Friday, September 27, 2002

Ars Technia published a review of XM satellite radio a while back and it makes for an interesting read. While it goes into a good amount of detail, I would be careful trusting the technical accuracy as I found several mistakes in areas I know well. http://arstechnica.com/reviews/02q2/xmradio/xm-radio-1.html It will be interesting to see if these services survive. XM is about $10 a month and Sirus is in the same range. There is some evidence that people saturate out on their total entertainment bills and have a hard time paying more unless there are reasons for significant lust (one of the reasons why broadband has stalled). XM has recently announced a "portable" version of their radio. http://www.xmradio.com/newsroom/news_room.jsp I can't justify such a toy as I'm spoiled with a few great radio stations, a large CD library and my iPod - even if someone gave this to me I don't have the hours to use it. Still - if I lived in a spot where I couldn't find a couple of good radio stations it might be very attractive. One wonders how XM and Sirus are doing in terms of signing customers. I live in a heavily urbanized section of the country and have only seen one car equipped with a satellite antenna. 2:21:34 PM     A very cute technology to identify music tracks using a cellphone connected to a database. You hold your phone to a music source for about thirty seconds and a match is made in a large database. The result (track id) is sent to your device's display. cute http://www.shazam.com/shazam/do/home 2:21:21 PM     Some people love their neighbors - others don't. http://www.knology.net/~carlos/redneck.htm (thanks for the link Jim) 2:20:46 PM     Bart points out an excellent anagram service. These have been around for some time, but they are fun and the hall of fame is worth visiting. http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/ some wonderful examples: Ronald Wilson Reagan = No, darlings, no ERA law George Herbert Walker Bush = Huge Berserk Rebel Warthog Evangelist = Evil's Agent and so on... 2:20:30 PM     Radio Shack will be distributing an interesting line of micro RC cars this holiday season. Several flavors exist in Asia, but this one is particularly interesting (if the reader comments are correct) in that it uses a capacitor for power storage. I guess it is time to visit the Radio Shack for a test drive. http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,557193,00.asp 2:20:15 PM

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