GoodYear GY-145 GPS Review

Commerce

2008goodHaving had my hands on a number of GPS units over the past couple of years I was very curious when the folks at GoodYear came out with a GPS. Not exactly a product you would expect them to come out with.

I tested the device here in Hawaii and while some will say why test a GPS in Hawaii, I had a specific mission in mind when I tested this unit. First of all the traffic is really bad at times so I waited till it was one of those days in gridlock when I employed my strategy.

This GPS comes with the ability for it to look ahead and give you some alternate routes. So I followed the alternate routes that the GPS gave me in my time of need and found some back streets the locals knew well but not having been born and raised here I did not know about.

Much to my surprise more often than not I was able to get ahead of the traffic by using back streets it routed me to which was good considering the price of gas here.

Second thing was I wanted to test usability and I found that the device was easy to navigate with one exception. The map zoom features really drove me crazy. Two small icons in the touch screen caused zoom in and zoom out. Often the zoom feature would only hold a few minutes and resort back to a wider view which I did not care for.

The GPS Unit seemed forever to pick up a GPS signal even in clear skies and the unit had a tendency to reset itself whenever I restarted the car which was annoying. Overall my impression on the route around feature was good but sadly I cannot recommend this unit as a product to purchase largely because of the zoom feature controlled on screen. The folks at Goodyear need to go back to the drawing table on this one.

Note: I was provided a unit to test and tested this unit in real world conditions for 7 days.

Zero pollution energy creation and storage

Technology

Regular readers may remember me talking about the dead-end that is electric cars with batteries. The complexity, weight, recharge time and dangerous chemicals that go into them make them of low practicality to the mass market. Bio-diesel is an even worse idea given the low energy recovery and the land it takes away from producing food. These two technolgies seem to form the cornerstone of almost all low emmision vehicles being produced or planned.

We are wasting time and money on these dead-end technologies when better solutions are available. Hydrogen fuel cells are a very possible and safe technology, and there has been success with trial and even production vehicles using this method. And while there is no widespread filling infrastructure in place today, it should be no harder to introduce than unleaded gas, or LPG was.

A team at MIT has taken the next step in making this technology truly viable. They have put together a method that produces Hydrogen from pure water at room temperature using solar energy. The catalysts used to do this are phosphate cobalt and platinum, all of which are fairly benign chemicals. Once it is built this system is a truly zero emmision power source. Solar energy splits water into Hydrogen and Oxygen. The Hydrogen is burned, mixing it with Oxygen to produce water.

Combine this with some of the new high efficiency solar cell technology that is on its way and there is a true potential that not only our cars, but our homes as well could be completely zero emmision within a relatively short time. A medium size array on the roof of your house could produce twice your power needs. Some of the excess power goes to produce hydrogen for night and the car, and some goes back into the grid for those in apartment blocks and industrial needs.

I am very excited about the potential of this path to energy production.

A New Reprieve for Windows XP and Vista Not Being Deployed

Microsoft

Two things in the news today. First, Microsoft has once again, for at least the third time, granted an extension to PC manufacturers who are insisting that they still want to purchase XP. Such manufacturers can now order XP through the end of January, even if they don’t want delivery of the software until as late as May. In my recollection, this is definitely the third, and possibly the fourth, reprieve for Microsoft’s most-used-to-date operating software.

And in another survey, Microsoft is finding out that 10% or less of corporate environments have deployed Vista. Educational environments are showing a slightly higher rate of adoption, but not much, at about 15%. Corporations and institutions of higher learning are holding onto the more stable and less resource-hoggy (is that a word) XP. If Vista is deployed, it is on individual laptops that are used for travel or other off-corporate-network projects. I know our institution is not deploying Vista except into a limited number of classrooms where the software is being taught. It has not been rolled out to staff or faculty systems except for laptops that are used mostly off-grid.

Microsoft is being pressured to produce on their Windows 7 promises. A release seems likely by late 2009 as customers continue to refuse to upgrade to the Vista platform. Vista has ended up being a dismal and financial failure for Microsoft. Even though I use Vista on several machines, I still defer to my XP machines for most of my day-to-day work. Unless a corporation can afford the massive hardware upgrade that Vista requires, XP is still the way to go, and these corporations are talking with their wallets.

It would be nice to think that Windows 7 will be a more natural progression of Microsoft operating systems than Vista is. What we all wanted and needed was an upgraded XP, not something completely new and different and expensive to deploy. I don’t know if I can think that hopefully, but maybe Microsoft has learned a few lessons with Vista.

GNC-2008-12-23 #434 We have a winner!

Podcast

We have a winner folks congrats to Matt Standley for winning the HP Magic Giveaway. I have a surprise for you at the end of the show tonight. Short show as I am in the process of fighting off a bad cold.. Enjoy!!

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Show Notes:
Chrysler Idiots!
VHS really RIP
OLED Christmas Tree
New Hubble Images
Roof Mapping by DOE
See any Rubber Ducks of Greenland
Maryland Students Playing with Fire
New Pidgin
RSS Feed for Favorite Shows
Christmas Bonus at Google not Cash
Blood from Mosquito gets man arrested
Dual Screen Laptop
Virgin Galactic WhiteKnightTwo Test Flight
iPhone 3g Unlocked
Nanoparticles make teeth to slick for bacteria
Roundtrip with Endeavor
Paul your focus is way to narrow
Windows Live writer Review
Firefox 2 no more updates!
Extent of Checkfree.com hack exposed!
Books next on the Apple Ap store Hit List
Australia Net Filter full speed ahead
Carbonate on Mars
800 new domain name extensions?
Transition to Computer Based TV?
RIAA changes Tactics
Pressure for Windows 7 on the rise
ISS Spacewalk in Progress
Something has frozen over!
Roku to go HD
RIAA makes ISP’s be bad guys
Jupiter Moon makes an Apperance
ISP asks RIAA to pay them for Notice Deliveries

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Matt Standley Wins HP Magic Giveaway at Geek News Central

Information

HP-MAGICWe had 161,904 entries for the 8 ways we gave people to win the HP Magic Giveaway. Matt’s Winning Entry was on how he would Share the Magic was randomly picked by Random.org.

Here is the text of the email he sent to hpmagic@geeknewscentral.com on Dec 20th

“Todd If I were to win, I would give my mother and stepfather in Louisiana one of the new computers because theirs crashed and my stepdad was recently laid off from his job. I would give another one of the computers to my dad and stepmom here in Georgia because the computer they have now was bought at a refurbishment place for $150. I would give another computer, the printer, and the media connect to my fellow interns at the theater that I work at because we’re all just starting out in our careers and it’d be nice to share that with someone to help them along. I’d give Kung Fu Panda to my little brother and his friend. The only thing I would keep would be one of the the laptops, and the interns and i would share the photo pack so we could print out some headshots. Thanks so much!  :-)”

Folks this is what sharing the Magic is all about! A huge number of people are going to benefit from Matt’s giving spirit.

I want to thank the thousands of people that entered to win the $6000.00 HP Magic Giveaway

24hr Podcast was a Huge Success

Podcast

24hrI am still recovering from the 24hr Podcast as I type this. Being online 24hr and talking to over 30 guest during the period is enough to drain you. But I am very proud to say that we had according to ustream over 15,800 people check out the stream.

We raised well over $1500.00 for Disabled American Veteran once donations are totaled I will be sending money to www.dav.org.

We had no fewer than 100 people on the stream even at the latest hour. The video stream on ustream was solid from the tricaster to ustream for the full 24hrs. We had a few hiccups with Talkshoe but overall the event went well.

I have a pile of media to work over in the next couple of weeks and hope you will be patient as I push it out. All of the videos and media files will be put on the 24hrPodcast.com website in the order sequential order.

Big thanks to all the guest and special shoutout to Carey Holzman of ComputerAmerica.com that really helped in a big way for about 3 hours of the show as I hit the wall a couple of times.

All told I consumed 1/2 gallon of water, 1/2 gallon of iced tea and two red bulls. Needless to say I have probably drank another 1/2 gallon of water today to rehydrate.

Over 300gigs of video was recorded, 6 gigs of raw audio files. 400 new people are following me on twitter and over 1000 emails were sent in for participation in the HPMagic Giveaway over the 24hrs.

5 hardcore fans stayed with me the full 24 hours and countless others only missed by a few hours. I will cover more in Tuesdays podcast. But their is a treasure trove of material in the content.

RIAA to Cease Prosecution of File Sharers

Music

The RIAA has decided to cease prosecution of file sharers directly, and instead force ISP’s to become the new copyright police.

The RIAA wasn’t even able to truly determine if people were sharing music, so a ginormous ISP is supposed to be able to figure it out?

I have BitTorrent loaded one one of my machines. I’ve used it to make large files of my own creation available to people who need it (most notably my work on adaptive technology) and used it to download similar materials. I’ve also used it to retrieve a working copy of software that I own but that the CD has been damaged.

Is ATT, my ISP, going to know I’m using BitTorrent legitimately, or are they going to assume that because my music library also exists on the same computer that is running BitTorrent, that I must be an illegal music file-sharer?

This isn’t helping anyone; the RIAA is just trying to find more effective means to catch people doing what may be legitimate work. It just gets scarier, doesn’t it? My BitTorrent machine is offline right now, not because of this, but because we are having new flooring put in the room where it resides. I’m debating on a complete uninstall of BitTorrent before I put that machine back on the network.