This is Tech

From my extensive research (by way of random conversations at parties), there is a huge untapped market for cold pillows. Maybe I have an unusually hot head, but there is something comforting about cold material against my face that makes me relax and drift to sleep.

The problem with some pillows is that they warm up after a time, and loose that soothing effect. The low tech and unacceptable solution is to flip your pillow throughout the night.

I have probably lost most of you, but those that are still reading know what I am talking about.
As someone who is fanatical about technology, it puzzles me that there is no good commercially available solution to this problem. So, in the interest of furthering the art in this area of science, I present my best ideas for cracking this nut: (more…)

The Science of March Madness:

Game Theory applied to your Office NCAA Tournament Pool

At This is Tech we like sports, but what we really like is the technology behind sports. With that in mind, we bring you the ThisIsTech.com primer on NCAA tournament pool strategy followed by an overview of game theory as applied to tourney picks from Professor John Duffy of the Experimental Economics Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Some of you know that I am a big fan of my Amazon Kindle. What you don’t know is that my wife prefers the Sony Reader. In this showdown, we go husband versus wife in a battle royal comparing the strengths and weaknesses of each device from our unique perspectives. Game On:

My Arguments:

I believe in substance over style and the Kindle is a superior device to the Sony Reader.

Wireless. The wireless functionality puts the Kindle in its own class. Wireless is the kind of essential functionality that people will eventually take for granted as eBook readers become more mainstream. “Mommy, tell me again what it was like when you were a kid and people connected their devices to a computer with a cable.” I am a technology junky and even I don’t like the hassle of having to find a cable and plugging my devices into the computer. I can browse a huge library of books and have them delivered wirelessly to my device. The eInk technology that powers both devices is cool, but by itself it doesn’t do much more than a regular book. Wireless connectivity gives Kindle users instant access to Amazon’s entire library of ebooks, which is the kind of technology that borders on magic.

Better Conversion. Amazon makes it easy to get your own content on the Kindle. They give users an email
address linked directly to the device. This means if you email a Word document or a PDF to yourusername@kindle.com it automatically is converted and sent wirelessly to your device. The conversion of PDFs runs an optical character recognition on the document and creates clean crisp text for the book. Amazon also automatically recognizes the table of contents and maps it to the various part of the book. Before I bought the Kindle, I tried putting a few PDF’s on my wife’s Sony Reader, and they were illegible. The Sony was displaying the pages as graphics instead of text, which on the small screen just didn’t work. The Kindle’s high quality conversion means that you aren’t as locked-in to Amazon’s ebook store. A couple days ago I downloaded a science fiction book called Accelerando by Charlie Stross. What’s great about that is that Accelarando is published under a Creative Commons license, which means I can read it for free or even give a copy to a friend. If you are interested, you can download a copy here, friend). Moving Accelarando onto the Kindle was as easy as emailing it to myself. I really hope this kind of functionality helps people like Stross succeed. I am a few chapters into the book and it is outstanding. Sending books to yourself wirelessly costs ten cents, but you can email files to yourusername@free.kindle.com and they will reply to your email with converted files you can move to the Kindle by USB for free.

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