The Logitech Harmony 880 is a hugely popular universal remote control. After reading rave reviews online, and extensively reviewing the alternatives, I decided to purchase one several years ago. It’s not inexpensive, currently selling for $229.99 at Amazon. That’s more than an entry-level, current-generation iPod Touch. I paid a bit less, but it’s a lot of money regardless, especially for a remote that was released in 2005. Most reviews justify the price by highlighting its extensive programmability via a relatively friendly computer-based interface. The remote is oriented around “actions”, so I can press one button (e.g. “Watch Apple TV”) and my remote will send appropriate commands to turn on my TV, set it to the correct input, turn my receiver to the correct setting, and turn on my Apple TV. Sounds wonderful, right?

Wrong.

If I don’t have the remote pointed in just the right direction, one of the devices might miss the signal and my setup ends up in a Frankenstein-like mishmash of settings – the Apple TV’s on but the receiver is still set for my Blu-Ray player while my TV remains off. Even though a failure is usually evident early in the process, I have to wait for the remote to complete it’s sequence before I can turn everything off and try again.

The lady doth protest too much, right? I should just get off the couch and set everything up manually. Unfortunately, that’s not even possible – many of today’s components require the remote to access many functions (including, in my TV’s case, turning on from sleep mode).

The remote is frustratingly sluggish, often causing me to overshoot while attempting to navigate a list of options. While the Harmony comes with what should be an elegant charging cradle, the contacts often fail to connect, requiring ginger repositioning to successfully initiate a charge (during which the remote makes a series of annoy and incomprehensible beeping sounds while displaying a “screen saver” – does a remote really need a screen saver?).

Remember that friendly computer-based interface for adjusting your remote? Granted, it’s not frequent that I’d need to adjust a setting, but there’s no way to do this from the remote itself. When I do need to make a change, I need to ensure some custom software from Logitech is installed, remember my rarely-used login to Logitech’s website, and find the mini-USB cable that I know was just here somewhere.

I hope there is something better out there, but I haven’t found it yet.

Nuance Communications Wants a World of Voice Recognition – NYTimes.com.

Here, Mr. Sejnoha, the company’s chief technology officer, and other executives are plotting a voice-enabled future where human speech brings responses from not only smartphones and televisions, cars and computers, but also coffee makers, refrigerators, thermostats, alarm systems and other smart devices and appliances.It is a wildly disruptive idea. But such systems are already beginning to change the way we interact with the world and, for better and worse, how we think about technology. Until now, after all, we’ve talked only to one another. What if we begin talking to all sorts of machines, too — and, like Siri, those machines respond as if they were human?

I’ve accumulated increasing faith in voice interactions ever since I acquired the iPhone 4S. I use Siri on a regular basis and, for the most part, it’s a great time saver. However, speech recognition is far from perfect, and it’s that lack of faith that it’s going to work that often limits my use of it. I think there’s a threshold with this technology that needs to be passed. The faith that a command is going to be correctly interpreted needs to outweigh our annoyance when there are errors. Siri is right at that boundary. For simple commands and common phrases, it works very well. For more complex queries with unusual words, it often stumbles.

In a way, though, a phone is more of a stress test. An appliance with a more limited set of options (e.g. a thermostat or coffee maker) is more likely to succeed with speech recognition because the potential vocabulary is more restricted.

Lytro review | The Verge.

But the first iteration of the Lytro isn’t quite there yet: it’s hard to use, its display is terrible, and outside of a few particular situations its photos aren’t good enough to even be worth saving. It’s not even close to being able to replace an everyday camera, and at $399-$499, for most people it would have to.

Lytro is the camera based on new technology that lets you focus the picture after you take the shot. I’m definitely improving as a photographer, but I have my share of out of focus shots. Digital photography has a number of advantages over conventional photography, but one of the biggest appeals is that you can fix so many issues after you take the picture. The Lytro appears to add incorrect focus to the list.  However, it sounds like the technology just isn’t there yet to replace something like a dSLR.

FOSS Patents: Motorola can’t enforce standard-essential patents against Apple in Germany while appeal is pending — huge victory for Apple, bad news for Google

Apple scored a breakthrough court victory today against Motorola (Bloomberg was first to report). Its importance can hardly be overstated. This is so huge that it even begs the question of whether Google’s strategy for its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility has failed before the deal is even formally closed (they’re still waiting for some regulatory approvals).

Seems like a pretty big deal.

AppleInsider | Apple’s iPhone 4 ship times slip ahead of iPhone 5 debut

All new iPhone 4 orders in the U.S. now take one to three business days to ship through Apple, a sign that the company is running low on inventory ahead of introducing its fifth-generation model.

More importantly, this is a sign that Apple is not following the prior model of continuing to sell the “old” version of the iPhone as the low end model. Further supports the idea that we’ll see a new low-end device (perhaps off-contract) and a higher end iPhone 5.

Most intriguing theory I’ve heard is that an off-contract iPhone will replace the iPod Touch, though I’m not sure if that’s financially viable.

Amazon goes big with unlimited cloud music storage ($20/year) and iPad optimized web player | 9to5Mac | Apple Intelligence

Amazon today announced unlimited storage for music in its cloud drive.  The catch is you have to upgrade your overall Cloud storage (also includes Docs, Pictures, movies, etc) to the 20GB plan which is $20 per year.  Once you do that, you can upload “Unlimited” amounts of music and play it anywhere.

I’m not sure I get the appeal of what Amazon is offering here. I have to upload all my music to the cloud drive and then I can…stream it? If I had vast amounts of music that wouldn’t be practical to take portably, I could potentially see the utility, but the reality is that much of music listening is mobile, and a streaming solution isn’t really practical yet (certainly not one that requires a web browser). There are always dead zones and the whole process is generally slow and cumbersome. It makes more sense, unless you have a really mammoth collection, to store the music locally on your portable device.

Amazon intros Library Lending feature for Kindle, apps | Electronista

Amazon on Wednesday announced users of its Kindle e-book reader and those with the Kindle app on other devices will now get the ability to borrow Kindle books from more than 11,000 libraries in the US. Called simply Kindle Library Lending, the feature will arrive later this year. It will allow for Whispersyncing of notes, highlighting pages, and marking the last page read, even for titles that were returned but lent out once again.

Interesting idea. Obviously will help Amazon rope in readers who are currently avoiding the Kindle because of the need to buy the books. But how will this work in practice. If you can lend electronically from your local library, why would you buy a book?

Did Steve Jobs really kill the music business?

I don’t know.

What I do know is that in college, I had no trouble finding interesting new music to listen to. Somehow as I’ve aged I’ve retreated into replaying the songs of my youth or (only a marginal improvement), new creations from the same characters. I’ve tried the modern tools that are supposed to help people in my situation (last.fm, Pandora) with little success. Ping would help if people actually used it and it didn’t require such effort to get to.

Strangely, my only refuge has been the Gap. Yes, the clothing store. It’s become a regular destination for my son’s clothes. While I don’t always notice the music (it’s often barely audible), there have been several times where I’ve heard something I liked enough to take a closer listen later on.

My first find was VHS or Beta’s Fall Down Lightly. A few weeks later was MGMT’s Kids. Last weekend it was Ellie Goulding’s Little Dreams. What’s odd is that the two of these weren’t even singles.

Of course, technology has played a roleSoundHound has been key to figuring the songs’ identities.

If you see me at the Gap holding up my iPhone and walking around looking aimless, I’m not…I’m just trying to find that one location where I’m both close to a speaker and have adequate 3G coverage to make this work for me.

Google gave the first glimpse at ChromeOS, their operating system for, well, netbooks.

Essentially, the “OS” is basically just…a web browser.

Not as crazy as it sounds…most of what many people do online is web-based. Reading pages, sending emails, Facebook, etc. This will be fine for that, but I’m not sure it’s all that appealing. Netbooks started taking off when they became capable of running a full OS (Windows XP).

The iPad and future Android based tablets like more appealing form factors for lightweight use.

On the other hand, I could see this form factor being useful in kiosk machines or as desktops for people with very limited needs.

I worry that the Chrome “app store” is just going to further fragment the web. It seems unnecessary since these “apps” are anyway just fancy web pages, albeit with requirements for modern browser capabilities.

Chrome as a browser, on the other hand, is quite decent. If I’m stuck on a Windows machine, I’ll probably be using Chrome. On the Mac, however, I can’t find any advantage over Safari, and I prefer some of Safari’s capabilities (e.g. command keys to launch bookmark bar items).

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