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Technologies to Use


Basically, I believe there are a couple of things that you "can't go wrong" with - if you buy a Honda it will be a good car, if you buy an HP it will be a good printer, etc. These are things that we should echo to our friends and family.

What kind of person puts up a technology recommendations page anyway? Either:
  • You cannot update it fast enough, and it should not be trusted, or
  • You do update it fast enough, in which case you have an unhealthy relationship to technology, and should not be trusted. What can you do.

So these are technologies that are mature and available enough to recommend to other people - for more "far out" things that I would never recommend to anyone, see my hobbies.

Connecting to the World

Verizon Wireless really does have the best signal in the states, and I don't think anyone disputes that anymore. It is also indeed more expensive, but I think that it is worth paying a few bucks for something so central to your day to day life.

Comcast is great. They get a bum rap, and had to do a huge PR campaign to compensate. But they keep jacking up their speed to preempt Fios, and they are now blistering. Comcast is way faster than my MIT connection now.

For personal wifi (MiFi cards, etc), Sprint may actually be the best right now. Verizon is looking like they might hit hard with 4G and their "Long Term Evolution" strategy by 2011. Boston is a 4G test market for Sprint right now in 2010 - we have 4G in our car computer in most parts of the city.

Using the Internet

This one's easy - obviously Google has taken a huge lead in search, image search, local search, mail, cloud documents, chat, maps, and managing calendar and contacts. I now use Google for all of the above, not unlike most people.

Bing is making big strides, Yahoo is sort of quietly doing some really breakthrough things, and Wolfram Alpha is increasingly fun to play with.

Gadgets

Thanks to technology you now only need one gadget. Ideally it has 3G (next year 4G), WiFi, a good battery, and Verizon.

Motorola Droid is my current buddy. The reviews are right - the phone is pretty flawless at everything that it does.

Blackberries are, in my opinion, still the best phones in the world overall. I would recommend them to anyone that cares about their phone being the top phone / messager, and doesn't care as much about it being a light saber or caveman racing game player.

Android is really taking off, and could mean that open source wins in the mobile phone world. iPhone deserves all the hype and sales, and unlike many people I don't hate them for commoditizing technology - in contrast I think it's great what they've done to make people love technology even more. Palm made all of those beloved devices that changed my life, but they have a hard road from here.

Getting Organized

BACKUPS! It is startling that people still lose data, and even more startling how hard it is to build a system where that doesn't happen. Your laptop WILL fail, and should automatically sync every few hours to a networked hard drive, or a remote backup service. Windows 7 is helping with this. Second Copy is a great utility that I've used for years - rock solid. And every few months you should store a "hard drive snapshot" and then file that away. I think it is the only way to protect against accidentally deleting something.

Wikis have changed my life - I use them to organize all of my notes and thoughts. They are like all those little text files you have, except you can organize them and link them to each other - finally solves the problem of how to consolidate your thoughts, and extend them naturally - transformative. There are hosted wikis you can sign up for like PBWiki and others, and for full control you might install your own.

Subversion is great if you are a programmer, and need to organize all your code as it evolves, perhaps on many computers or with many users. Then again if you are a programmer then you already know this. But if you are a beginning programmer, get Subversion!

Google Calendar and Google Contacts - nobody does it better right now.

Getting Music

I have music going 24/7, and subscribe to pretty much every service almost pathologically. Even if you have a large appetite, you can probably still pay less than people that buy mp3s all the time, and get much more!

Rhaspody lets you hear just about any song on any album, when you want. Stop buying or stealing mp3s and then spending all your time organizing them - Rhapsody is finally where something like this needs to be.

XM Radio AKA Sirius is worth a subscription even if their customer service is notoriously evil. It is helpful because they actually have the best programming available - with their resources they can basically get the best DJs and programming lineups. A computer still can't invent a playlist that flows from one song to the next coherently, so you need to have XM to complement Rhapsody - in your car, on your computer, now on your phone.

Pandora has succeeded, and really does good free music discovery. Worth the paid subscription to escape the ads and not have it turn off. Slacker has even more songs, and Last FM is a long time favorite.

Home Theater

Talk about a moving target. But basically, once you have your big tv and your speakers everywhere, there is only one thing left - where to get the content.

Hook a computer up to your TV and A/V receiver. Now you have Amazon Unbox, Hulu, Netflix, Youtube, not to mention all the music services in your living room.

It is crazy that Roku and Apple iTV and Sony and others are trying to sell people cheesy hardware appliances for hundreds of dollars each just to provide tiny pieces of their content pipe. Get the internet into a PC in your living room system and you are done.

Gaming

Talk about a waste of time. But so important for "stress relief" - the good ones are pretty stressful in themselves.

Xbox 360, I admit, looks like the winner as a platform this round.

I have Playstation 3, because it comes with a Blu-Ray player and there are plenty of top games to keep me busy.

Call of Duty as a series may be the best game every made. Get a copy!

Nintendo Wii is ingenious, but should only satisfy you if you are a small child gamer. Of course, we all grew up with Nintendo and I love them, but real gamers do Xbox or PS3. Actually, real gamers have a PC with a crazy graphics card, 120 Hz monitor and probably 3D goggles, but we can't all be real gamers.