Year: 2012

In case you missed it, Microsoft is overhauling Hotmail. The new service, Outlook.com, features a spiffy Windows 8-inspired interface and will eventually have tight integration with Skype, Office Web Apps and SkyDrive (the service is still in “preview mode” and many of the new features are incomplete).

One of the coolest features of the new service is that you can create multiple aliases for your account. Say you created your Hotmail account 15 years ago, back when you were in college. And, like a bad tattoo, you picked an email address that’s slightly embarrassing today, like ChumbawumbaFan4Ever@hotmail.com or SchlitzChugger@hotmail.com. Now you can add a more professional alias to your account, like name@outlook.com (live.com and hotmail.com domains are also available, but are pretty picked over by this point). So your friends can continue to email you at the old address, but you can also send and receive mail with your new name@outlook.com address as well.

If you’d rather just rename your account altogether you can do that too. In that case, Outlook.com will make your new alias permanent, and you’ll have to log in with the new address. Outlook will retain your old address as an alias, so you will still receive mail addressed to the old account.

But what if you don’t want your old address? What if, like me, you used your Hotmail account just enough to get a lot of spam, but not enough to really care about any email you receive there? In my case, I used my old Live account mostly to sign up for free music downloads. So the only things I ever got at that address were newsletters from bands I might (or might not) care about these days, and a bunch of spam. And the spam from the Live.com address was clogging up my new Outlook.com account. Can’t I get rid of the old Live address and start fresh with just the Outlook address?

Yes, although the feature is hidden because it hasn’t been transitioned from the old service yet. To delete any alias from your account, login to your Outlook.com account and do the following:

1) Click the “gear” icon in the upper right corner of the screen. Choose “Switch back to Hotmail” (you may be asked to provide feedback as to why you’re switching back; click “Skip feedback”).

2) Click on your name in the upper-right corner and choose “Options”:

3) Click “Email Addresses” under the “Account” section:

4) Click “Remove” for any addresses you no longer want.

5) Sign out of Hotmail, then sign back in at Outlook.com to go back to the new UI.

Aaaaannnddd there you go: a new Outlook.com account, minus the old Hotmail or Live address that was getting so much spam. I was receiving 4-5 spams a day from my old address, but haven’t received one since I got rid of my old address last week!

SPOT stands for “Smart Personal Objects Technology”. SPOT devices used FM radio waves to sync to a time server and receive updated information, like sports scores and weather forecasts. Microsoft, who developed the technology in 2003, hoped that the small devices would take off not only in watches, but embedded in devices like coffeemakers, alarm clocks and weather stations.

SPOT devices had numerous flaws.

For one thing, the most common implementation of SPOT – wristwatches – were butt-ugly. Seriously: the watch pictured above is one of the more attractive SPOT models. If you’re old enough to remember those giant multifunction Casio digital watches of the early 80s… well, SPOT watches were just an updated version of that.

Secondly, most SPOT watches needed to be recharged every couple of days, making them absolutely useless for things like camping. What’s worse, the charger dock included with most SPOT devices was bulky, making it inconvenient for travel. Most watches run for 18-36 months between battery changes, and a watch that needed to be charged every two days seemed a huge step backwards.

Thirdly, SPOT devices were only receivers not transmitters. So they could not actively seek information. Once you bought a SPOT device, you went to a website and set up preferences for your preferred location(s) and sports teams. Data would then be pushed to the watch at intervals. If it was late in a game and you wanted an updated score now, you were out of luck. Or if you wanted to see the score for some other sports team, you had to use a computer to log in to the SPOT site and update your preferences (and then wait for the next update cycle for the data to actually arrive at your watch). At that point, you might as well have just gone to nfl.com directly and gotten the score there.

But the biggest problem with SPOT devices was that, by the time they finally came to market, everyone had a cell phone that could do anything a SPOT device could do (and more). So why pay Microsoft $59/year for SPOT service when you already pay Verizon $59/month for a phone that can do the exact same thing?

It’s interesting (to me) that the SPOT data specification allowed for more data than RDS (RDS, which stands for Radio Data System, is the technology that radio stations use to include metadata such as artist and song name; if you’ve ever seen this in your car stereo or iPod, RDS is what makes that happen). In 2008, after it was clear that SPOT was a failure, Microsoft pitched the SPOT tech to GP makers like Garmin as a way of pushing more traffic data to GPS units faster. Sadly, it was too late, and SPOT tech never gained traction. SPOT watches were discontinued in 2008, and the MSN Direct radio service was discontinued on January 1, 2012.

My dad loves gadgets. But he only seems to actually use a handful of them. Some of his gadgets just sat in a drawer for most of their lives, like the circa 1977 “portable” TV that weighed 35 lbs. Or the “check printer” that looked like a personal organizer and was supposed to keep track of your spending. It actually printed the payment details onto your checks (kind of like how Walmart used to just ask you for a blank check, the cashier would stick it in the printer and let it print the date, amount, etc. on it). But it was so much work to use that it ended up being useless.

There was one gadget I bought him back in 1989 that he actually used all the time… the Sharp Dial Master:

It was an electronic address book, memo book and calculator. It had a staggering 8KB of memory. But the cool thing about it (at the time) was that it had a speaker on the back. You’d scroll through the address book and find the number you wanted to dial. You held the back of the device up to the microphone of the telephone handset and pressed DIAL. The device would then generate the DTMF tones and dial the number. It sounds kind of silly in today’s world of smartphones, but this was actually pretty nifty back in the late 80s.

The problem with the device was that the “UI” – such as it was – was needlessly complex. My dad, born in the late 40s, didn’t grow up with electronic devices and isn’t a “computer genius”. But if you let him play with something, he’ll figure it out pretty quickly. But he always had to have me add new numbers or edit old ones on his Dial Master. And it would take me several minutes to remember how to do it. If you have a simple device, but have to go back to the manual to remember how to do something, your UI has failed.

So yeah… my Dad was a big user of the Dial Master. Which put him in unique company. Because you know who else used the Dial Master? Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks. You might remember this scene where he and Sheriff Truman interview Laura’s beau Bobby Briggs:

Cool.