Only a few days late here. She was born in the Midwest in 1933, when her dad earned $12 a week and movies cost a dime. It was the Depression, but she didn’t know it. … My mother used to sit in the den of our house in the San Fernando Valley chain-smoking Kents and […]

According to the editors of Analog, circa 1984. Lee H. Pappas: Star Raiders Commander Level: Star Commander Class I, no shields used the entire game, 54 Zylons destroyed. April 20th, 1984. That’s it, that’s all. Twenty years from now, will people be laughing about Mobile just as much as we are laugh

Entertaining toys for anyone who might be contemplating a new child in the near future (and I know a few of you): Baby Name Wizard’s Name Voyager is an amazingly entertaining Java app that lets you see how the popularity of various first names has changed over the decades. When I first found out abo

A few years ago I was working on a story about copyright law for a magazine. For a factoid in that story, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what proportion of the film industry’s revenues come from theater showings vs. video rentals. I wasn’t ever able to find a definitive […

It’s not often that people who love and want to preserve wild land and wild species get to enjoy unmitigated good news. Every battle won is only a temporary win, while battles lost are permanent failures. Today’s wildlife preserve might be tomorrow’s oil field, but a housing development is never goi

I wonder if it has to take time-outs when it malfunctions? Japan Today – News – Sony’s Qrio robot attending nursery school in California While the children were at first apprehensive about Qrio, they now dance with it and help it get up when it falls. “The children think of Qrio as a feeble younger

Robert Rodriguez’s inspiring 1995 book, Rebel Without A Crew, makes a convincing case that anyone can make movies–all you need is chutzpah, a few friends, and the ability to previsualize the entire movie in your head, so you can do everything in one or two takes and edit it together in a few weeks b

So you fancy yourself a serious photographer, but you don’t want to carry a big SLR or a bulky enthusiast camera? The Canon PowerShot S70 is made for you. It’s fairly chunky, and at 10.8 ounces it’s on the heavy side. But the PowerShot S70’s solidly built, dark gray, metallic body conveys a sense of

Kodak’s EasyShare DX7590 is a great choice for the X Games: It’s a point-and-shoot camera that also has a powerful zoom lens, so you can get action shots of the half pipe even if you’re stuck in the middle of the audience. With a 10x optical zoom lens and a wide range of automated shooting […]

The first thing you need to know about the Casio Exilim Zoom EX-Z50 is that using it will not, by itself, make you more attractive. It will, however, make you feel pretty damn slick. It’s slim and light enough to fit into a shirt pocket or a tuxedo without mussing your lines. And when you […]

It was inevitable that someone would eventually try to cram a Palm PDA into a wristwatch. And finally, after many delays, Fossil has done it. The Fossil Wrist PDA is a huge, gleaming chunk of metal and LCD that balances on your wrist about as elegantly as an elephant on a pogo stick. Its nearly […]

HP has figured out how to make excellent, user-friendly cameras, and it’s not messing with the formula. We liked last year’s HP Photosmart R707, a 5.1-megapixel camera with a virtually identical weight and profile. The Photosmart R717 adds another megapixel of resolution, a slightly bigger LCD, and