geek stuff

How secure does your crock pot need to be?

11 October 2014 by Steve Blum
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If you let it simmer long enough, even a trojan horse will be tender.

The whole point of security is to make access to your stuff inconvenient. Not explicitly, of course, but that’s really what’s going on. If it’s harder for a bad guy to get in, it’s going to be harder for you too. It can be annoying to have to enter a pin code just to answer your phone But if someone uses it to clean out your bank account, that’s potentially a life changing event.… More

Bitcoin grows where broadband flows in Santa Cruz

5 October 2014 by Steve Blum
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No Internet access, no Bitcoin. If a merchant wants to take payment in Bitcoins at the cash register – or anywhere else – both he and his customer have to be connected. Danny Thorpe, owner of the Quail and Thistle tea room in Capitola, was one of the first bricks and mortar merchants in the area to accept Bitcoins. He spoke to the Santa Cruz Bitcoin and Crypto-currency Meetup in September about the benefits and pitfalls – a video of his presentation is below.… More

It's not about the watch, it's about Apple diving into health care

14 September 2014 by Steve Blum
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When Tim Cook unveiled the Apple Watch on Tuesday, and launched into a rapturous description of the digital crown – the old school winding wheel on the side that’s redesigned into a user interface – the first thing I thought was “they made the damn watch for right-handed people”. Any southpaw old enough to remember having to wind a watch every day – yes, me – remembers having to unstrap it and shift hands first.… More

Small business, big benefit from online bookkeeping

31 August 2014 by Steve Blum
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The winner.

Once I’d decided to dump Quickbooks and figured out that other self-hosted software wasn’t any more functional, I took a hard look at the online alternatives. Six alternatives – FreeAgent, FreshBooks, Wave, GoDaddy (formerly Outright), Xero and Zoho – warranted hands on testing.

My needs, I thought, are simple. I bill a relatively short list of clients on an hourly or fixed price/milestone basis, and pay expenses through a checking account, a couple of credit cards and occasionally cash out of pocket.… More

Dodging the Quickbooks tax

30 August 2014 by Steve Blum
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Temple of doom.

The death sentence for Quickbooks came with the release of the Mavericks version of Mac OS X. Intuit wasn’t supporting the last version I bought – Quickbooks Pro 2010 – and online account downloads stopped working. I could spend a couple hundred bucks for the 2014 version, or find a better way to manage my business. I’d already done that with my personal finances. When Intuit torpedoed Quicken for Mac, I switched to iBank, which does the job at least as well.… More

Best Mac apps for blogging

23 August 2014 by Steve Blum
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I came for the logo, but stayed for the app.

It’s easy to take tools that work so well you barely notice them for granted. I want to recognise a few that have made daily blogging a joy. Byword, MarsEdit, Linode and WordPress top the list.

When I stepped up posting in 2012, it quickly became clear that Blogger, my original platform, wasn’t going to give me the degree of control over the end product that I wanted.… More

Samsung makes stuff, and now stuff to connect its stuff

21 August 2014 by Steve Blum
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Another thing for the Internet of things.

Samsung has decided to take a different home automation route than Apple or Google. The announcement this week that it is acquiring SmartThings gives a hint that the Korean consumer electronic giant is looking, first and foremost, at creating an automation platform for its own vast array of products, rather than a web service business built around its smart phones. It might eventually do that too, but the decision to go with SmartThings, which relies on an in-home hub, shows a definite hardware-centric attitude.… More

Job cuts show Microsoft CEO is serious about new direction

19 July 2014 by Steve Blum
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Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, has gotten it right. His 10 July 2014 email to Microsoft employees set out a clear path forward for the struggling giant and this week’s announced layoffs of 18,000 employees turned that vision from clear into ruthless. Which is the only way the company will survive as a major tech player in the 21st century.

Star legacy businesses – Windows OS, Office productivity software, Xbox – will survive, but primarily as stepping stones to cloud and mobile services, which are intended to reach customers regardless of whether they’re using Microsoft products…

All of these apps will be explicitly engineered so anybody can find, try and then buy them in friction-free ways.

… More

Microwave ovens weren't designed for patient people

12 July 2014 by Steve Blum
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Doesn’t cook any faster.

GE is floating a prototype sensor suite for cookware that will measure the caloric and, eventually, nutritional values of microwave meals. It’s an interesting concept. But it’s still a lab concept. It does point to two things, though.

First, consumer goods manufacturers are looking at ways to combine sensors, connectivity and powerful server-side processing to deliver rapid, granular data to people on a routine basis. Everything around us is measurable, and creating devices that can automatically gather that data and send it on for processing – make it meaningful – is rapidly becoming commonplace.… More

ET could have phoned home faster on fiber

2 July 2014 by Steve Blum
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In case you missed it, today was World UFO Day, a good time to pause and reflect on why strange things happen. There’s no dispute that UFOs are real. Pretty much any night of the week – usually around the time that people come stumbling out of bars, according to ground-breaking research in the Economist – people look up in the sky and see flying objects they can’t identify. Not only that, but none of their friends can either.… More