jamesb.com

MIT has announced a $100 laptop that can operate for 10 minutes on a 1 minute hand crank. Man…we need more things like this in our schools, and in our lives.

energy, technology

Not only do we need to find alternate (clean, renewable) ways to produce energy, we need to find ways to not use as much. Here is one idea that is starting to take hold: Replacing Incandescent light bulbs and even compact fluorescents (CFLs) with LED Bulbs. Once price of these bulbs come down a bit more, I will be using them in my house.

Sarah brought home a free gift from her work a few months back. A Two pack of flashlights. Wow, I was under whelmed. How exciting…flashlights…just what we need. And then I looked at them and realized that they were LED flashlights. Well, my attitude changed almost immediately. I hunted down some batteries and started to use those flashlights right away. I have been enjoying them ever since. They take very little juice to make them work. (I have a set of batteries in one of the flashlight that was too dead to use on my sons race track, but still work fine for the flashlight.)

energy, technology

I produced NavelCast #2 again. I worked on reading and speaking it the way I would more naturally talk when I tell a story. Please comment about which is better.

Today’s story, music and quotes are all about names.

Songs Features on this podcast:

• A Boy Named Sue by Johnny Cash from the album The Best of Shel Silverstein: His Words His Songs His Friends
• A Front Row To Hear Ole Johnny Sing by Shel Silverstein from the album The Best of Shel Silverstein: His Words His Songs His Friends: Link to full streamed version at NPR’s All Songs Considered archieve.
• NavelSafe: Susan Grey by National Bank of Morocco: A song about a day in the life of a normal guy - GarageBand.com Link
• NavelSafe: Name In Lights by Sitting Still: You could make a change this time, you cou could help to heal these wounds, You could make a better world, or you could have your name in lights. GarageBand.com Link
• NavelSafe: James by Puckett: Sometimes friends get you to do bad things. GarageBank.com Link

NavelCast old

Is the day of the home PC going to become a thing of the past in the near future. Jonathan Schwartz, president of SUN, seems to think they are.

“The majority of the world will first experience the Internet through their handset,” Schwartz said.

This quote got me to thinking. Most things that the average person needs to use a PC for, can be programmed right on to a cell phone now: email, web browsing, word processing, etc. When a keyboard mouse and displays can be connected to a phone at will, we will have the future. Imagine docking you phone and using it as a workstation…undocking it and away you go.

technology

I’m going to re-produce NavelCast #2. After posting it, I let Sarah listen to it and she thinks that it’s dry, and not like I normally tell stories at all. It makes her want to go to sleep. I’m still trying to figure out this thing called podcasting.

I’m learning a lot, but clearly have a lot more to learn. So, as an experiment, I’m going to re-record my narration with Sarah sitting in the room with me, so that I read and tell the story more like I would be telling the story in real life. She promises to make me lively. This will be an interesting experiment to contrast and compare. Hopefully others can learn from my experimenting, and those of you who tuned into my first two will hang with me while I experiment with the format and the production itself.

Stay tuned for NavelCast 2 v2.

podcasting

Today’s story, music and quotes are all about names.

Songs Features on this podcast:

• A Boy Named Sue by Johnny Cash from the album The Best of Shel Silverstein: His Words His Songs His Friends
• A Front Row To Hear Ole Johnny Sing by Shel Silverstein The Best of Shel Silverstein: His Words His Songs His Friends: Link to full streamed version at NPR’s All Songs Considered archieve.
• NavelSafe: Susan Grey by National Bank of Morocco: A song about a day in the life of a normal guy - GarageBand.com Link
• NavelSafe: Name In Lights by Sitting Still: You could make a change this time, you cou could help to heal these wounds, You could make a better world, or you could have your name in lights. GarageBand.com Link
• NavelSafe: James by Puckett: Sometimes friends get you to do bad things. GarageBank.com Link

NavelCast old

Far from being politically correct, I used to laugh at the cartoon book, 101 uses for a dead cat. Now it seems that theoretically there are 102 uses. I was lead to this article from Slashdot.

BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) — A German inventor said he has developed a method to produce crude oil products from waste that he believes can be an answer to the soaring costs of fuel, but denied a German newspaper story implying he also used dead cats.

energy

Welcome to the first edition of NavelCast. If you don’t know what a podcast is, download iTunes and find out.

Here’s what you will find in the first edition:

• NavelCast Introduced - with mood music, Not Alone, by Rob Costlow
• The Cowboy Junkies new album: Early 21st Century Blues - See NPR’s All songs considered episode 90 under archives for full streaming version of Music Clip: Isn’t it a Pity by George Harrison. Also played Music Clip: Brothers Under the Bridge by Bruce Springsteen
• My First Memory
• NavelSafe: Stilts by Ten Story Relapse
• QTP: I grew up to have my father’s looks - my fathers speech patterns - my father’s posture - my father’s walk - my father’s opinions and my mother’s contempt for my father. –Jules Feiffer
• NavelSafe: Making Me Nervous by Brad Sucks

NavelCast old

John C. Dvorak is calling Podcasting the next big thing.

There is no doubt in my mind that podcasting is not only here to stay but will also shortly threaten established media broadcast systems. It’s not so much that they will all be destroyed by homebrew networks, but podcasts will be taking away just enough listeners to be a major concern.

podcasting

I did a google search for “navelcast” and “belly button blogging” and the only search results I came back with were my own pages. Just wanted to check if anyone else had thought about it. Well, if they have…google doesn’t know about it.

Googlegazing: using google to navel gaze.

blogging, podcasting