Tag Archives: Yahoo Mail

Weekly output: phone unlocking, iOS and Android video, Google Calendar sync, Tim Berners-Lee

Posted on by
Reply

Work finds me in Austin this weekend for the SXSW Interactive festival. I’ll have more about that over the next few days; for now, here’s what I have to show for myself, professionally speaking.

3/5/2013: Unlock And Load: White House Picks Phone Policy Fight, Disruptive Competition  Project

The White House surprised many people with its favorable response to a petition seeking the legalization of unlocking cell phones without carrier permission–it said “yes” and then endorsed the idea that carriers shouldn’t be denying service to unlocked phones from other operators. The latter is a somewhat novel idea in wireless but has been been the law in wired since the FCC’s underappreciated “Carterfone” ruling of 1968. But there are important caveats to the White House’s statement, and noting them helped push this post past 1,000 words.

3/9/2013: Work around video playback issues on your mobile device, USA Today

Like many of my USAT columns, this one started with a question from one of my relatives–my mother-in-law couldn’t watch a video of her grandson in her Yahoo Mail account on our iPad’s copy of Safari. The piece also has a tip updating advice I gave in November about sychronizing Google Calendar with an iOS device.

TBL BoingBoing post3/9/2013: Tim Berners-Lee: The Web needs to stay open, and Gopher’s still not cool., Boing Boing

The inventor of the Web had some interesting things to say in his talk at SXSW; after tweeting out highlights of the keynote, I pitched my editor at Boing Boing via Twitter direct message (making this my fastest salesmanship ever) and wrote up this recap later that afternoon.

On Sulia, you could have read me noting the White House’s phone-unlocking petition response (and, in retrospect, reading a little too much out of it) drawing a lesson for tech journalists from the outrage over EA’s botched SimCity launch, called out two still-absent features in Google’s updated Maps apps for iOS, and applaud the seemingly-impossible success of the free WiFi at SXSW.

About these ads

Weekly output: e-mail privacy, 3-D printing, TV antennas, smartphone competition, sports networks, bargaining over TV bills

Posted on by
Reply

It’s not a total coincidence that I wrote as much about TV as I did in the week running up to one of the biggest televised events of the year.

1/28/2013: Why Can’t Web Services Compete To Protect My Data From The Feds?, Disruptive Competition Project

Reporting this one made me feel a little dumb when I realized that I could have had a nice little scoop weeks or months earlier if I’d just asked Google, Microsoft and Yahoo what they require before turning over a user’s e-mail data to the government. It turns out that all three go beyond the strict requirements of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in requiring a warrant–but that none seemed to think this was something worth bragging about.

1/29/2013: Hold Your Fire Before Freaking Out Over 3-D Printed Guns, Disruptive Competition Project

I started writing this post in December, then decided I didn’t like the last third of it and set it aside. I finally picked it up again after CES. Somewhat to my surprise, it only got one “you want to ban all guns” reply.

Discovery TV antennas review1/30/2013: Two Flat, Stick-On Antennas Tune In Free TV, Discovery News

I revisited the subject of over-the-air TV for the first time in over a year to review a couple of flat, lightweight antennas. Somewhat to my surprise, they worked better than the old set of rabbit ears I had plugged into the set downstairs (and unlike that antenna, I could put each one high enough on the wall to avoid becoming a plaything for our toddler). So I bought one of these models, the Mohu, and am now trying to figure out exactly where on the wall it will get the best reception of the three trickier network affiliates: ABC’s WJLA, CBS’s WUSA and PBS’s WETA.

2/1/2013: Will A Two-Party System Adequately Represent Smartphone Users?, Disruptive Competition Project

BlackBerry has a new operating system, but will it do any better than Microsoft’s Windows Phone? (I’ve been testing Windows Phone 8 on an HTC 8X; there are things I like about it, but the app selection really holds it back.) In this post, I express the possibly-futile hope that either BlackBerry or Microsoft can become a viable alternative to the increasingly entrenched duo of Apple and Google.

2/3/2013: How sports networks inflate your TV bill, USA Today

One of the people on my neighborhood’s mailing list asked about a new fee that Verizon was going to put on her bill to cover regional sports networks. I told her I’d see what else I could find out. The column also includes a reminder that TV rate hikes can, at least sometimes, be negotiable if your service thinks you’ll leave.

Sulia highlights this week included two more rants about the TV business–one on Verizon’s extortionate CableCard rate hike and another about the stupidity of making some Hulu content “Web-only”–and a post noting that the “Apple tax” is real when you look at what it costs to get more storage on an iPad.

Weekly output: CNET and CBS, Internet Freedom Day, Tech Night Owl, Java, Yahoo Mail

Posted on by
1

For once, I did not come home from CES with a cold. Instead, I picked up one from our toddler a few days later.

CBS CNET post1/15/2013: CBS, CNET And How To Kill Tech Journalism Through Big-Media Denial, Disruptive Competition Project

This is a story I kind of missed during the show, but it also took me a day or two to realize how dangerous CBS’s rationales for interfering with CNET’s editorial decisions would be for tech journalism in the traditional (read: media conglomerate-owned) media. I was glad this little rant got as much attention as it did; I wish that had been followed by accountability for the twit or twits in CBS’s executive suite who thought this stunt would work.

1/18/2013: Internet Freedom Day’s Unfinished Business, Disruptive Competition Project

Friday marked the first anniversary of the Internet rearing up and kicking Big Copyright in the hindquarters during the battle to quash the Stop Online Piracy Act. That’s worth celebrating, but a week after the death of net-freedom advocate Aaron Swartz I also thought it necessary to point out all the items remaining on the tech-policy to-do list if you value a more open Internet and technology economy. I hope the results doesn’t make me sound like a total Eeyore.

1/19/2013: January 19, 2013 – Kirk McElhearn and Rob Pegoraro, Tech Night Owl Live

I discussed the things I saw at CES, Apple’s stock price and other tech-news topics on Gene Steinberg’s podcast. I haven’t heard Kirk McElhearn‘s segment yet, but I’m sure that Macworld and TidBITS contributor had insightful things to say too.

1/20/2013: Q&A: Is Java safe to use?, USA Today

I returned to the topic I covered in my USAT column last spring, this time with more context about what Java was supposed to do and how it became the nuisance it is–plus a few remaining, non-Web uses for this software I hadn’t addressed in detail in that earlier piece. There’s also a tip about enabling a security feature Yahoo finally added to its Yahoo Mail service, some five years after Google had provided the same option to Gmail users.

I also held forth on the mini-blogging site Sulia, as my experiment with that site continues. Among this week’s posts: a review of Facebook’s new, airtime-free voice-calling service (and one of an Android app that does the same thing through Google Voice); documentation of some new Twitter features; a call for editors and publishers to post those newsroom-wide memos that always wind up getting published elsewhere.