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Grill gadgets come in all shapes and sizes. Considering the amount of goods that get on the grill, this is a good thing. But all this variety complicates things. Gone are the days when burgers and dogs were the only ones that fought for space on the grill. Today's modern cookout requires a little more planning. But one thing that hasn't changed is that all these goodies equate to fun in the sun.

With the sun shining brightly down on so many grill sessions, it only makes sense to capture some of that energy. While we may still … Read more

A simple fact of life in the kitchen is that some accessories are more valuable than others. Though the fun ones--such as cookware that mimics beer-can chicken, or toasters that demand to be used for making breakfast sandwiches--get all the attention, sometimes it is the little gadgets and accessories that come most in handy. Precision control is always appreciated, because after all, that's what we all really want in the end: well-made food that is delicious. And all that starts with temperature.

The Sur La Table Dual Thermometer by CDN is a convenient tool to have onhand in the … Read more

On their blog today, Rackspace's cloud division, Mosso, shows off a study they did where they compared the costs and performance of Amazon Web Service's S3 storage service and CloudFront Content Delivery Network (CDN) against Mosso's combination of CloudFiles and their partnership with CDN provider, Limelight Networks. The blog post presents five common use cases, and compares the cost of CloudFiles/Limelight with the Amazon offerings, both with and without Amazon's support option.

I spent some time on the phone yesterday with Mosso co-founder, Jonathan Bryce, and Senior Cloud Architect for Rackspace's cloud division, Erik Carlin, discussing what they found. The short-short version is that, for the five use cases they analyzed, they claim (not surprisingly) that Mosso beats Amazon's offerings in simplicity, cost and performance, especially when support is taken into account.… Read more

Chicago's Museum of Broadcast Communications (MBC) collects, preserves, and presents historic and contemporary radio and television content with the purpose of educating, informing, and entertaining the public through its archives, public programs, screenings, exhibits, publications and online access to its resources.

MBC also runs Museum.tv--which stores and delivers terabytes of digitized radio and television content. Currently, they are featuring a 1984 senatorial debate including Roland Burris--whom you may recognize as the senator just appointed to fill Barack Obama's vacancy (check out the protests at the start of the debate and how the moderator handles it).

Through … Read more

I've been experimenting with Amazon's new CloudFront CDN service since the launch and thus far it's proven to be a good option provided you don't need to update content in anywhere near real-time (you are pretty much looking at 24 hours before content updates hit the full network.)

And while the functionality doesn't match something like Akamai, my best math effort suggests that the service will cost you 10% (or less) than Akamai does for static image serving, which makes the service very compelling.

Paul Stamatiou wrote up a great how-to guide for CloudFront and … Read more

The Netflix Player by Roku, which enables owners to watch streaming Web video on their TV sets, has received plenty of applause from pundits and owners since debuting last May. But the box now faces its first major challenge.

Customers from around the country have been "experiencing inexplicable loss of video-streaming quality," for at least three weeks according to Roku's engineers, who have posted comments at the company's Web forums. Device owners have posted complaints to the same forums about receiving less than half of the video quality they've had in the past. One user told CNET that the video stream is now "unwatchable."

Tim Twerdahl, vice president of consumer products at Roku, told CNET News on Monday that the company is still unsure about what exactly triggered the problem, but he said indications are it originated at Netflix. Twerdahl added that the problem likely affects Netflix's other boxes as well as Roku's player.

"All we know is Roku didn't make any changes," Twerdahl said. "This is not a box problem. We know from some reports that this seems to be correlated with a change in Netflix's content distribution network (CDN), and Netflix is trying to figure out what the issue is." … Read more