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Did Bell Steal Ideas?
December 26, 2007
If you are interested in historical telephony and whether Alexander Graham Bell actually invented the telephone or “borrowed” some patent ideas, you will want to read this story.
Excerpt:
In "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret," journalist Seth Shulman argues that Bell -- aided by aggressive lawyers and a corrupt patent examiner -- got an improper peek at patent documents Gray had filed, and that Bell was erroneously credited with filing first.Shulman believes the smoking gun is Bell's lab notebook, which was restricted by Bell's family until 1976, then digitized and made widely available in 1999.
The notebook details the false starts Bell encountered as he and assistant Thomas Watson tried transmitting sound electromagnetically over a wire. Then, after a 12-day gap in 1876 -- when Bell went to Washington to sort out patent questions about his work -- he suddenly began trying another kind of voice transmitter. That method was the one that proved successful.
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Mobile Menu Productivity
December 26, 2007
It has been a fairly busy holiday season from a work perspective but over the holidays I found some hours to get some much needed work done. I have gotten on a productivity and efficiency kick that started with my change to the Google Reader. The more I use this reader, the more I like it.
One reason I made this switch you may recall was because I want to take my RSS feeds on the go and the Google Reader works well with my phone.
But I now have another dilemma. I don’t always want to open my mobile browser to the Reader. I have a handful of links I like to use but I needed a new menu system that would allow me quickly access to the links I want.
I first tried customizing Google Mobile to do this but it wasn’t very flexible.
I then tried designing a mobile menu page using Google Pages as it allows rapid page creation. What I found was that using pages created in this fashion interfered with various Google services. Whenever I clicked on a link on my phone from the service it would give me some mobile related error message and then give me a non-mobile formatted result. It even forced me have to enter in my password for Reader each time I clicked on the link from the Pages menu. It was if cookies weren’t being read.
Then I decided to just use Microsoft Word and create the menu and export the HTML file to a folder on my blog site. I now have a super-efficient menu allowing me access to just the content I want. Here is how the mobile menu looks:
Unless otherwise specified the links are all Google links. In other words Maps is a link to Google Maps.
Even though the file is under 10k in size, I then decided to copy it to my phone to have even faster access to the menu. I now have a rapidly opening menu allowing me access to any link at lightening speed.
The way I did this was as follows... Copy the file called “mobile-home.html” to your “My Documents” folder and on your Windows Mobile browser enter:
file://\My%20Documents\mobile-home.html
Now you have a lightening fast menu accessible from your mobile phone.
Please note I may update this menu as time goes on so you are welcome to save a copy of it if you find it perfect the way it is.
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TMC Goes JibJab
December 26, 2007
The TMC team apparently has been very busy keeping our audience entertained. For the latest creation take a look at the Night of the Living Republicans starring the TMC team. How many TMC team members can you recognize?
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