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About Jon
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I'm a musician and writer, dividing my professional time between these two pursuits. I've published six books in the ubiqutious yellow-and-black Dummies series, as well as other books and magazine and newspaper articles on music, guitar, audio, and technology.
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Category Archives: Technology
Using Gear for Good
Using Gear for Good. After paying for yet another unforeseen auto repair (are there any other kind?), I found myself envious of the car mechanics who probably never pay full price to have their own cars fixed. When they need to replace their rusted rear shocks (as was the case for me), they simply do it themselves. Sure, they have to pay for parts, but they use their own expertise to save themselves a bundle of cash by not having to incur expensive labor costs.
Multi-tasking . . . or Multi-taxing?
Everyone thinks that multi-tasking is a good thing—or at least a necessary skill worth mastering for these modern times. Well, just because we’re forced into multi-tasking for work and home life doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Witness texting while driving: That’s multi-tasking, and that’s clearly an unsafe, bad, illegal thing to do. Many experts argue that simply talking on a cell phone in a car is dangerous, and that the whole “hands-free” loophole doesn’t really address the basic problem—that dividing your concentration ultimately makes you less successful at either activity.
Kindle Envy
Every musician knows what it’s like to suffer buyer’s remorse in a gadget or equipment purchase. This is the feeling that manifests itself sometime between one minute and 24 hours after you finally plunk down your hard-earned cash. You suspect that the company you’ve just supported by buying their product will instantly relegate that model to the scrap heap and release something more powerful, cheaper, shinier, and happier. And inevitably, they do. If you stay in the technology-buying game long enough, you will swear that the company is simply waiting for you to buy before they announce their new releases.
Takin’ Your Music to the Cloud
This week Amazon launched a major new online locker service called Cloud Drive. It is so named because it follows the current trend of “cloud computing,” which is just a fancy name for “online.” If you use gmail or yahoo mail, you’re already engaged in “cloud computing,” and all it really means is that you’re accessing something (music, email, word-processing functions) online instead of from your device’s internal hard drive, SD card, or other internal storage medium.
