My home PC is a tower, that is located in my desk in a vertical partition just above the floor, which lacks a door. It has developed an occasional habit of instantly going black and then reverting to some Intel board error checksum message, one of those written in a large, clunky font. (It’s an [...]

After seeing the item about the Software Association of NH joining the NH High-Tech Council, former Telegraph colleague Dave Aponovich sent me a note reminiscing about his appearance at a 1998 SwANH panel at which the lunchtime speaker was Dan Brown. The advance notice reads: “The luncheon keynote speaker will be Dan Brown, the Phillips [...]

New Hampshire’s geek world has lost its best acronym: the Software Association of New Hampshire (SwANH) has been subsumed by the  New Hampshire High Technology Council. NHHTC (”nuh-hikt”?) isn’t nearly as as much fun to say as SwANH (”swan”)!

The release says this will create “a single voice for the state’s high technology community,”  for lobbying [...]

One of the coolest pieces of the most interesting new technology of recent years is made by E-Ink of Cambridge, Mass. - the little rotating black-and-white balls that are the secret behind screens of the Kindle, Sony Reader and other “electronic reader” devices. This system has big advantages (no power draw when a page is static, easier on the eyes due to lack of backlight) but also has problems (no color, slow to refresh). The question is whether really good tablet computers and/or super smartphones can make traditional computer screens useful enough that they’ll kill E-Ink technology.

With the arrival of Apple’s iPad, the Globe asked a few consultants this question, and they all said there’s no E-Ink killer out there … yet. Here’s the story.

The Telegraph has an iPhone app, and GraniteGeek is prominently featured, as you see from this screenshot. The problem is that “GraniteGeek” didn’t fit, so we have become “Geek Blog” in the iPhone universe. Plus, the only good icon we could find was a half-filled beaker … I guess I need to write more about [...]

Washington Post columnist Mike Musgrove has a column about two sites (www.gazelle.com and YouRenew.com) that buy last year’s iPod/laptop/camera/etc., then refurbish it and sell it on eBay or the like. The companies want the used electronics business to grow like the used car business, but since electronics depreciate much faster than autos, not everyone agrees. [...]

The Globe’s MetroDesk blog-like-object reports that in the case of the BU student who faces $675,000 in damages for downloading 30 songs, a judge has denied an attempt by the record labels to stop him linking to and talking about a playlist of the songs that was sent to The Pirate Bay file-sharing service. From [...]

Digital Equipment Corp.’s move to New Hampshire in the 1970s was probably the biggest single event that moved this state from its post-textile-industry funk into its edge-of-Route-128-tech-corridor present. (Nashuans would say that the important thing was military electronics firm Sanders Associates, now part of BAE, moving into a closed textile mill downtown decades before that, but DEC had a much higher profile.)

The end of the minicomputer era deflated DEC, which is now part of Compaq, but its memory lingers in the Greater Boston Area. As Mass High Tech reports, there’s even a documentary film about DEC in the works.

Plus, you can get the Digital logo on a necktie!

If you’ve wondered why Earle Rich hasn’t posted one of his engineering-ish items in a while, he is visiting relatives in Britain and reports that for some reason he can’t sign into GraniteGeek and a few other regular Web sites. It’s as if he has encountered a sort of trans-Atlantic block, like the continental tags [...]

New Hampshire will get its second Apple retail store on Saturday morning, at the Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua - joining one two miles away at the Rockingham Mall in Salem. (They’re a dozen miles away but because of our north-south interstate road network, might as well be 50 miles apart as far as Massachusetts [...]

Earlier this year I wrote a story about the 20th anniversary of the Linux “Live Free or Die” fake NH license plate (this link is to a post with photos of 10 of them). So I was delighted to see the above T-shirt for sale at ComputerGear.

Xconomy, an online-only tech/business magazine that has Boston as one of its three hub cities, has a good piece riffing off the news that Boston’s BBN -  formerly Beranek, Bolt & Newman, which developed lots of the tidbits that make up modern networked computing  -  was sold to Raytheon on the same day that the [...]

A year ago I wrote about a New Hampshire company that is selling wood pellets online, because it snagged $4 million from a venture capital firm that usually did sexier stuff - here’s the June ‘08 column. As CNet’s Green Tech blog reports, the company (now called WoodPellets.com) has gotten another $11 million in funding. [...]

Slashdot pointed me to this IT World story about mysterious laptops being sent to the offices of at least 10 governors, including that of Vermont, for reasons which remain unclear - the FBI is investigating. The assumption is that the machines contain some sort of malware that would sneak into the state-government network when they [...]

My daughter and her husband now live in Algeria. When she recommended Skype, the on-line telephone communications service, I was a little skeptical. But, I was willing to try it out even though I thought it might be just a poorly rendered gimmick. All I needed in addition to the laptop computer was an all-in-one [...]