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Comment Re:Still pretty affordable (Score 5, Informative) 393

It's not necessarily true in LA because of the way electricity is billed. If you are going for pure usage based--you will easily blow through tier 4 usage limits when charging an EV every night. This brings you into the 34 cents per kwh level. (in Los Angeles) Which also is what the rest of your house will be billed at too. This also doesn't include taxes and so-called "delivery charges" which may bring your electricity into the 50 cents per kwh range. My Volt takes like 12-14 kwh to charge. And I get maybe 40 miles range on that. So that's like $4-4.50 to charge. Maybe $6 if you add in all the fees added on top of it. I get the equivalent of a little over a gallon of premium gas in range--so maybe $5-6 of gas for $4-6 worth of electricity. I suspect the Tesla gets more miles per kwh than the Volt, though. The only way to really save money on charging your car is to get a separate meter to your garage, and have that meter billed at the time of day rate--so during the day it's 34 cents and at night (like midnight to 9 AM or something) it's 11 cents kwh. And charge only at night.

Comment Google Voice probably lives... (Score 1) 166

I was convinced Google Voice was next on the chopping block after they canned reader. The iOS app hasn't been updated in over a year, and they broke gmail GVoice calls awhile back. But they've now added Google Voice support to Hangouts, which leads me or believe it's going to morph into a Hangouts feature instead of a standalone service.

Comment Didn't they already try this with the VUE? (Score 1) 769

I'm lazy and don't know how to actually make coffee. In fact, I didn't drink coffee regularly until the first Keurig came out. It's like 5X more expensive than brewing your own, but 100X more convenient.

But they already tried to come out with a DRM'ed successor to the Keurig called VUE and it totally flopped. The coffee was more expensive, and the machine just had a bunch of useless options making it not much better than the regular Keurig with much cheaper K-Cups.

Comment uWInk (Score 1) 196

Seems like prior art would be Nolan Bushnell's uWink restaurants. They were around the LA area, and had macs built into the tables you could order from. At the end of the meal you could select which of the items on the bill were yours and swipe a card to pay your share. Food was pretty weak, though!

Comment Just in Shanghai last week (Score 1) 55

The Great Firewall seems inconsistent. Sometimes I was blocked on 3G from visiting Twitter, FB other times not. Wifi was spotty as well, but usually blocked. I used a VPN to access the Internet most of the time. But keeping the VPN up was tricky. Using the Internet in China was absolutely useless as a Westerner trying to get anything done. Such a weird place, they have a maglev train but you can't drink the water. #priorities

Comment Leap doesn't work (Score 5, Informative) 86

I've played a few Leap games and it just doesn't work at all. They were just totally unplayable. In one case the game was designed specifically for Leap and the other was using the Leap as a mouse/touch replacement. In both cases the game constantly freaked out when Leap couldn't figure out where your hands were, or started tracking some random thing like your watch or a sleeve, etc. I had to keep removing my hands from the view area to 'reset' the game. This happened consistently throughout the game. After awhile I just gave up in frustration.

Kinect (both 1 and 2 which are each based on completely different tech) is a FAR SUPERIOR tracking solution--but it's much larger and expensive.

It's funny to see this company get all this hype for a device that essentially doesn't work.

Comment Had similar experiences (Score 1) 185

I wasn't using a MakerBot, but a BukoBot and felt the kit printers are just garbage for anything real. I ended up printing the same object (a 6 inch tall figure) using a low-end pro grade printer (uPrint SE...uses the same type of extruder/FDM print technology) with kind of spectacular results (before and afters here): http://ralphbarbagallo.com/2013/05/02/diy-3d-printing-is-not-ready-for-prime-time/

Also the price difference between the low end uPrints and the Replicator 2X isn't that great. About 2.5X. Now that the company that makes uPrint owns MakerBot, I'm hoping we see consumer printers as robust as these high end machines (that are as large as a refrigerator!)

Still took 20+ hours to print my figure on both machines.

The kit scene reminds me of the personal computer scene in the '70s. I expect rapid progress in this area. We've already seen drastic improvements in quality on the consumer side with the Replicator 2X and Form1.

I still kind of don't like stereolithography because although it's way higher detail, you can't use a support material--right? You still have to print 'fluff' that you crack off by hand?

Comment The next Google product to be killed (Score 2) 172

I'm convinced Google Voice is the next Google product on the chopping block. It hasn't been upgraded in years, it's still kind of wonky. I love it, and use it as replacement for iPhone's Visual Voicemail. Plus it's awesome when traveling out of the country. And the ability to filter callers etc. is just basic stuff that should be available to any mobile customer. They have slightly updated the web interface by integrating it into Hangouts with the new GMail--but they also removed the ability to make calls from GMail. It's only a matter of time before Google kills it.

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