j a m e s f o r s y t h ✡ n e t

I’m all excited. Pictured above is my new Western Digital 500 gigabyte IDE hard drive. It’s in an enclosure which I got a few months ago.

These days you can buy 500 gigabyte external hard drives which come with their own enclosure for about $160. I could have done this, but I didn’t want to waste my enclosure which I’d already bought.

I didn’t get a SATA drive because I’m not sure if any of my computers can accomodate that. It’s a much newer technology than any of my machines.

What will I use it for? Right now I’m thinking I’d like to put a few documentaries on there. I like watching those. The problem is they aren’t seen on P2P sites as often as other types of films. Patience.

The Google search engine we are all increasingly relying on for information (and now email, and maps, and web history archiving…) has found its way to the mobile/cell(ular)/hand phone.

Not qualified to give you the up-to-the-minute news on the subject I’ll leave it to you to hear A LOT more about it over the next few years.

Casio has brought out this watch with a remote control. It is a “learning” remote, which means that you can “teach” it to control to your very own TV & DVD player.

Last year we rented our apartment out to some tenants, fully furnished. We ended up evicting them (another story/post) and they took our remote control with them.

Since that time we found that we desperately needed a remote control because DVD players these days have a lot less buttons than the remote control. We wanted to change the language (to Chinese) on some of the DVDs that we own. The buttons to do so are only present on the remote, not the player.

So we purchased a Crest remote control. Generally we’re very happy with it. One difficulty is that the process of adding an unlisted code presupposes us having the old remote control on hand to locate “pause” or whatever it is on that one before putting it on the new one. I don’t know whether this problem is faced with every universal control or with this very special looking Casio watch.

Having a remote control watch opens up all sorts of lifestyle questions… Who would it be most useful for? Does it encourage excessive TV use? Is it a breakthrough item for people with disabilities?