Technology – Page 2

Bad Facebook, No Cookie For You

As was widely reported, Facebook pro-actively made some changes to users’ email preferences recently: forcing the default email address for every user to switch to an @facebook.com address and displaying it to all their friends, regardless of what the user had previously chosen.

News quickly spread and most people (myself included) quickly changed their e-mail setting back to what it had been before Facebook forced the change. Annoying, but a minor inconvenience, right?

Maybe not. Today, a co-worker discovered that his contact info for me had been silently updated to overwrite my work email address with my Facebook email address. He discovered this only after sending work emails to the wrong address.

And even worse, the emails are not actually in my Facebook messages. I checked. They’ve vanished into the ether.

For all I know, I could be missing a lot more emails from friends, colleagues, or family members, and never even know it.

F*** you very much Facebook.

If you’ve got my contact information in your phone or address book, please check to make sure you’ve got the right email listed?

UPDATE 7/1: Greetings, CNET readers. Thanks for stopping by.

Is It Time For An Upgrade?

How do you know when it’s time for a new camera, versus simply having a case of Nikon Acquisition Syndrome?

After 4 years with the D40, I think it might really be time for an upgrade. More and more I find myself getting frustrated with the D40 and even reaching for my Lumix when I want to shoot something.

I can still get shots like this:

But I’m finding myself fighting with the camera more to make it do what I want. It seems to me that I shouldn’t have to struggle so hard with a camera I’ve had for 4 years; if the equipment is getting in the way, that’s a problem.

So all in all, I think it’s time for an upgrade. The D5100 is looking pretty good to me.

Or do I just have a case of NAS? When do you know it’s time for an upgrade?

To Go Big (Screen) or Not To Go Big

For the last 2+ years, my primary home computer has been a 13″ Macbook Pro. And although I love the easy portability of a smaller laptop, I’m also a little frustrated by the small screen. Editing photos, playing games, and Powerpoint all suffer when you’ve got that little screen real estate.

So as much as I love portability, I’m also seriously thinking about buying a nice big monitor and spending more time at my long-neglected home office desk instead of computing on the couch. I’m even considering buying a small desktop computer to go with it. With so many cloud sharing services these days, synching files across devices isn’t the pain it used to be.

The main thing that’s holding me back is what going back to a desktop might do to my back. I screwed my back up badly before I got the laptop by not paying enough attention to my chair and desk quality, and I don’t want to make the same mistake twice. On the other hand, I don’t really want to spend a bunch of time trolling Craigslist for used Aeron chairs.

It might be a fun Xmas Shutdown project though… Hmmm…

To go big (screen) or not? What do you think?

In Search Of: The Perfect Tablet

TL; DR: There’s no such thing as the perfect tablet. My MacBook Pro rules.

I spent a good chunk of the weekend giving the Xoom a workout. I truly wanted to like it but I have to say I’m less than enthused.

There’s things I like about it, to be sure. Being able to turn the device on, log in, and poof! Google starts synching all my stuff. That is great. Or it would be if it actually downloaded all my apps and bookmarks. Most of them got re-synched but not all.

The Xoom is fast and app switching is really smooth and easy. Want to jump from a link in Tweetdeck (which runs beautifully) or even email to a web browser? Click, you’re there. The web page loads fast, and then getting back into Tweetdeck is one tap of the Back button. It’s nice and I find it an intuitive workflow. On the iPad I have never liked having to hit the Home button and re-launch an app to jump back and forth.

Oh, and the battery life is excellent. After 8 hours of near continuous use with the wifi turned on, I still had 15% battery left. More than enough time for a cross-country flight, and that’s a key use-case for me.

Then there are the things that are annoying. The keyboard, despite being on a bigger screen, isn’t easy to type on, because some of the elements from the layout have been switched from where they are in Froyo devices. This is annoying and slows down my typing speed. Some apps and widgets are great, others, not so much. Scaled-up Android apps generally don’t look as bad as scaled-up iPhone-to-iPad apps do, mostly because they’re nowhere near as badly pixelated. It’s true that few apps are designed to take advantage of the expanded real estate of available on a tablet but my apps worked well

I have issues with the iPad as well, though. I hate the browser, and not just because it doesn’t run Flash. I can’t import bookmarks from Chrome into it, for one thing. It’s also slow, even when on wifi. I miss my Android widgets. I wish I could customize the screen more. And several of my favorite tools look like crap on the iPad – notably Tripit, Foursquare, Facebook. And sadly my much-loved Tweetdeck is buggy as hell on the iPad.

On the other hand, the iPad wins for email hands-down. I find the keyboard easy to use and the unified inbox is very nice.

Either the iPad or the Xoom will do just fine for the two main things I’ll be using them for – airplanes and some lightweight email management in the bedroom. They’re both decent devices but neither has my heart. That still belongs to my trusty MacBook Pro.

18 months from now who knows? Maybe I’ll be typing my blog post on a tablet instead of my laptop and laughing at how I ever thought a laptop was better. So far, color me unconvinced.

Google TV: First Impressions

So last night, we added a Google TV device to the household. It’s a Logitech Revue, one of the three current gTV options.

Setting the Revue up is pretty simple. Power cable. HDMI in from your DVR or cable box, HDMI out to the TV (one HDMI cable is included). Wifi built in (or you can jack in an ethernet cable if you wish). The on-screen setup went smoothly, although the Revue did hang after downloading an update. needing a quick power off / power on to get things going again. You’re asked for a Google account, which isn’t a big deal but does create an issue for households with more than one Google user — whose account do you add to the TV? Or should you create a special gTV account to be shared by all? The hardest part was setting up the connection to your TV and DVR or other set-top box — you’ll be asked for the specific model numbers for each.

At any rate, eventually you’re all done and your new Google TV is ready to roll.

So what did I do first? Check out YouTube. gTV has something called “YouTube Leanback” built in as a custom channel – mostly music videos and content from key partners. You can also use the built-in Chrome browser to log into your own YouTube account and use YouTube just like you would on your computer (my choice). The Logitech keyboard / touchpad works well for navigating around the screen and I was quickly able to start watching my saved favorites in full-screen mode on our 46″ TV.

Performance was a non-issue. Of course, watching older, non-HD video on a big HDTV isn’t exactly a challenge, so next I gave Netflix a shot. After activating the gTV with my Netflix account, my queue came up on screen and I was able to dive right in. Performance was no different than what I get when watching Netflix streamed via my TiVo. [Side note, this is now device #3 in the living room capable of streaming Netflix to our TV. I really need to get streaming Netflix into other rooms of the house now.]

So far, so good. I don’t like basketball so I gave the NBA app a pass, nor do I have a lot of photos in Picasa so I couldn’t do much with that. There are some other apps (HBO GO, CNBC, Twitter, etc) I have yet to check out as well.

I’d like to see more apps on the gTV of course – for example, as a Last.fm subscriber it’s a little frustrating to see Napster and Pandora there but not my preferred streaming music provider. It will be a few months before there’s a healthy pipeline of new gTV apps, so I’ll have to be patient.

At this point, my main concern is — who is the target market for the Google TV? As The Spouse pointed out, people like us already generally watch TV with a laptop parked in our laps. We can search, Tweet, etc in the living room already. For that kind of user, the use-case would be in rooms of the house where you have a TV set up but don’t necessarily want to haul a laptop – like the kitchen or bedroom. Originally I was going to set the gTV up in the bedroom, in fact, but we have an older cable box and DVR in there and as such don’t have the necessary HD connectivity.

For slightly less geeky families, having a Google TV in the living room could be a big win — if they nail the user experience. It’s good, especially for a 1.0 version, but could be a little more friendly.

With US midterm elections this Tuesday, I’m really interested to see how well the web browser / TV picture in picture setup will play out – having Twitter and MSNBC on the same screen could be a lot of fun.