By Jeffrey the Barak As usual, I spent a few minutes today playing with my trusty vacuum cleaner and also a Swiffer duster. And as usual, the vacuum and the duster each had plenty of dust to pick up. Sometimes I cannot see dust without putting on my eyeglasses, but that’s another problem altogether. So [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak Have you ever seen a time zone map? Its a rectangular projection of our globe, like most maps, where small distances at the poles are stretched for thousands of miles and large distances at the equator look tiny by comparison. But my preference for globes is not the focus of this [...]
A response to the Doking HD By Jeffrey the Barak The Doking HD is car made in Croatia. Most cars are of course not made in Croatia, but this is not the most unusual aspect of the Doking HD. It is an electric car, and it is competing for our attention against electric cars from [...]
By Mark Bernstein There’s been a lot of attention in the news about sexual abuse. The most recent scandal involves some sports coaches at a large American University culminating in the firing of a legendary and iconic football coach for being complicit in the cover-up of a younger coach’s indecent activities. This most base of [...]
The November 2011 L.A. Auto Show, Los Angeles Convention Center, California USA. (click twice on any image to see it full size) For years, the-vu has been lucky enough to have a couple of writers attend the LA Auto show on Press Days, and we have written selective reviews of cars, usually electric and alternative [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak A Rant about multiple LinkedIn profiles. I don’t use LinkedIn. (Linked In, linkedin.com). I really don’t need to because I’m not in the kind of business where I need to network with people and I don’t have a job working for someone else. Still, there is no harm in having a [...]
By Isabella Woods The new Kindle range from Amazon doesn’t replace your iPad, but if you’re looking to make a change of eBook reader or tablet computer, your choices have been expanded. Both the Kindle Touch and the Kindle Fire are must buy gadgets. Kindle Fire Getting the biggest surprise out of the way first, [...]
Nissan and Toyota sue each other for making similar products. Toyotas are to be banned in the UK while Nissans are to be banned in the USA. Sounds ridiculous? Well it is and it’s not true. But this is exactly what Apple and Samsung are trying to do to each other. the-vu thinks it makes [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak The KickPed is a custom Know-Ped, manufactured in the same factory in California, Patmont Motor Werks, but made to a lean and mean customized set of specifications, exclusively for one retail store, NYCeWheels in New York City. In some ways it is less of a scooter than the Know-Ped but the [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak A couple of decades ago I bought a notebook computer and Windows 3.0 and Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Today, as I prepare my iMac for the upgrade to OSX Lion, I deleted all Power PC applications that will no longer work after the change. This included Microsoft Word and Microsoft [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak Very different capabilities and different prices, but this comparison is completely valid, because it’s about which system better serves lightweight, traveling, out of the home or office, on the go, computing. I work at home, and in my office I use a 27” iMac. But almost everything I do is from [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak Back in the days of Windows 3.0, which I seem to remember being 1990, I acquired my first mouse. Then for twenty years I spent most of every day with my right hand on or near a mouse. For the most part it did not hurt, and because it worked so [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak Words cannot adequately describe Arne Jacobsen’s iconic mid-century designs, but it’s always nice to view a few of them in one place. So this is not an article, it’s just a vision massage. Swan Egg Series 3300 Tavolo Swan Series 7 3103 Oxford Eggs Arne
By Jeffrey the Barak Following a recent failed revamp of the original infamous fattening American Food Pyramid, the USDA has introduced The Food Plate. It really is quite simple, and easy to see that half of our food should be fruits and vegetables. It should be noted that a typical American meal may contain as [...]
By Natalie Walters If you’ve hung out with a Senior in college lately, you’ve probably witnessed a least one breakdown or “freak-out” about something along the lines of entering the vicious job competition underprepared and moneyless. If you’re hearing this from a Dance major, then they’re also worrying whether their body is pretty enough, strong enough, [...]
By Leda Meredith “Why have an audience? Why not just create your art for art’s sake and dance it in, say, your living room?” That’s one of the first questions I ask students in my choreography classes. The initial answers always focus on what the audience does for the dancer/choreographer: The audience creates performance adrenalin, provides [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak The State of Hawai’i is the only place in the United States in which you can lose your shadow, outside, in the middle of the day. when there are no clouds. In Hawai’i this is known as Lahaina Noon and it happens twice a year, but on different dates, depending where [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak Today at the Google I/O 2011, the Chrome operating system finally became a reality. Google executives, whom many expected to announce the death of the project, instead proclaimed the Chrome future and expounded upon the advantages of Chrome, a browser-based operating system, over the more traditional OS of Microsoft, Apple, Linux [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak. We all still wait, or maybe we don’t. I titled this article Waiting for Google Chrome, part 20, but I’m not really waiting so intently as I was in the first 19 parts. Things move quickly in the world of computers and software, but Google’s Chrome operating system is continuing to move very [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak April 1st 2011 Now that we have discovered the Gnarl Jump, and matter can be made to jump from spot to spot indefinitely, it can be used to turn wheels with pistons, or it can be used to endlessly power huge turbines. The implications of using the Gnarl Jump to power [...]
By Nasir Hashir. I live in a small town in California. I was born here and my parents have been here since the 1960’s. Because my older brother was a hot rod enthusiast, my childhood sports heroes were low-budget independent drag racers, and not football, baseball or basketball players. So from an early age, when [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak Single serve coffee and single serve espresso are the fastest growing trends in home coffee preparation. While the cost per cup can be a lot higher than you would pay with a normal coffee maker or home espresso machine, capsule systems take away the guesswork, the mess, the constant cleanup and [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak In the tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson, first published in 1837, the hero of the story is the little boy who screams “He’s naked”. In his innocence and honesty, he sees the truth. This little boy is sorely needed today. Today we have organizations convincing people of [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak Some of you may have browsed to this review on the-vu between December 16th 2010 and January 17th 2011 and found a very different story. Due to a hardware conflict, namely a radio device in my particular computer, I failed to get Joicloud to work properly in December 2010, but with [...]
By Sparklee A Hole. If you can read this, you are a human, and you poop. A subject that may delight a few, and disgust many more. but opinions dont count, because we all have to go and poop. It is what happens afterwards that is rarely discussed. People from different cultures have different ideas about [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak Yesterday Google held a press conference which included the sad news that Chrome and Chrome-based netbooks will most likely not be on sale until the second half of 2011. Having abandoned smartphones because I find them too tiny, (I sold my last iPhone), and having also sold my iPad, because it [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak Los Angeles, 4:30PM November 19th, 2010. Today is the day for the Jolibook to launch in England. Meanwhile a look at the Jolicloud site revealed a change, they now allow you to sign up and try Jolicloud OS in your browser, emulating what it would be like to have Jolicloud running [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak As usual, the L.A. Auto Show welcomed the-vu to press days, where we took our usual meandering course through the convention center, staying out of the way of the TV and magazine writers, and looking in all the wrong places, on purpose. Not for the first time, the winners for aestethics [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak. Sometimes the L.A. Auto Show presents a gem in the basement. In the underground part of the convention center, 2010′s fun booth is Mobo. Recumbent cycles are nothing new but the 2010 line up of human powered vehicles from City of Industry, CA are a blast. They are easy to ride, [...]
By Jeffrey the Barak. Hidden away off to one side at the 2010 L.A. Auto Show was the Fisker booth. This year the Fisker Karma is looking like a ready-for-sale luxury car, crouched and ready to spring out onto the public streets. The Karma is a four-door curvacious Plug-in Hybrid Elecric luxury car that really [...]