Articles about Digital Lifestyle

The only thing that ever stood in the way of my becoming a major international singer/songwriter was my inability to sing. Or write songs. I took guitar and piano lessons as a kid, and am pretty handy at Rock Band, but I’m not a great musician, so I never really get invited to jam with more musically-minded friends.

However, that might change, if I can persuade some of them to give Google’s latest interactive Chrome experiment a try.

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Valve has announced the launch of its Steam for Linux client as a limited access beta. Testers of the invite-only service were chosen from a large pool of applicants (over 60,000 people applied within the first week), with priority given to experienced Linux users.

Initially only available for Ubuntu 12.04+, with more distros to be added in the future, the beta client gives testers access to the free-to-play Team Fortress 2, as well as two dozen additional Steam titles, including Serious Sam 3: BFE, Trine 2, World of Goo, and Darwinia. The beta also includes the Big Picture mode, which allows Steam to be viewed on a TV and interacted with using a game controller.

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London’s street lighting has come a long way since the days of gas lamps (although, interesting fact there are still some 1,600 of these old lights in use), but it’s about to be brought bang up to date with the introduction of smart lighting that can be controlled by iPad-wielding engineers.

Following a successful pilot scheme, Westminster City Council has announced that it intends to convert all 14,000 of its electric street lights over the next four years.

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You’ve got to hand it to Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom. Despite living under house arrest, his assets frozen, and facing the prospect of extradition to the United States and up to 20 years in prison if found guilty of copyright theft, money laundering and racketeering fraud, he’s pressing ahead with plans for a new file-sharing site.

Mega, his Megaupload replacement, was revealed yesterday, and despite just consisting of a holding page at the moment, was quickly overwhelmed. "Millions of users hitting at once. I'm delighted by the interest. But servers can't handle it. The new Mega will. WOW!!!" Dotcom tweeted an hour after the news broke.

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On Monday night while watching "Resident Evil: Afterlife" on USA Network, Google aired the first Chromebook commercial -- not once but twice. The ad played a lot better during primetime than on YouTube, with that oh-so tempting $249 price reaching out from the screen. Advertising where real people go shows Google's seriousness to reaching the masses. Make no mistake, something of a computing revolution quietly is brewing here.

Chromebook is still the top-selling laptop at Amazon, and that while being out of stock. Meanwhile, the cloud-connected device gains some surprising followers. On Google+, Chromebook chatter cracks the pipes, and mainly because of the newest model, which matches MacBook Air's form factor and ergonomics, including 11.6-inch screen and better keyboard, for one-quarter the price.

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Just in case you were thinking it was all about the iPad mini and Surface tablets at the moment, along comes Google with a new Nexus range. The company had planned to make a big announcement in New York today, stealing some of the thunder from Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 launch, but Hurricane Sandy decided to put the kibosh on that (how ironic), so instead the search giant has had to make do with a blog post instead.

There are actually three Nexus devices being announced today, the Nexus 4 smartphone, the new Nexus 7 tablet (which my colleague Joe Wilcox talked about here) and the bigger Nexus 10 -- Google’s 10.1-inch answer to the Apple iPad.

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In the old days people worried less about storm preparations because they generally didn’t know what was coming and had no electricity anyway. How times have changed. These days we have the advantage of things like The Weather Channel and weather.com warn us, or perhaps scare us with sensationalistic reporting.  We also have a power grid we rely on for everyday life and computers and mobile devices that keep us connected.  So, what do you do when all of this technology suddenly fails, as it is likely to do in the coming hours and days for people in the mid-Atlantic region?

The easy answer is to buy a generator, but those aren’t cheap and, if you live in the path of oncoming Hurricane Sandy, as I do, you will find that stores are already sold out of generators, not to mention batteries, flashlights, milk, eggs and bottled water. However, there are other, cheaper solutions.

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To answer my colleague Joe Wilcox’s question, I won’t be buying an iPad mini. I will however, be shelling out on a 4th gen iPad. I already own an iPad 2, and was thinking of upgrading to the 3rd gen version, but I knew an update was likely. Even though Apple only rolled out the most recent iPad in March, there were a few clues that suggested a sooner-than-usual upgrade was on the cards.

Firstly, the Lighting port. On the accessories front alone it’s important for Apple to transition its devices to the new connector as quickly as possible, which means putting it in all of its relevant hardware. Secondly, the 3rd gen iPad gets incredibly hot when doing graphically intensive tasks. The new A6X chip will, I suspect, greatly reduce that problem. Making the iPad faster (while keeping the price the same) will also help position it a little further away from the new mini. However, the main reason for the upgrade is much more straightforward: it kicks the hell out of the competition.

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Google’s standing in the Muslim world isn’t great right now. The company’s refusal to pull the offensive The Innocence of Muslims video from YouTube has led to lots of criticism around the world. The Saudi Arabian government even led calls for a new international body to censor the internet purely as a result of Google’s stance.

However, perhaps in an effort to appease angry Muslims, Google has announced that from today it will stream the ritual of Hajj (the world’s largest pilgrimage) live from Mecca, on the Saudi Ministry of Culture and Information's YouTube channel.

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Great ideas usually take time to germinate into a model that is truly feasible. People are notoriously slow in grasping new paradigms, preferring to flirt with a comfortable present that is more often than not, entirely worthy and sufficient. This consumer mindset is an issue that faces aspiring and radical technology entrepreneurs, it is not sufficient to simply have the chops to think and execute the new ideas, but the right timing is nearly as crucial. To possess the patience and sense to release a radical idea into the wild only when the market is ripe is a factor that can determine make or break.

People discovery is a concept that has floated around the mobile app industry for quite some time. Apps like Badoo, which was founded in 2006 by a Russian entrepreneur and currently has a user base upwards of 150 million, operates around a fundamentally location-based model, by allowing users to see and interact with like-minded people around their specific region. Scores of other location-based apps, such as Banjo and Sonar, have managed to find relative success in their respective niches as location tag aggregators over various social networks and as friend-finding systems.

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Changing your email address can be a major pain. You’ve got to tell everyone about it, move your emails from the old account to the new one and so on. I know people who’ve been using Hotmail for the better part of a decade, despite loathing it, just because they don’t want the perceived hassle of switching to another service (or even upgrading to Outlook.com).

AOL’s new cloud-based email tool, Alto, is designed to avoid this problem by working alongside, or rather on top of, the main webmail services, rather than replacing them. You don’t need to sign up for a new email address, you just log in with your existing AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, or iCloud details. Once you’re in, Alto will help manage your inbox and cut back on clutter.

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More Americans are discovering what I did, after buying the original iPad more than two years ago: Reading ebooks, magazines and newspapers on a tablet is an immersive experience and often much more satisfying than print. Today, comScore says that in August, two out of every five US tablet owners read a newspaper or magazine and one in 10 did so almost every day.

The numbers' meaning is greater when taken in context of another. Pew says that during the same month, one in four Americans used a tablet (22 percent as owners, 3 percent borrowing one belonging to another household member). Make no mistake, magazines and newspapers are going digital in ways like nothing seen on the Internet, because of publishers' ability to deliver richer content -- at that, more frequently -- and actually make money doing so.

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Computing, and I use the term in the widest sense, has always been tribal to an extent. People have loyalties, and there’s nothing wrong with that. This year, tribes are called "ecosystems", but whatever the current label, looking around the Interweb it seems to me that tribalism is becoming more prevalent and more aggressive. It’s as if everyone stood on soapboxes with their fingers in their ears, shouting "LALALALALALALA", while at the same time (a good trick, this) yelling through a megaphone that theirs is the only way and anyone who doesn’t agree is just too stupid to be considered human.

Famously, way back in 1994, the writer and thinker Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) compared computing loyalties to religions: Apple followers were Catholics who believed that they would find salvation through following the One True Path. Conversely, PC users, like Protestants, were obliged to find their own way through the many paths open to them, and not all would be saved. And (I guess) Linux users are the hairy prophets who come out of the desert proclaiming, "It’s really easy. Honestly. And these days you only have to scourge yourself with thorns once a week …"

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Whether you think Microsoft wants to be Apple, or not, the company continues to roll out products designed to compete with its major rival. Today’s announcement is for Xbox Music, a digital music service for the Xbox games console, which will also appear as the default music player in Windows 8.

The service, which goes live tomorrow and will be available in 22 countries from launch, is a cross between Spotify and iTunes. Users will be able to listen to songs or full albums for free, create artist-based streaming radio stations, and put together music mixes and playlists. The iTunes element comes in the form of a music store, which will allow users to purchase and download tracks. The store will reportedly offer over 30 million songs, some four million more than Apple's store. There will also be over 70,000 music videos on offer.

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History is often overlooked and rarely highlighted in technology, of lesser importance if you will. Google decided to put history in the foreground with the introduction of the Google Cultural Institute by using technology as a foundation.

Seventeen partners, including cultural foundations and museums, contribute to the project through their archives of letters, first-hand video testimonials and manuscripts, as well as other resources. The Google Cultural Institute offers 42 new historical exhibitions that are available for online viewing and includes stories detailing significant events of the 20th century. The Holocaust, D-Day and the Apartheid are all major turning points in human history, and highlighted in a digital form by the Mountain View, Calif.-based corporation.

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