Weekly output: Cable WiFi, travel WiFi, Internet governance, phone lanes, Find My iPhone vs. Android

Posted on July 20, 2014 by robpegoraro

In one way or another, wireless technology figured in all of my stories this week. But why should this week be any different from others?

7/15/2014: With Cable WiFi, Your Modem Is My Hotspot, Yahoo Tech

I’ve been working on this column for a while–my e-mail correspondence for it goes back weeks–and for once, the news cycle obliged by not throwing any breaking tech news at me on a Monday. I’m still trying to figure out how so many people say they hate the idea of Comcast turning their leased modem into a public hot spot but so few (according to Comcast) opt out of it.

7/15/2014: How to Stop (or Start) Sharing Your Internet Connection with Strangers, Yahoo Tech

To go with the column, I wrote a quick explainer about how to turn off Comcast’s Home Hotspot–or set up an openwireless.org guest account for anybody to use.

NowU domestic-bandwidth story 7/15/2014: What You Need to Know About Staying Connected in the U.S., NowU

This Gannett site for empty nesters officially launched on Tuesday, but if you’d thought to visit that site on Sunday you could have read my advice on traveling bandwidth then.

7/16/2014: Issues Raised by New Technology: Policy Slam, Internet Governance Forum USA 2014

This part of this daylong conference at George Washington University was an audience-participation event: People were invited to step up to the podium and share their ideas about Internet-governance issues that we ought to focus on, and then I and the other judges picked ones to debate further and offered our own comments about them.

7/17/2014: Cellphone Talkers Get Their Own Sidewalk Lane in D.C., Yahoo Tech

A bit of an experiment staged for an upcoming National Geographic TV show led to this extra post (so, my thanks to NatGeo for the upcoming extra income). The piece got a blurb on the Yahoo home page, so this may have been seen by more people than anything else I’ve written. And then it got a BeyondDC/Greater Greater Washington writeup, which was also nice.

7/20/2014: Get a browser to work where it’s not welcome, USA Today

This column pretty much wrote itself once I realized Apple’s short-sighted and easily-circumvented decision to block Android browsers from its Find My iPhone page matched the New York Post’s foolish attempt to keep iPad users from reading its Web site.

Weekly output: tech policy (x2), Kojo Nnamdi Show, baby monitors (x5), hotel WiFi

Posted on June 1, 2014 by robpegoraro

Five of the stories that figured in earlier allusions here to upcoming work posted this week. It felt great to send the invoice for them.

5/27/2014: Why Congress Keeps Screwing Up Tech Policy, Yahoo Tech

My first draft of this piece got sent back to the kitchen; not for the first time, an editor was correct in saying I was trying to cover too much ground in one story. Before you read the comments: I apologize for the ageist nonsense on display there, which I did my best to smack down in moderation and replies.

5/27/2014: Five Tech Policy Bugs Congress Needs to Fix, Yahoo Tech

News flash: Bad laws have a long half-life, especially when they won’t get fixed unless the tech industry unites to ask Congress to do its job.

5/27/2014: Tech Gifts for Grads and Dads, The Kojo Nnamdi Show

I doled out advice with CNET’s Maggie Reardon on various gadget-guidance topics. Big surprise: how many Microsoft Surface fans called in.

5/27/2014: Infant Optics DXR-8, PCMag

I reviewed five baby monitors for PCMag, and this one got posted a day before the other four. If you don’t want any form of Internet connectivity in a monitor, this is the one I’d recommend out of this batch.

5/28/2014: Summer Infant Baby Touch, PCMag

This system’s display unit and Android and iOS apps had some singularly weird interface quirks that set me off.

5/28/2014: Withings Smart Baby Monitor, PCMag

My editors judged this Internet-connected model worthy of an “Editors’ Choice” nod. The weak quality of Withings’ Android app bothers me, but this was one device I didn’t like to send back–my daughter had grown attached to its lullaby feature.

5/28/2014: Philips Avent SCD603, PCMag

This thing combined thoughtful hardware design with woeful interference with my home WiFi network as well as my phone’s tethering option. And yet Amazon shoppers have made almost no mention of that problem. I’m still not sure that I didn’t run into some freak interaction.

5/28/2014: Motorola MBP36, PCMag

This model didn’t do much for me–certainly not at the current price. I might as well note here that for a couple of years, my wife and I relied on a hand-me-down monitor we got for free.

6/1/2014: Grrr. What’s up with hotel WiFi login pages?, USA Today

A tweet about an awkward hotel WiFi setup led to a question from a reader, which in turn led to this explainer about why establishments can’t just use standard password authentication. See the comments for one from me that relays two tips that readers shared over e-mail: one about coaxing a hotel with a Web WiFi-login scheme into offering connectivity to a Chromecast or Apple TV, another about running an older version of Apple’s AirPort Utility on a current Mac.

Weekly output: Aereo, 4K TV, Tech Night Owl, public WiFi, personalized Google search

Posted on July 1, 2013 by robpegoraro

I did a lot more writing from the Consumer Electronics Association’s CE Week conference in New York than I’d expected, considering its small size and attendance. (I posted a few photos on Flickr.) The list below leaves out one other post reported from there, which should be up sometime Monday.

6/27/2013: Notes From An Enlightening Interview Of Aereo’s Chet Kanojia, Disruptive Competition Project

To my considerable surprise, an onstage interview of a tech CEO by a trade-association CEO yielded some useful insights about how we view copyright disputes and challenges to entrenched incumbents–thanks also to some unintentionally revealing questions from the audience.

6/28/2013: 4K, 3D and How Perfectionism Can Crowd Out Practicality, Disruptive Competition Project

Most of the last day at CE Week was taken up by a series of panels and presentations about “4K” television, so called for its almost four thousand pixels of horizontal resolution. I was a skeptic about 4K’s prospects before getting on the train to NYC Tuesday afternoon, and this show didn’t make me more optimistic.

6/29/2013: June 29, 2013 — Jim Dalrymple, Bob “Dr. Mac” LeVitus, Gabriel Weinberg, and Rob Pegoraro, Tech Night Owl Live

I returned to Gene Steinberg’s podcast to talk about 4K but also tech companies’ attempts to push back against NSA surveillance and my recent review of Republic Wireless (which, I should note, was reposted by Mashable a week ago as part of a Discovery content-sharing deal).

6/30/2013: Public Wi-Fi can alarm your browser, don’t let it alarm you, USA Today

Explaining why connecting to a public WiFi network with a Web login initially yields errors for every encrypted page open in your browser seemed like it would be a pretty straightforward job. That was not the case. The tip part of this week’s column covers a simpler topic: having Google show you search results that it hasn’t customized to suit its perception of your interests.

On Sulia, I posted a round of short reports from CE Week (for instance, relatively cheaper prices for 4K sets from Sharp and Toshiba). I also kvetched about the apparent uselessness of a new link-sharing site called Potluck, reminded readers that Big Music’s protests about Pandora shouldn’t ring true, and noted a successful resolution to a complication with repairs to an iPad 2’s cracked screen.