In this Hawaii Techies edition, my guest is Philip Mow who played instrumental roles in bringing network connectivity to GTE Hawaiian Telephone and network connectivity and Internet access for Hawaiian Electric. Phil gives us an overview of the early days of network access at both companies.
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In this Hawaii Techies edition of the MobileViews Podcast, Todd Ogasawara and guest Sterling Yee discuss Sterling’s experiences at Hawaiian Electric Industries (parent company to the electric companies for Honolulu, Hawaii (island), and Maui Counties as well as American Savings Bank) in the firm’s early days of Internet access and the move from analog modems to broadband.
Thank you to Kiman Wong for kicking off this series of discussions of the early days of the Internet in Hawaii in MobileViews Podcast 445.
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Jon Westfall and I were joined by frequent guest panelist Sven Johannsen for this podcast. They discuss:
Available via Google Music Podcasts and Apple iTunes.
Guest panelist Don Sorcinelli joins Jon Westfall and me for this podcast. We discussed:
The Verge Microsoft to demo its new ChatGPT-like AI in Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook soon
Note: I post-processed the audio recording for this podcast using Adobe Podcast beta
Available via Google Music Podcasts and Apple iTunes.
In this Hawaii Techies Edition of the MobileViews Podcast, I’m joined by guest co-host Kiman Wong. We discuss our memories and involvement in various Internet connectivity efforts starting in the 1980s analog modem days through current day broadband services. Kiman and I had parallel paths over the past 30 years. We both started at GTE Telephone Operations but then diverged. I was involved in some aspects of the 1990s DSL rollout and then in the 2010s, as part of the State of Hawaii Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs CATV/Broadband Division. Kiman spent the next several decades at Time Warner Oceanic Cable (now part of Charter Spectrum) including a period as the General Manager for its Roadrunner Cable Modem service.
We also touch on a few related topics.
Kiman noted that Amazon Prime Photos has unlimited still photo storage but a finite video limit. This Amazon Photos FAQ confirms that this limit is 5GB.
Amazon Photos has a 5GB video upload limit
I noted that the retired AT&T tran-pacific submarine cable (HAW-4) was transferred to the University of Hawaii which created the undersea Aloha Cabled Observatory.
U of Hawaii Cabled Observatory
What is there ?
There are five modules that are connected together on the seafloor. The Junction Box is connected to the HAW-4 cable and to the Observatory module. Together, they supply 1200 watts of power and 100 Megabits per second of Ethernet communications to sensor systems on these two modules, and to the other three modules. The other modules are the Camera tripod, the AMM bottom node, and the TAAM mooring. Sensors provide live video of the ocean bottom around the ACO, sound from local and distant sources, currents, pressure, temperature, and salinity.
You can find a collection of audio and video clips from the undersea observatory here:
ACO Audio/Video Library
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In MobileViews mini-podcast 33, I threw MobileViews Podcast 440 into Adobe Podcast beta to learn more about the currently free service’s noise reduction and speech enhancement. The result was underwhelming. However, I conceded this may be because (a) the audio was already processed by Microsoft Team’s noise reduction feature and (b) an already reasonable quality audio is not the best test case for the service.
So, I walked outside and recorded a minute of myself speaking with a good breeze blowing, many birds chirping, and an aircraft flying in the distance. After a brief preamble by me, you can hear the audio recorded outdoors without any post-processing followed by the same minute of audio processed by Adobe Podcast beta. The difference is striking. You can see in the screenshot here a few seconds of both tracks before and after Adobe Podcast processing. In the screenshot example, you can see where a bird chirp is nearly completely removed by Adobe Podcast.
My current thinking, though, is that if I start recording podcasts outdoors, I want to keep most of the ambient sound except for the wind over the microphone. A mic wind sheild should handle that without needing additional post-processing. More tests to come…
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