the tomgrom blog

I’m often asked for what I consider to be the most reliable notebook brands.  Now I’m glad to have some hard evidence to back my recommendations, much of which frankly surprises me.

I’m a big fan of Apple and Lenovo, for example and thought that they’d certainly be top reliability contenders.  Not so!

Of course, if we’ve purchased a bum Asus or Toshiba (the leaders of the pack), we’ll often consider them all to be junk, and if our Macbook has been humming along just fine for the last five years, we’ll often think they’re all rock solid.

It’s also interesting to note that Netbooks are more prone to failure than full-size laptops.  My MSI Wind has been fantastic thus far, slogging along with me on multiple continents, but once again YMMV.

30,000+ SquareTrade laptop repairs give us a really good sample, though, so I’ll go with their results over my own little slice of experience.

[via /.]

John Harris developed his music collection and knowledge like me — years of collecting, and paying.

He knows just how game-changing it is to have instant access to virtually any piece of music at little or no cost, and based on some of my own conversations with students, he is exactly right.

13-year olds are discovering Solid Pleasure on their own, for goodness sake.

[via /.]

The Dieline highlights clever twists on boring, traditional package barcodes.  I love these!

They’re from Japan, of course.

As a lover of live music, GigLocator looks promising.

It has a slick, no-nonsense interface, a large database of events, and some slick extras — I just wonder if it’ll have some of the more obscure acts that I enjoy, or find good gigs in the hinterlands of Connecticut.

Definitely worth checking out.

[via Josh Spear]

Want to know what Google knows about you?  Sign into their new site, Google Dashboard.

Once you do, you’ll see every Google service that you’ve signed up to with that username.

Transparency is good.

[via /.]

It’s strange twist of fate that the highest-level of rigor in fact-checking comes from a comedy show, but also extremely fitting.

This Poynter article was quite an eye-opener.  At least we have someplace that we can trust.

I shall miss Bill Moyers Journal a great deal, and can only hope that someone else picks up the baton — in a world of sound bites and biases, it’s essential to get as many viewpoints as possible.

Mr. Moyers is a personal hero of mine, and his show is one of the few that gives a forum to dissenting voices in an intelligent, respectful, and informative way.

I wish the best to him, and hope he knows how grateful many of us are for his hard work over the years.

Marguerite Reardon lets us know how she saved big money on broadband in a competitive market, and points to a few studies that bolster arguments in favor of more competition.

Of particular interest is the FCC-commissioned study [PDF] that compares the US broadband market to other countries.

Slashdot offers up a slew of new reasons to join me in ditching cable for Internet TV.

OK, while I haven’t completely ditched cable because of lousy HD signal penetration where I live, I only keep the basic stations (at $10 per month, in full HD) and don’t notice the difference.

Another bit of evidence that we’re the ones making history, right here, right now:

Wired’s Epicenter discusses how advertising-based music sites seem to be struggling, and the implications of this for the future of online music distribution.

How long will it take to shake off the growing pains that come from decentralized digital distribution of intellectual property?  I think that it might not even happen in my lifetime.

If it’s going to be a bumpy road, though, at least the scenery is varied and interesting.

Revered tech writer David Pogue smacks down Verizon (and AT&T) for business practices that are specifically designed trick and inconvenience us.

This is yet another reason why these government-sanctioned telecommunication monopolies are bad business for everyone but shareholders, politicians, industry lobbyists.

I feel particularly sorry for the many dedicated and caring employees at these companies, who get a bad name because management decides to do underhanded stuff like this.

I guess there’s little incentive to serve the public when you’ve got a lock on the people who “really” count.

[via Daring Fireball]

Holy moly, is this awesome.  Just as I’m getting into the mood for more 60’s and 70’s rock, VSL hooks us up with this incredible site.

Lovingly curated 60’s and 70’s psychedelic, hard rock, folk, and progressive rock albums for download, including big, beautiful cover art, liner notes, and a variety of formats (MP3, FLAC, etc.).  There’s some question on the legality of some of these for me, but others look OK — YMMV.

There goes my weekend.

[via VSL]

It’s rather sad that the way to make money on the Internet is through quantity, not quality.

MetaFilter points us to a bunch of intriguing data about Demand Media, a hugely successful company that spits out low-quality, high-volume (and high-profit) online content, including this RWW article from August.

It seems as though there will always be a place for cheap crap online, just as there is the real world, and that there will be a great deal more of it.  No surprise, huh?

[via MeFi]

I get sucked in by alarming headlines just as easily as anyone, so when the Freakonomics blog pointed me to this FuturePundit post comparing natural disasters in the 19th Century to those of the 20th Century, I was hooked.

You see, the 19th Century was rife with disasters that, if they were to happen with today’s infrastructure and population, would be devastating on a scale beyond imagination.  The question is whether or not the 20th Century was relatively calm on this front, and whether or not we’re in for a bumpy ride during the 21st.

Check out the original article, and then be sure to read the comments underneath it, which were equally interesting.

[via Freakonomics]