My father is, finally, going to get broadband, and that got me thinking about life-altering technologies.

I don’t mean the major things like the printing press or the Internet — I’m thinking more of consumer-level stuff that, once you get it, you can’t imagine living without it.

Granted, these will differ from person to person, but the ones I’m thinking of seem to resonate with a lot of folks. Another common denominator: You don’t know that you want it until you have it. Then you feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle to convince other people what they’ve been missing.

I can think of four off-hand, but one is a bit iffy because it’s too big:

1. The mouse wheel. When they first debuted, I remember Gus Venditto, who worked with me at Internet World, classify the wheel mouse as one of the biggest tech innovations of the year. And I thought, “It’s just a neat addition to a mouse.” Boy, was I wrong. For a while I had to convince people that mice without wheels were worthless. Now, of course, you can’t buy one without one. (Many have side-to-side scrolling, too, but that’s aimed mostly at spreadsheet users.)

2. Broadband Internet. I was living in Maplewood, N.J., when the cable company called to try to sell me on broadband, which it was offering for the first time. I didn’t let the gal finish. “Yes!” I shouted. “When can you come?” But most people still used modems at home, and it took some convincing that broadband was about more than pictures loading faster. The important thing was that it was always on — no waiting to dial and handshake. I hope my father sees the light soon.

3. TiVo (and DVRs in general). If you don’t have one, you don’t understand how incredible a digital video recorder is. You just don’t. My brother tried to convince me that it was great, but I wasn’t a big videotaper anyway, so I didn’t believe him. Then I got it, and everything changed. Not just pausing a show, and not just fast-forwarding through commercials — a TiVo changes the way you watch television. It doesn’t matter nearly as much what time it is now. Your favorite shows are waiting for you. You never have to worry about not setting the VCR properly and losing the last five minutes of the game. Heck, you don’t have to worry about setting anything.

I wonder if Touch-Tone® phones were the same way when they came out. I remember when we got one, but I was young enough that it didn’t change my calling all that much. I suspect teenagers were a bit more excited.

And maybe Macs are the same way — maybe if I had one I would say, “Oh, sheesh! Now I get it!” Could be. (But it’s a bit expensive to find out; it’s not a $20 mouse or a $100 TiVo.)

Anyone else have any “personal life-changing tech” thoughts?

Waiting in line, or just peeing their pants when the Apple stores opened? You decide.

(Click to enlarge.)

On the side, one of my jobs is “slotting” blog posts for a major tech magazine’s Web site. That means adding categories and keywords. I typically see only the first sentence or two of an entry (but can view the whole thing if need be). Usually, though, it’s enough.

Not always. Today I read this, which left me head-scratching:

“The PTCL ITI Connectivity with SMW-4 went down early Monday because of a cable cut in Segment 2.2.”

Is that bad?

As in, the game cheats — not “how you can beat Minesweeper.” At least so says Subversity. Not that I don’t believe him, but I don’t think it’s exactly cheating.

Apparently, Minesweeper only places some of the bombs at the beginning, and it will also move un-found bombs during the game.

Interestingly, it apparently will move a bomb that you click on — preventing you from losing. But the blog post doesn’t make clear whether it will move other bombs to affect the outcome. If it’s just shifting them around in the unaffected play area, it wouldn’t make a difference. (Of course, that begs the question: If it wouldn’t make a difference, why do it?)

Something I noticed in, well, just about every blog (and other Web site) I’ve seen: When talking about a book, writers invariably link the book’s title to its Amazon.com page.

Now, I like Amazon plenty. I’ve bought a gadzillion books from the place, along with lots of other stuff. But there are plenty of other bookstores out there — Barnes and Noble, Powell’s, and Borders, for starters. Why not link to one of them once in a while? It’s not like Amazon has incredibly short URLs, or is even less expensive.

I looked up one book by Terry Pratchett (simply because he’s the world’s greatest author): Thief of Time. The price is the same everywhere ($7.99), and Powell’s has shortest URL, if that matters to you.

The point is, books are a commodity, and you can get ‘em anywhere. So what say we link to other stores once in a while?

I was watching Numb3rs, which I catch occasionally. The good guys are the FBI; in this episode they were chasing what they thought was a racing-boat captain who may have been smuggling some missile guidance systems for the Bad Guys.

At one point they had the captain’s wife in for questioning. She denied knowing anything, but they thought she was covering for her husband. So they threatened her.

They said that, if her husband was smuggling stuff for this arms dealer, he could be classified as a terrorist, and if she knew where he was but didn’t tell them, she could be classified as a terrorist as well, “and detained indefinitely.”

So here we have the “good” guys threatening an American citizen with indefinite detainment as a “terrorist” for not disclosing where her husband was. (He turned out to have been forced to do the smuggling.)

Does anyone else see the problem here? That kind of indefinite detainment — Guantanamo is what we’re talking about — is supposed to be for non-Americans caught fighting U.S. troops. But now, at least according to CBS and the Numb3ers folks, it’s perfectly acceptable for us to think of it as a place we can put anyone who may have a remote tie to terrorism.

It wasn’t too long ago that you could see a movie with the Evil Soviet Policeman threatened the Innocent American with being sent to Siberian prison without trial. Then, it would have been clear who the bad guy was. Threatening to put someone away forever without due process? He must be destroyed!

But now it’s cool that we do that?

24 does enough damage convincing people that good guys don’t give a damn about civil rights. But it’s an idea that’s seeping into too many cracks.

I wish that woman had said, “The FBI is threatening to toss me in prison forever without a trial? And I’m an American citizen? Who the **** do you think you are, asshole?”

But that’s dreaming — at least as long as cop shows let the “good” guys get away with anything.

Years ago, the good folks at Panda Security sent me a free copy of Panda Internet Security. I was incredibly impressed – it found infections on my computer that nothing else had.

The Panda folks had offered me updates forever, essentially, but as I wasn’t writing about the software I didn’t feel right taking them up on that offer. So eventually the software got old. I got a new machine and switched to AVG, which was free, but got frustrated because it slowed down my computer too much.

I settled on Eset’s NOD32 because a lot of hackers recommended it because of its small footprint. It didn’t seem to affect my system at all, and everything I read said it was pretty darned good.

But this entry is entitled “In praise of Panda anti-virus.” Here’s why.

The other day I did something stupid and downloaded the wrong file. It had a nasty trojan, which screwed up my system. But I found the fix and cleaned it out.

Then I made sure NOD32 was up to date, and used it, Spybot Search & Destroy, and Ad-Aware to scan my PC, along with some other programs targeting specific trojans.

They all found some lingering stuff and cleaned it out. Yay.

Then I started having trouble getting to some Web sites – Computerworld’s Tech Dispenser, USA Today, CNN, for starters. But others worked perfectly. It was hit or miss.

I tried everything I could think of, but nothing worked. (And yes, I switched to OpenDNS.)

So I called Verizon Fios support. They had me try stuff. Again, no joy.

So I went to Panda’s site and did the online virus scan. It found 300+ infected files. Holy moly. So much for NOD32. Panda cleaned those files, and — lo and behold – I can access the whole darned Web.

So once again I’m reminded: Panda makes darned good anti-virus software.

This is one of those things that make me say, “Huh? Why was this disabled?”

If you’re using Firefox, it’s set to deliver muted colors in photos. But you can fix that.

First, copy this text (so you can paste it in a moment):

gfx.color_management.enabled

Now, in the address bar, enter about:config

(If prompted, tell it yes, you know what you’re doing.)

Paste the text you just copied into the “Filter” box at the top. The long list will be replaced by that one key.

Double-click it, which turns it to “true.”

Exit Firefox and restart.

Now go check out some photos.

Being sold at the Texas Repub convention:

I just noticed this on my site. There’s a McCain ad that asks “Is it OK to Unconditionally Meet With Anti-American Foreign Leaders?” (The answer, by the way, is yes, of course it is. Meetings shouldn’t have conditions. Agreements, yes, but if we imposed conditions on any anti-American leader, we wouldn’t have a lot of people talking with us.)

But that’s not the problem. The problem is that it appears you’re given a choice — a Yes box and a No box. But the boxes are fake. No matter what you click, you go to the same place.

To me, that’s slimy – that’s the kind of crap you expect from “Click the monkey to win a prize” ads, not from a candidate for President.

I guess McCain feels he needs to trick people into clicking through to his site.

I think a complaint to Google Ad Services is in order.

Oh, waily, waily, waily goes the blogosphere — the Washington Post, it was said, Photoshopped an image of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson.

Let the hand-wringing begin. “[S]o if they’re willing to change the photo in a story, is there any reason to think that they wouldn’t change a story’s facts or exaggerate things?! Mainstream media is turning into a complete farce” wrote one commenter.

Problem 1: The photo wasn’t in the Washington Post; it was in the paper’s free weekly pub, Express. But saying “Doctored photo in the Washington Post!” sounds better.

Problem 2: The photo was real. It wasn’t Photoshopped.

Chris Combs, photo editor at the Washington Post Express, weighed in on BoingBoing:

This is a Getty photo and I ran it verbatim. I don’t have time for Photoshop.

The one error to which our sports editor will likely admit is that it is credited to “Stuart Franklin/AP,” whereas it is “Stuart Franklin/Getty Images” that took the photo. Here is the picture on Getty’s site.

And thus, once again, we see the difference between bloggers and journalists. Bloggers don’t have to check facts, they can rely on the truthiness of something — their gut feeling — to make a claim of fraud. But a journalist couldn’t get away with just saying something is true because, gosh darn it, it feels true. He would have to, you know, check facts.

One of the more famous examples of this was when right-wing extremist Michelle Malkin claimed that the Associated Press had fabricated a source, citing her “contacts.” In fact, the source was real, the AP produced him, and Malkin issued a half-hearted apology.

Journalists check facts. And when they don’t, the whole world knows — right, Dan Rather?

So while bloggers can talk about the imminent demise of the mainstream media, they really don’t have anything better to replace it.

How do I know? I’d say this is pretty much crossing the line between “enthusiastic users” and “freaky mind drones”: 

Yes, that’s an eBay auction for a piece of an Apple sign. And it’s up to $202+ already. (The money is going to charity, btw, which I think is great.)

Here’s a closeup. [sniff] I would be [sniff] proud to hang that in my home.

With little fanfare, Skeptic magazine has thoroughly debunked Ben Stein’s anti-science propaganda film, “Expelled,” which purports to expose that educators across the land are being attacked for being creationists.

There are, in fact, several articles on the subject of “Expelled,” and they share a common theme: Showing how the filmmakers, including Stein, were forced to resort to a variety of distortions and, basically, outright lies to make their points.

For example, there’s the case of one Guillermo Gonzalez, who the films claims was denied tenure at Iowa State University for being a creationist. But, Skeptic points out

…filmmakers neglect to bring up the fact that in all his years at Iowa State Gonzalez had only brought in only a tiny amount of grant money when compared to the funding brought in by his colleagues. Nor do they mention the fact that Gonzalez failed to mentor a single one of his students at Iowa State through to their Ph.D. Nor does it tell viewers that while initially his publication record was terrific, during his years at Iowa State, it had significantly dropped.

That kind of “forgetting to mention the salient facts” is typical of creationists.

For example, in Caroline Crocker’s case, she claimed that “[My supervisor] said ‘nonetheless you have to be disciplined’, and I lost my job” at either George Mason University or Northern Virginia Community College (it’s not clear which she’s referring to). Skeptic, however, puts her claim in perspective:

Although in interviews and trailers for Expelled Dr. Crocker and her documentary host Ben Stein repeatedly claim she “lost her job,” the facts show that, less dramatically, her contracts at both GMU and NVCC were allowed to continue through their natural terms and were simply not renewed. Although this indeed must have been disappointing for Dr. Crocker, it is certainly not uncommon: about 70 percent of instructional faculty members at U.S. universities work on term contracts, many as “visiting” or “adjunct” professors as Dr. Crocker was, without any long-term guarantees.

In fact, the magazine points out, students in her cell biology classes at GMU had complained about Crocker because she was teaching nonsense, and they knew it — this was reported in a Washington Post story about her.

For instance, in the Washington Post article Crocker is described as initially telling the reporter she would discuss “the strengths and weaknesses of evolution,” then proceeding to unleash on her NCVV students a barrage of Creationist talking points. Finally, following the reporter’s remark at the end of the lecture that she did not introduce any existing evidence in favor of evolution, Crocker volunteered that she doesn’t believe there is much, and that she doesn’t think it is necessary to teach any at all.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: When you have to distort facts (or simply make them up) to support your argument, there’s something seriously wrong with your argument in the first place.

Liz Trotta from Fox “News” says it would be good to kill Barack Obama. Oh, it was just a joke.

“And now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama, er Obama,” she said, then laughed. “Well both, if we could.”

Ha ha. Considering how we all know you’d react if someone suggested killing McCain, that’s a lot of class there, Liz.

There’s got to be a catchy word for this — when people get together to write glowing reviews for a product that clearly doesn’t deserve it.

http://www.birkoph.com/Wolf_tshirt.htm

“[President Reagan] didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home.’’

Well, except for that little Iran-Contra, arms-for-hostages deal. A minor thing, I guess.

You think maybe Mr. McCain is losing his memory in his old age?

(Well, a few days ago. I just saw it.)

“Senator Obama’s support . . . among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.”

Gosh, it’s a good thing he’s got all those lazy blacks supporting him, huh? [roll of eyes]

Just a thought: If you run a biotech company, it might help if your last name wasn’t Moreau.

I wrote before (as have many others) about how Apple sneakily got Windows users to install its Safari browser by slipping it in with other software upgrades. I was reminded how careful you have to be when installing anything from Apple.

I reinstalled Quicktime the other day, which seems pretty straightforward. I’m glad I chose to configure the installation manually — or as manually as possible — because that at least saved me some trouble. Users who choose the default, though, are at Apple’s mercy.

Just about every piece of software I’ve ever installed, including freeware and open-source stuff, asks where I’d like the shortcuts put — on the desktop, the Start menu, or the Quick Launch bar. Not Apple; it puts Quicktime wherever it wants, leaving me to remove it.

(Why I would possibly want it on my Quick Launch bar I can’t fathom. It opens automatically when it needs to play a file. I don’t think I’ve ever manually launched Quicktime. But that’s Apple logic.)

Today I began having trouble viewing some images in Firefox. I had right-clicked and chosen “View Image,” but instead of showing the pic, the screen started to flicker.

I dug and discovered the problem. Quicktime had set itself as the default viewer for PNG files in Firefox without my permission. But it had screwed up and for some reason created two entries in Firefox for PNG, both pointing to Quicktime. For some reason, that was causing an endless loop and the image wasn’t displaying.

I switched both entries back where they belonged — where they had been before Quicktime screwed with them — and all was well again. (Except that now I have two entries for PNG in Firefox.)

So, Apple, I realize that you expect your customers to trust you implicitly and that you think you know what’s best for everyone, but guess what? You don’t. Please stop messing with my settings without asking.