the tweney review

“I just told my son that when I was a kid I had to leave home to play video games, to watch movies, to send mail, to see friends….”

–Martin Varsavsky on Twitter

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from May 2nd through May 6th:

• Signing Off, And What Does A TechCrunch Writer Actually Use? - Great collection of tool recommendations. I agree with most of Duncan’s suggestions, though I haven’t tried Evernote, Things, or Skitch — but I will, now
• Webby Award Winners - Wired.com wins a Webby for “Best Copy/Writing”
• Microsoft?s Shopping List - Sramana Mitra on Strategy - Some interesting suggestions about what Microsoft should acquire instead of Yahoo: LinkedIn, Shutterfly, Kayak, Hi5 and a few others. Total bill: $6 billion according to this guy’s estimates.
• WordPress ? Support » RSS widget and Google reader shared items - WP 2.5’s RSS widget does not work with RSS feeds from Google reader. This workaround requires modifying WP’s base code, unfortunately
• Marc?s Voice » Blog Archive » Decentralized Twitter’s time has come - People are upset about Twitter outages. So they want a decentralized, DNS-like replacement. My question: Do you really care about Twitter that much?
• A personalized preview of Grand Theft Auto IV, the big video game of 2008 » VentureBeat - Dean Takahashi’s thoughtful first impressions of GTA IV. Nicely done preview of a game that’s sure to be controversial
• How the Brain Learns to Read - Science Journal - WSJ.com - The brain works very differently when reading different writing systems, eg. Latin alphabet vs Chinese characters

“Folks here were never that psyched about the idea of Microsoft buying one of the hometown heroes and I think they’re happy to see that the deal is off the table right now.” That’s me, talking on public radio station KQED this morning about Silicon Valley’s reaction to the now-suspended Microsoft-Yahoo merger. I talked for about five minutes about how people’s emotional reactions to Microsoft colored what otherwise would have been a smart financial decision (Sell my Yahoo stock at $34? Hell yes!) and turned it into a visceral one (Microsoft is the enemy).

Why’s that? “Yahoo is probably the greatest success story to come out of the dot com boom. It really embodies a lot of the optimism and the work culture that grew up during the dot com boom… it has this iconoclastic, consumer-friendly and low-key attitude. And I think people really regard it as an example of the best that Silicon Valley produced during that time.”

I’m not at my most eloquent in this segment, but it gets across my main points.

KQED Radio News: Taking Yahoo’s Pulse
Download the segment: MP3 file

A nice surprise over the weekend: the Gadget Lab podcast I produce has risen to the #6 spot among technology podcasts in iTunes’ podcast directory. That’s pretty remarkable, given that we produce this podcast in a borrowed closet with no budget and zero marketing.

If you haven’t listened to the podcast before, check it out. It’s short (10-12 minutes per episode), and usually includes some lively banter about the week’s top gadget topics plus short reviews of a couple interesting gadgets. We try to put some goodies in each episode that you can’t get on the blog, too, like previews of upcoming reviews or anecdotes about shenanigans in Wired’s product testing lab. My goal all along has been to make this a short, listenable overview of interesting and relevant hardware news.

Here’s the latest episode: Wired Gadget Lab Podcast #27: Psystar, T-Mobile 3-G, and AT&T TV. And here’s the Gadget Lab podcast RSS feed.

I’d love to hear what you think of the podcast — use the comments form below or email me directly.

These are a few things I found interesting on May 1st:

• The Next CNet - Joel Johnson - Interesting idea from Joel for a crowdsourced gadget info database
• Autopia Biofuels - Biodiesel filling station located in San Mateo, CA
• Paul Kedrosky: Age and the Entrepreneur - Average age of U.S. tech entrepreneurs? 39. Yeah, it shocked me too. Turns out I’m not too old to start a company after all!
• Scientists Create First Memristor: Missing Fourth Electronic Circuit Element | Gadget Lab from Wired.com - Spiffy R&D news. In addition to resistors, inductors and capacitors, scientists now have components that change resistance based on how much current has flowed through them.
• Carlyle, “Mechanical Age” - Writing in 1829, around the time Babbage was starting to design his Difference Engines: “It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word”

O’Reilly’s annual Maker Faire is happening this weekend, May 3 and 4, 2008, in San Mateo. It’s a festival of do-it-yourself (DIY) culture, and is a chance to see just how creative people can get with soldering guns, welders, circuit boards, old bicycle parts and lots of propane.

That’s just for starters. The Faire is now in its third year. Since it’s in my home town of San Mateo, I’ve attended each of the past two years, and the panoply of displays was frankly stunning each year. The Faire attracts a lot of same on-the-fringe techies that you might find at Burning Man, and indeed many of the projects on display have been created for Burning Man. But San Mateo has none of the dust, chaos and expense of Black Rock City. So this is a good chance to see some of these kinetic, firebreathing sculptures without venturing out into the forbidding Nevada desert. (I’ve never been to Burning Man, but I’m a big fan of it from afar.)

More to the point, Maker Faire is designed to give you a chance to talk with the people who made these projects, so you can start learning how to do similar things yourself. Granted, 90 percent of the audience is not likely ever to build their own moving, music-pumping robotic giraffe, and they’re there just to admire the handiwork of others. Similarly, lots of subscribers to O’Reilly’s Make magazine will never actually build most of the projects in the mag’s pages. I don’t, and yet I’m an enthusiastic subscriber.

So what is it about D.I.Y. culture that attracts people who don’t actually do it themselves? I think it’s two things: One, it’s just fun to look at what people can accomplish on their own, from a backyard zipline to an electric car shaped like a giant tin muffin. It’s like admiring art: You don’t have to be a painter to enjoy a trip to an art gallery.

Two, D.I.Y. culture embodies a kind of optimism about human capability. In a world where almost everything is manufactured elsewhere, then packaged in several layers of plastic and sold to you as-is under the glaring fluorescent lights of a big-box retail store, it’s encouraging to know that people can still do things for themselves. It’s that inventive creativity (and the skill with metalworking tools) that impresses me, and gives me hope about the future.

So even though my own efforts at making things have been rather modest so far, I’m looking forward to Maker Faire as a chance for me — and my family — to soak in that optimism, that creativity, and that inspiration. See you there!

Wired.com will be covering the Maker Faire extensively, in words, photos and video. Most of our coverage will appear on Wired’s Gadget Lab blog. If you’re going to be showing a project at the Faire and want us to know about it, please get in touch with Wired.com reporters Alexis Madrigal (email, twitter) and Jenna Wortham — they’re looking for cool stuff!

UPDATE: Here’s a great preview of the Faire, with video, by Jenna and Alexis: From Welding to Weddings, DIY Rules at Maker Faire

And here’s the detailed schedule of Maker Faire events happening during the weekend.