Entries for June 2007

The long-awaited Ambient Umbrella is almost here. It is a bit offbeat, using lights in its handle to signal the chances of rain, but it's a taste of more mainstream products coming from Ambient Devices. The start-up is maybe best known for its Orb—and now is ready with a wave of what the company calls "zero-click" devices designed to take the pain from getting info from the Internet.

Going digital in television, like seemingly everything involving computers, makes for a better product--but one that's more complicated, mysterious, and irritating. The reception we get through new, digital TV broadcasts is clear and sharp, even on a 20-year-old set. When we get reception, that is.

Over the weekend, I had a great time editing some family video. Too bad nobody can watch it. This is a story of yet more frustration with software, in this case Studio 11 from Pinnacle.

I want to give Studio a glowing review. This is the most fun I've had with the actual editing process, as the software makes it easy to import, organize, and splice together scenes. I didn't try to get fancy, as I've learned that editing can be a time black hole. No, I just wanted a quick video of a family outing to share with the kids' grandparents.

Impress your friends and relatives: Send them your own PDF files. Anyone can be a master of PDFs, those Adobe Acrobat files arriving from distant senders that magically can be opened and read by anyone using almost any computer, whether Windows PC, Mac, or even Linux. It's easy now to create your own PDFs, making it possible to finally—decades after desktop computers became popular—know they'll be seen as you intended. Even better, it can be done free.

Widescreen is all the rage when it comes to TV, and for good reason: Most movies, and now many TV shows, are shot to fit on a screen that is much wider than it is tall. But not most photos. So I'm frustrated with a recent purchase, an electronic frame for displaying digital photos, which forces me to dramatically crop my pics for its stretched screen.