mediageek

Author: Paul

  • The Life of One Brand of Cheapo Electronics

    One might argue that cheap, nearly disposable, electronics is one signpost towards the collapse of modern capitalism. If so, the Yorx brand is one trip taken on that road. I only remember Yorx as the cheaper (but not cheapest) brand when you went shopping for boomboxes or radios during the 1980s at stores like Consumers…

  • mediageek.org is back

    For some of you fair readers mediageek may have been off-line for nearly a week — my apologies. It’s not been completely off-line, however. The mediageek.org domain went into domain limbo through a changeover of hosts and registrars. But, I actually moved the blog over to mediageek.net in November — since then most of what…

  • Satellite, Cable and TV Stations Betting Viewers Like Chips in a High-Stakes Gamble

    On last Friday’s radioshow, former WCIA news director Ken Schreiner and I talked about how TV station owners like Nexstar (WCIA’s owner) and Sinclair are trying to suck money out of every stream they can find. These midsize owners leveraged the hell out of themselves in order to buy up stations, and currently aren’t turning…

  • Senate Commerce Committee Gets Hot for Indecency Tuesday

    Tuesday Thursday begins the Senate Commerce Committee’s orgy of telecom hearings with every pandering lawmaker’s favorite topic: broadcast indecency. It all starts at 10 AM EST. The lineup of invited panelists is heavy on broadcast and media execs, though anti-indecency crusader Brent Bozell from the Parents Television Council, and Jeff McIntyre from the American Psychological…

  • Vinyl and the Death of our Cultural Heritage

    In the last couple of months I’ve been discussing what I’m calling the death of our culturual heritage due to obscene copyright laws. In some ways, it’s worse than I even thought — and I’m both pretty cynical and informed. There are thousands, if not millions of recordings that were issued on vinyl LPs but…

  • News Headlines from the Jan. 13 Radioshow: NJ Outlaws Pirates, Indiana Senate Considers Massive Telecom Dereg, more…

    These are the news headlines as read on the Jan. 13, 2006 edition of the mediageek radioshow: NJ Passes Anti-Pirate Radio Law; Indiana Senate Considering Radical Telecom Deregulation; FCC Accepting Comments on Local Cable TV; FCC Chair Says ‘Yes’ to Network Neutrality, and ‘Yes’ to Two-Tiered Internet; Groups Urge FCC Not To Expedite TV Station…

  • Take the mediageek radioshow poll

    I’ve got a poll running on the radioshow page asking listeners what they want to hear more about on the show. Please take a moment and vote in the poll — your feedback is valuable!

  • On Friday’s Radio Show: Independent Video Producer and Ex-Nexstar Employee Ken Schreiner; More Nexstar Bullying

    I initially invited Ken Schreiner on the program because he’s a local guy who completed a feature documentary on the relationship between people and wild animals that he’s distributing on his website, along with other videos he’s produced. Only after extending the invitation did I realize that Ken used to work for our local Nexstar-owned…

  • CD-Rs and DVD-Rs Only Last 5 Years?

    Data retention is not an easy issue these days. Infoworld reports that a physicist and storage expert at IBM warns that most burned CDs and DVDs will last only 2 – 5 years under typical conditions. Basically, he says the dyes used in the discs can degrade over time. Rather against popular opinion, he recommends…

  • mediageek zines now available for purchase online

    I really am not the world’s greatest zinester. Ever since the transition to WordPress there’s been no links to the mediageek zine page, and there’s not been any page or info for mediageek zine #3 which came out last June. Finally I’ve got the new zine page together and added the ability to order the…