just an asterisk

It was inevitable. My daughter was born last month (also inevitable in a way) and it was only a matter of time before I wrote a blog post about baby tech. But here is the funny part – the tech sucks. There isn’t that much to talk about. Maybe our litigious culture has squashed innovation or maybe the only people concerned are so blotto from not sleeping that they can’t invent anything, but either way – the technology just isn’t very interesting.

When babies are born, in case you are not aware,  they need to be swaddled, rocked and given something to slobber upon… As I see it, the result is that technology tends to focus on rocking and/or white noise. That’s about it. Sigh… I write this as I sit up waiting to do our late night / early morning feed and wish that there were magic bullets I could use from my bat belt. No dice.

Instead of telling you about our Fisher Price Cradle Swing (god send that it is), I’ll focus on the tech that I’ve found useful, rather than helpful, for life with a baby.

Camera(s) – iPhone and DSLR

She’s cute and everyone wants to see her, thus we’ve snapped away with both our iPhones and the big DSLR. Although in the beginning we went a bit overboard, expect to take tons of pictures. Having the DSLR, with its incredible resolution, reassures the compulsive in me who worries that we’ll miss the perfect shot. The iPhones have pretty decent cameras too, for all those times when you don’t want to lug around a baby, six pieces of matching baby luggage AND and camera bag…

Ways to share pictures – Picasa and Dropbox

Picasa lets us share our photos with the family, but Dropbox is where we consolidate. With two Macs, two iPhones and a SLR, there are lots of places where pictures end up. We combine our photos into a shared folder in Dropbox and then I upload them to Picasa. Easy peasy.

The white noise app on my phone

Hm… This one was almost a magic bullet… We were told that white noise would soothe her on our way out of the hospital room and by the time the elevator arrived in the lobby, I had a white noise app for the car ride home. The great part? It actually works (provided that she isn’t hungry, sleepy, wet, dry, too hot, too cold…)

If you want extra geeky points, go grab yourself a pillow speaker (very cheaply online) and use an old iPod to make your white noise machine. It’ll free up your iPhone for dropping calls.

Amusements – all hail the iPad

You will spend a lot of time doing nearly nothing (other than rocking your child) and your brain doesn’t have capacity for the russian novels you were planning to read. My iPad holds my books, my RSS feeds, Netflix, Hulu and my email. With a bit of balancing, I can use it one-handed. Late in the evening, ’round about 1-2am, this will become very important.

That’s it. Like I mentioned above, no true magic bullets, but there are plenty of ways to add techie flair to staying up late with your newborn. Best of luck – duty calls…

~ab

I discovered something interesting this past weekend.  I had convinced my wife to allow me the upgrade from my old diehard Blackberry to the new iPhone 4.  Trust me when I tell you that it was a process.  You see, I had argued that by carrying a blackberry and an iPod touch, I was wasting space, buying and keeping track of extra cables and so on… When I travelled, this tedium slowed me down… It’s true – none of this was brilliant rhetoric, but I guess she gave in mostly to shut me up.  I was allowed to buy the iPhone…

After all that, I was utterly stupefied to learn that I had missed the biggest, humdinger of an argument for the upgrade.  I went on Gazelle.com to try to sell my old Blackberry and iPod and discovered that  Blackberry + iPod really does equal an iPhone.  I had known this would be true functionally (phone + music player = iPhone), but I had never really thought that selling my old hardware would cover the cost of my new stuff!  As a thank you to Gazelle, I thought I’d give them a bit of a shout out.  You will get more money if you try to sell your stuff with Craigslist, but the added convenience of this service is worth checking out. Read more »

I have been avoiding the subject of the iPad.

It has barely been a week and the hubbub online about the hardware, software, features, design, upgrades, and potential yadda yadda is (almost) enough to make me revert to paper news.  The use of the phrase paradigm shift has hit an all time high… (sigh)

However, a friend asked me when I was going to write about the iPressrelease and casually added “isn’t it about exactly what you preach to your readers?  The ultimate goal isn’t the technology?”

Damn.  Touché.

Read more »

As I see it, the world doesn’t need any more keyboards.  They are completely unavoidable these days… We have a keyboard on our computers, our phones, and even our iPods.  In a way, this was inevitable – the computer keyboard grew from the typewriter, which in turn was an invention spawned from the printing press, which was spawned from Chinese woodblock techniques going back to the 9th century (or even further).  I guess the added efficiency of reproducible characters is something we’ve been secretly exited about for a loooooooong time.

That doesn’t mean that we have chosen the best ways to go about it.  What is pretty comical about the QWERTY keyboard that we use today is this – when the typewriter was invented just after the US civil war the design was changed.

“The type-bar system and the universal keyboard were the machine’s novelty, but the keys jammed easily. To solve the jamming problem, another business associate, James Densmore, suggested splitting up keys for letters commonly used together to slow down typing. This became today’s standard “QWERTY” keyboard.” – Wiki article

I guess for all you who can’t type (or can’t type well) this is a relief.  You were never meant to!

Unfortunately, considering all of the different keyboards we see each day, I can think of three good reasons to type faster: Read more »