I was on Daily Tech News Show talking Net Neutrality with Tom Merritt and Molly Wood. Review of the Blood Alcohol Concentration measurement device called BACtrack Mobile. Interview with Thinkware to learn about their dash cams, the Wireless Power Consortium to talk standards and 4Moms to talk high tech baby gear. In Chit Chat Across the Pond Donald Burr joins Steve Sheridan and me to teach us about how to build your own Quadcopter.
Hi this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Mac Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Macintosh bias. Today is Sunday February 8, 2015 and this is show number 509. In yet another action-packed show, I’m going to do a review of a Blood Alcohol Concentration sensor from BACtrack, we’ll hear from three vendors at CES: Thinkware Dash Cams, the Wireless Charging Consortium and 4Moms, creator of some innovative baby products. In Chit Chat Across the Pond we’re joined by the venerable Donald Burr AND honored guest Steve Sheridan (aka Wingman) to learn about how to build your own quadcopter. We’d better jump right in if we’re going to get all of this done!
DTNS
This week the news broke that FCC Chairman Wheeler is going to reclassify Internet service providers (wired and wireless) as common carriers, otherwise known as Title 2. Tom Merritt had me and Molly Wood on the Daily Tech News Show to discuss the ramifications of this decision. It was great fun meeting Molly and she and Tom enjoyed some old home week fun when the reminisced about the first time they talked about Net Neutrality on June 6th, 2007 on Buzz Out Loud. If you want to watch, I posted the unofficial video of the episode on podfeet.com, or you can subscribe to DTNS by searching for it in your local podcatcher, or go to dailytechnewsshow.com and look for the February 5th episode to hear me and Molly.
Blog Posts
Breathalyzer Testing With the BACtrack Mobile
Thinkware Dashcams – Not Just to Record Meteors
Wireless Power Consortium Supports the Qi Charging Standard
High Tech Baby Gear with MamaRoo Robotic Rocker and Origami Go Collapsible Stroller
Clarify
A few weeks back I told you about a tutorial I created on how to make better quality compressed PDFs than the built in method in Preview. After I posted the tutorial I was deluged with comments that my method wasn’t working for most people. I retested, and found a better way to do it that worked for everyone. Now imagine you had created this tutorial using Microsoft Word. Sure you can take new screenshots and plop them back into Word, but as soon as you do that things start moving around in your document as though the words and images had a mind of their own. You try to resize an image to fit and it suddenly jumps to the end of the document. You put in some hard word wraps and the text flows completely wrong and ends on the next page. You swear, you cry and finally you turn to drink. At least that’s how it used to be for me.
Luckily I use Clarify from clarify-it.com. I opened my original Clarify tutorial, clicked the button next to each image I needed to replace and took new screenshots. I edited the text to change the explanation, inserted some steps and watched Clarify gloriously renumber my steps. Every step lands nicely on the pages just like it did before. No crying, no swearing. When I was finished I tapped the button to repost the file to my WordPress blog, changed the title to Rev A so everyone knew it had changed, and I was done.
Save yourself, run over to clarify-it.com and get a free trial of Clarify and you too can save money on the swear jar. And tell them Allison sent you!
Chit Chat Across the Pond
Donald Burr’s blog post of doom on how to build your own quadcopter:
http://donaldburr.com/2015/02/07/how-to-build-your-own-quadcopter/
That’s going to wind this up for this week, many thanks to our sponsor for helping to pay the bills, the makers of Clarify over at clarify-it.com. Don’t forget to send in your Dumb Questions, comments and suggestions by emailing me at [email protected], follow me on twitter @podfeet. Check out the NosillaCast Google Plus Community too – lots of fun over there! If you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfeet.com/live on Sunday nights at 5pm Pacific Time and join the friendly and enthusiastic NosillaCastaways. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.
!Boring (not boring) – NosillaCast #509
While Allison Sheridan rarely disappoints, I must admit, going in, my expectations were not very high for her story about a breathalyzer product. My bias was simply based on pre-judgment of “the book by the cover”. After all, breathalyzer reviews just sound boring to me.
As an old guy (from the old school), I love listening to Allison’s podcasts, as I find it to be an incredible melding of new tech coverage by someone that still seems to posses old school values. Allison’s breathalyzer product review left me standing on my chair, bic lighter raised in hand, cheering for an ovation, and wondering how I could nominate the piece for the Pulitzer prize.
Why? Research! In this “copy, paste, and share” world of “writing”, Allison took some provided product specs, then actually took the time to visit the FDA to find out exactly what the specs did (and did not) imply. Allison even briefly touched on some of the the FDA’s more dubious policies in place (corporations providing their own test results).
Simply put, Allison investigated. She went the extra mile. Perhaps five extra miles. For a simple little product review. In comparison, these days, I do not expect that extra mile to be taken by our “leading” news providers.
While a breathalyzer product review is still boring (to me), I find Allison’s reporting to be nothing short of old world, grade “A”, number one, TWA first class”, delivered on a silver platter, to little ol me (sitting in my old world Braniff styled leather chair).
Knowing Allison treats a little product review like this, I will never listen to the podcast the same way.
Kudos is not high enough praise. Allison, you deserve a Podcasting Pulitzer for honesty and integrity in Podcast product reviews.
http://www.podfeet.com/blog/2015/02/509/
Joe – I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to write this. I’m humbled by the praise but I will graciously accept it. I thought maybe I’d bore people to death talking about a 501(k) filing but to me it was really interesting and made me understand the product more so I figured if I liked it, maybe others would too.
I’m grinning from ear to ear right now, there will be no living with me for the next week.