The Globe and Mail's Omar El Akkad has the skinny on why Amazon's hugely successful Kindle book reader, now available in more than 100 countries, still can't be purchased in Canada. Moneyquote: Sources say the delay may be due to newly discovered competition. Until recently, the wireless technology used by the Kindle was available only through Rogers. This week, however, Bell and Telus announced a new next-generation network that will go live in November, giving Amazon more options to choose from for their device. The two carriers announced this week that they will use the new network to begin offering Apple's...

09 October, 2009

The CBC Radio iPhone app has finally been updated, and now includes live streams from Halifax (and Fredericton and Saint John, but not Sydney or Charlottetown), and from at least one location in every Canadian time zone. The app allows on-demand access to many good CBC Radio shows, but alas, only to "highlights" of Ideas, whose producers have for some reason been glacially slow to grasp the importance of the Internet's time-shifting potential for this program. Hat tip: Scott Gillard....

09 October, 2009

Google's Halifax street view feature is now online. Getting there is a little tricky. Here's how: Go to maps.google.ca Enter a specific address in the search box, and press enter. I entered "1726 Hollis St, Halifax, NS B3J 2Y3," which is the address of Province House. A little red-orange teardrop enclosing the letter "A" should show up in the map. Click on it. In the small window that pops up, click on "street view." Voila! Play with the cursor and the arrows in the image. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it is pretty darned cool. Let me know how far it ranges: Dartmouth?...

07 October, 2009

Canada fared poorly in Oxford University's second annual global study of broadband connection quality. Canada ranked 30th in download speeds, 31st in upload speeds, and 17th in "leadership," a measure that combined speed and access. The study drew on 24 million records from actual broadband speed tests conducted by users around the world from May through July 2009 using www.speedtest.net. For more depressing details see the news release, the pdf report, and the chart-filled appendix....

01 October, 2009

CBC is awaiting approval from Apple for an update to the terrific CBC Radio iPhone app. The updated version, which should appear on  iTunes soon, will include live streams of CBC stations Halifax, Calgary, Edmonton, Fredericton, Grand Falls, Moncton, Ottawa, Regina, Saint John, St John's, Thunder Bay, Windsor, and Winnipeg. (Can Sydney be far behind?) The original app (free download here) did not include any streams from the Mountain, Central, or Newfoundland time zones, and only Goose Bay in the Atlantic zone. Stations in the missing locations streamed in Windows Media format, which the app could not handle. As stations switch...

29 September, 2009

A few weeks ago, I posted a critique of an opinion piece in the August 25 edition of AllNovaScotia.com [subscription required] by Prof. Larry Hughes of the Dalhouse University's Computer Engineering Department. Hughes is currently toiling as a visiting professor of Global Energy Systems at Uppsala University in Sweden. Shockingly, Contrarian is not yet daily reading in that particular corner of Scandinavia, so he only recently learned of my comments. Hughes writes: Contrary to what you have written, [my article in AllNovaScotia.com] has nothing to with NSP's existing 2010 or 2013 requirements.  The article is about NSP's new 25% renewables...

28 September, 2009

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, whose interview on Spark was the subject of a somewhat testy post on Contrarian yesterday, has returned fire. I saw your blog entry on my interview with CBC and my book "Delete". From your entry it is obvious that you have not read the book. [True.] That's perfectly fine - except that you then move to render a flawed judgment on the book. To start with, the example that I used in the interview is not about photographic memory, but about a biological condition of a very small number of people who cannot forget - or at least remember a...

23 September, 2009

The excellent CBC Radio show, blog, and podcast known as Spark has just posted host Nora Young's  long interview with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Mayer-Schönberger believes cheap digital storage has encouraged us, often unwittingly, to store more information than is good for us. In the interview, he offers two examples: Some people with photographic memory have trouble making decisions, because memories of bad outcomes from previous decisions paralyze them. A Canadian psychotherapist, Andrew Feldmar, was permanently barred from entering the United States because a US border guard, using Google, discovered a 10-year-old article he...

22 September, 2009

Green Party leader Elizabeth May likes to deride clean coal technology as "George Bush's favorite techno-fix" for climate change. But a new documentary from the Australian Broadcasting Company says the Bush administration actually undermined clean coal, even as it pretended to support the technology. Coal is our most abundant conventional energy resource, also our dirtiest. It contributes about half of greenhouse gas production in Nova Scotia, about 30 percent worldwide. So a technology that let us use this resource without producing greenhouse gas emissions would be a huge breakthrough in efforts to slow climate change. In 2007, MIT produced a study called,...

20 September, 2009

Jeff Pinhey suggests Nova Scotia take a page from the "IMBY syndrome" he observed on while riding the Train à Grande Vitesse from Paris to Amsterdam. The Dutch, who arguably know as much about windmills as anyone, choose to put their power generating ones in places where there already is a lot of background noise:  along a train line and urban freeway.  This is one of what must have been 20 that followed the rail line. Probably can't even tell they make a noise here. I find it puzzling that we seem to be forcing our windmills into areas as remote as...

16 September, 2009
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