty good idea to the answer that I preferred. I don't exactly need someone to tell me what to do with electronics but I knew it'd be something that would incite conversation and, having seen previous questions that they've put on there, figured there'd be a good chance they'd put it on.

Anyway, I asked the question because I've done some "hacking" in my day. In other words I just followed some tutorials very precisely, purely because I wanted to play NBA Jam on as many different devices as possible. Long story short, here are a couple things I have modded or hacked:

PSP - the first thing I modded/hacked

An original Xbox - didn't own one at first but from messing around with my PSP I heard a few things and decided to dive in

Motorola Atrix - I had it for a while, it started to mess up, then I decided "What the heck?"

And I'll probably soon be working on my galaxy s3 and maybe ps3. Everything is just better when you've added your own flare to it.

At work over the past month I've had my first whack at designing a website. I had been told about the task a while ago but was reluctant to jump into it. When I had no other projects to work on, I finally dug in and I loved it.

I didn't know how to start so I did what I always do: Google. I found a few videos and tutorials but ended up using examples of other well designed sites. I explore, experimented, attempted to recreate, and repeated the process.

To make a long story short, I eventually had to strip down tons of stuff because it didn't fit with the template of the whole site but I became really passionate about design in the process and I learned a ton.

Site before redesign:

Redesigned site (took a video to show how it interacts) before it was stripped down