After months of work, Karen’s plans for our remodel finally got the green light from the planning department yesterday. We celebrated by sabering a bottle of champagne last night, and this morning Karen — together with a neighbor she hired — started stripping stucco off the outside walls of our hous

Virginians riot over $50, 4-year-old iBooks: Va. Laptop Sale Turns Into a Stampede “I took my chair here and I threw it over my shoulder and I went, ‘Bam,’” the 20-year-old said nonchalantly, his eyes glued to the screen of his new iBook, as he tapped away on the keyboard at a testing station. “They

Never saw this in his crystal ball… Psychic’s crystal ball burns down his flat in unforeseen blaze

From Technology Review, a summary of an interesting study on how the brain works to identify words: In the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in late June, 42 undergraduates followed instructions to click a mouse on one of two pictures on a computer monitor. Some

Rocky Balboa. The Jamaican bobsled team. Ross Perot. We can’t help but love our scrappy, endearing underdogs. OK, maybe not Ross Perot. But definitely the Gizmondo. With a gaming market utterly dominated by the Sony PSP and the Nintendo DS, the odds of an independent console making it are slim at be

Even gadget-heads like us occasionally get tired of fiddling with dials, knobs, and buttons to get our devices working right. Sometimes, in the sleepy, alcohol-infused predawn hours, we just want to snap a picture of our new Reno friends without having to worry about whether we’ve picked the right w

Agenda recently spotted in an unnamed office conference room.

This was a really fun story to work on: Mobile magazine’s list of the top 50 portable video games of all time. Read it in the August issue, or online. “Don’t know much about history? It’s probably because you spent your time dodging little red blips on a handheld football game instead of reading pag

Is the Moon made of Swiss cheese? Google has the answer (just zoom in all the way).

James Howard Kunstler takes a sober, pessimistic look at what happens when cheap oil goes away — in Rolling Stone, of all places. America is in a special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities [

I got a new cell phone today — the amazingly badass black Razr. Since Cingular follows the usual cell phone industry practice of offering the worst deals to their loyal customers, I didn’t renew my contract with them — we found a new-customer deal that was far, far better. As a result, I’ve got a […

How to make chai in a typical office. Short version: Put teabag and sugar in a mug, fill mug halfway with water, microwave on high for 45 seconds. Let it steep for a minute, then add milk until the cup is 3/4 full and microwave another 15 seconds. The author says spiced chai is for […]