Dylan Tweney

About a month ago, I moved this weblog and my haiku site to Birdhouse Hosting, run by my friend Scot Hacker. It was a good move: Both sites are faster, Scot’s spam-filtering has given me back 20 minutes a day that I used to spend deleting junk mail, and most importantly, Scot is a patient, […]

The Merc’s Dan Gillmor says now is time to face facts, make needed investment — in data infrastructure (last mile broadband, in particular), in education, in basic research, and in health care. Without these investments, Silicon Valley — and the U.S. at large — could easily lose what competitive edg

Brad Templeton has a canny solution to the domain-name fiasco: Let almost anyone create their own top-level domain, as long as they’re able to maintain it and contribute to the maintenance of the overall domain name system (DNS). Instead of just a few TLDs, like .com, .gov, and .biz, we’d have zilli

“While using the Bovine Rectal Palpation Simulator the student palpates virtual objects resembling parts of the reproductive tract inside the rear-half of a fibreglass cow.” (via strata lucida)

A school in the U.K. is now offering a course in Elvish — or more precisely, Sindarin and Quenya, two languages invented by Tolkein.

According to attorney Scott Bursor, phone companies’ practice of “locking” phones so they can’t be used with any other carrier is anticompetitive. He’s not the only one who’s angry about locked phones. But don’t just sit there — Schuyler Erle tells you how to do something about it.

Peter Rojas’ new gadgets weblog looks almost exactly like his old one.

Matchstick rockets are cheap, easy to make, and your mom would definitely not approve.

It baffles me why there is such a rush to electronic, touchscreen-based voting machines, when their security risks are so clearly documented. The fact is, the most reliable, secure, and user-friendly voting technology is a simple optical scanner system. It’s what I used to vote this morning in San M

Have you ever wanted to snap a still photo right in the middle of some event you’re videotaping? Neither have we — but clearly someone does. How else to explain the Canon Optura Xi’s ability to snap low-res digital photos, storing them on an SD card, while at the same time recording video to tape? [

You might think that the addition of an overhyped networking technology wouldn’t be enough to save a crappy product from itself — and in the case of the Concord EyeQ Go Wireless camera, you’d be right. Unfortunately, that insight seems to have escaped the engineers at Concord Camera, who have dresse

Road warriors take heart: You no longer have to return to the office just to print your latest report. For that matter, you can cross off stopping at the drugstore to get your photos developed. Canon’s new i80 Bubble Jet printer, released in February, takes care of both chores in a sleek, portable p