Technology Bytes

On Tuesday & Wednesday, November 16-17, from 6 a.m.- 11 p.m., KPFT will preempt regular programming for 2 special days of fund-raising for the Pacifica Radio Archives.

All programming normally on these hours will be preempted. This included Technology Bytes.

We’ll be back on the air on Wednesday, Nov 24th!

As you are probably aware, KPFT is in the middle of its Fall Membership Drive. The overall station goal is to raise $350,000 by Wednesday, Nov. 10th.

Technology Bytes has three fund raising episodes scheduled during the drive. We’ve already completed the first one on Oct. 27th and we met our goal of $1,600. It was a bit tight and we came in right under the wire. Thank you to all who pledged!

But it’s not over yet. We still have two more episode where we need to raise $1,600 per show this Wednesday, Nov. 3rd and next Wednesday, Nov. 10th.

But here’s some AWESOME news! For this Wednesday we are already halfway to our goal! A generous listener has pledged $800 in matching donations for Technology Bytes. That means if we can raise an additional $800 between now and when the show starts on Wednesday at 8:00 pm CST we can just do a regular show, one without begging our listeners during the program to make donations. How cool is that?

What we’re asking our listeners and fans to do is click on the donation link below and donate what you can.

Support KPFT Now!

Secure online form

As soon as we receive $800 in matching donations, we’re done for this week!

We’re not asking you to give more than you can afford. Just donate what you can. If that is $35 for a basic membership, that’s great! If it is more, we have some fantastic thank you gifts at the different levels. Examples include (but are not limited to) a KPFT t-shirt at the $60 level, a KPFT 40th Anniversary T-Shirt at the $90 level and a classic black polo shirt with BBC logo embroidered on the sleeve at the $150 level.

When making the donation just pick the amount and specify Technology Bytes as the show you are donating to and you will be prompted to pick your thank you gift and input your billing info.

Once you make your donation please send a note to jay@geekradio.com telling us you have pledged and indicate the amount. That way we can keep a running tally to know how close are to making our goal.

It only makes sense that we should utilize technology to change the game when it comes to fundraising, and this is how we can do it! Technology Bytes did this once in a previous fund raiser and it was very cool. Please help us do it again!

Thanks for your support!

The Technology Bytes Crew
Jay Lee
Peter Hughes
phliKtid
Groovehouse
Barrett Canon
Dwight Silverman

Allright. It’s that time of the year again when we ask you to reach into your PayPal pockets to help keep KPFT on the Houston airwaves. I don’t know who first equated the price of a cup of coffee with a pledge amount, but it was a genius move, given the explosion of coffee’s popularity and its equally high prices. This is one area where geeks didn’t overpay as early adopters, though we’re certainly paying the price now. In 1980, a large cup of premium joe was going for around 80 cents and probably closer to 40 cents 40 years ago when the station first came online. In 2010, we’re solidly in the $2.00 range for your basic cup of black, and easily up in the three to four dollar range if you append an -ocha, -atte or -ino onto the end of your caffeinated beverage of choice.

I did my own math and came up with a (scarily conservative) number upwards of a thousand dollars per annum. Yeah – as soon as I hit the Enter key, I wish I hadn’t.

Even Jay Lee’s single pre-show cup would net him a membership at the $150 hoodie level, but *I* believe that money is better spent to keep him awake and to help maintain his cheery disposition.

So here’s where I’m going with this: I’ve been in the car a lot this last week and have had the opportunity to listen to several of the other programs on KPFT reach for and meet their fund raising goals. Two things really stood out to me among the talk shows: First, much to my dismay, nobody ever used the “For the price of a cup of coffee” plea and second, that Technology Bytes, as a show, is extremely a-political. We’re definitely tuned into the laws and legislation that affect your digital life, but as a whole, we don’t really talk politics on the show. I think that Geeks, for the most part, transcend political boundaries, if for no other reason than, as a group, we have enough existing personality quirks to effectively overshadow any off-putting we may do with talk of politics.

Now, don’t get me wrong: we do have *our own* political battles, but they’re usually over things like operating systems, mobile devices and text editors – You know… well defined battles where there is *clearly* a right side and a wrong side. (Apologies to the vi camp.)

I also got to watch a fair amount of network and cable news this last week as I was packing up my place in anticipation for a move to new geek digs. While KPFTs political talk is, for the most part, well thought out and on point, it’s not nearly as fun as some of the fear-mongering going on elsewhere. So, it being so close to Halloween, and in an effort to balance the voices of sanity you may hear during other times of the week on 90.1, I’d like to indulge in a little techy fear mongering of my own, spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about what the world would be like without the benefit of KPFT and especially Technology Bytes.

First, spyware would run rampant. Aside from reminding listeners to keep current on Anti-virus and Anti-spyware programs, the mere *presence* of Jay Lee keeps Houston free from 40% of the malicious code that has infested the rest of the nation. If you check out virus trends for the periods that Jay has been out of the country, you’ll notice very significant spikes in virus and malware infestations in the Houston metropolitan area coinciding with his exact travel dates.

We’ve all heard about the IP address shortage in the IPv4 address space. What you haven’t heard about is the impending shortage of Zeros and Ones. phliKtid is actually responsible for running the master /dev/random device, barely keeping up with local demand. If phliKtid goes, the computing world may have to find some other system of base notation with which to communicate. That’s right – if the current times have you a little spooked, you need to stop buying gold and move to the real currency of the future, Zeros and Ones. In fact, anyone who makes a pledge tonight just has to track me down at the next Geek Gathering and I will hand them a DVD full of zeroes and ones. I’m talking billions of them… I can also email them. Just a little added incentive there…

Without the presence of Peter and Dwight, Steve Jobs and the Apple design team may not feel compelled to design any new quality hardware. The MacBook air would get a little chunky at the bottom, and would have to be renamed the MacBook Pear. iPods would start to look like first generation Zunes and Apple TV would only carry over-priced re-runs of Glenn Beck and grainy episodes of the original Lassie. For the record, there’s nothing wrong with Lassie… It’s just that I’d prefer to watch her pull Timmy out of the well in 1080 HD splendor.

And without Groovehouse’s voice on the airwaves, your computer’s clock cycles would get out of sync, wreaking havoc system wide. It’s that low steady voice with its inner groove that keeps your clock cycles beating-along at their prescribed pace.

And finally, without me, you may have missed the Ubuntu boat and wound up with HML. I’ll give you a hint: it’s a linux distribution based on Kubuntu. Is anyone familiar with it?

HML stands for Hannah Montanna Linux, which can be downloaded from hannahmontana.sourceforge.net. If you’ve been listening to Technology Bytes for any length of time, you’ll know that we were early proponents of Bootable CD Linux distributions like Knoppix and Ubuntu. Without us, your first foray into the world of Linux could have been met with a purple desktop adorned with the teen singer, complete with a rebranded Tux the penguin sporting the Hannah Montana graphic on his rotund little tummy. Now, this is a fine distro for an eleven year old girl, but I think we can all agree that that isn’t the case for a fourty year old man.

So…what *do* you get if you don’t do your part to help KPFT?

Rampant Virus, spyware and malware infestations in the Houston area; a worldwide shortage of zeros and ones, no new mac gear, your computers would lose all sense of rhythm, (something akin to Carlton on the Fresh Prince of Belaire), and you’d have to hide your laptop’s screen in public for fear of ridicule (or masked envy) of your Hannah Montana Desktop. Not a pretty world, yet somehow still not as bleak as the one painted by the guys over at Fox.

That’s it for your Fair and Balanced FUD-One-One and that’s that for your Big Fat Greek BarretTime.

Catch the Interview with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. Interview starts about 25 minutes into the show.

Technology Bytes Podcast For Oct. 20th, 2010 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

All right – I’m sure you’re all familiar with the quote, “In this world, nothing is certain but death and Spyware”? Actually, that’s Jay Lee’s version; Benjamin Frankin’s version was death and taxes. Now, either the good folks at the Houston Area Apple Users Group haven’t realized that Jay has added some Apple to his arsenal or they’re just wholly unconcerned with Spyware.

Whatever the case, they’ve chosen to take the tax route in this Saturday’s main presentation featuring 2011 QuickBooks Pro, given by Clair Jascske, at the Bellaire Civic Center located at 7008 South Rice Avenue in Bellaire, Texas. Special interest groups get going at nine AM with the main presentation at 11:15. Things wrap up by 1:00, allowing all the attendees to go balance their books with their new found accounting prowess.

Actually, when QuickBooks was first released, it found huge favor with small business owners who had *no* formal accounting training. It soon ate up 80% of the small business market, even though professional accountants balked at its lack of audit tools and its poor security controls. As early as 2000, these issues were addressed by Intuit, the software’s publisher, and the product was forked into two versions: Basic and Pro. Now, a full decade later, Intuit is ready to roll out its latest offering for Mac and PC. So, whether you’ve got an interest in accounting, own a small business, or just want to be in the same room with people interested in accounting or small business owners, this Saturday is for you. Hit www.haaug.org for more details.

With the October Geek Gathering falling on 38 (that’s 10-01-10 in binary), you’ll have to go five full weeks until you can gather with like-minded geeks again at the November installment of the Tech Bytes meetup. That is, unless you decide to attend the Houston Hacker Space open house this Friday night at the Caroline Collective, hosted by Tx/Rx labs. They’re the ones who were passing out stickers at the last Geek Gathering and they popped up on KPFT’s live journal earlier in the month. Tx/Rx labs is a project-based team of makers with backgrounds in the creative arts: electronic circuitry, music composition, 3D printing, computer science and security, screenprinting, fashion design and even haute cuisine. You are all welcome to attend their open house this Friday at 8:00 PM to visit with their members, share your own projects, enjoy some home cooking, or just hang out with a friendly crowd of technology and craft enthusiasts. The Caroline Collective is located at 4820 Caroline Street near the Museum of Fine Arts. Hit www.txrxlabs.org for info on the group and their Open House or carolinecollective.cc for a list of upcoming community events, not all of which are techy.

I’m going to abstain from my quasi-techy segueue and just jump to:

If you’re a Visual Basic programmer tired of being abused by your C-sharp counterparts, maybe you should ditch that crowd in favor of a pro-VB vibe at HAL-PC this Saturday at ten in the morning. The Visual Basic Special Interest Group is led by Tom Baehr and addresses all things related to the event-driven programming language and integrated development environment from Microsoft. The language itself is very venerable, at least in computer years: VB 1.0 was released in May of 1991, and borrowed much of its syntax and style from the original BASIC desinged in 1964 by John George Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. A bit of trivia: does anyone remember what BASIC stands for? Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code! So if your only programming experience is: 10: Print “Hello”; 20: GOTO 10;”, leave your line numbers at home at home and go see what all this event-driven fuss is about at the HAL-PC Headquarters, located at 4543 Post Oak Place Drive, suite 200. Surf to www.hal-pc.org for driving directions and a full list of monthly meetings.

That’s it for your QB/VB CV and that’s that for BT.