Walt Mossberg Waldorf

“Litany of shite” — it’s hard to improve on Troubled Diva’s description of this excellent MP3 by Big Hard Excellent Fish; listening to it is a strangely cathartic experience. … It’s time to form a militant wing of the Apostrophe Protection Society … Why you should always use a serial comma … Let’s n

Intuit’s Quicken is the only software product I’ve used in the past ten years that gets consistently worse with each subsequent version. I started out with Quicken in 95 or 97, when it was a pretty stable, usable app, although it did have its quirks. Each version since then has been more complicated

I took apart a nonfunctioning 15GB iPod that had been hanging around the Mobile PC offices for the past few months. I pretty much just went right in, using a pocketknife to create a gap between the front (white) plastic and the metal back, which are joined together extremely tightly; once I’d create

“All prawns have this catastrophic event at two days and 11 hours past sell-by date” — Inventor James Larsson hooks up some capacitance sensors and an old computer to a Marks & Spencer prawn sandwich, and uses its decay to measure the passage of time. Am I the only one thinking about A Zed and […]

You can export your Blogger weblog and import it into Movable Type (and into many other weblog systems as well), but you can’t go in reverse: There’s no way to import entries into Blogger, as far as I can tell. What’s up with that? Now that Blogger has comments, and now that it’s got sufficient […]

Ancestors of Mobile PC magazine: Several galleries of early 20th-century technical magazine covers, including a big selection of mags by Hugo Gernsback, the founder of Amazing Stories. The future ain’t what it used to be!

It’s official: The U.S. Patent Office has absolutely no idea what it’s doing.

People often ask me if my religious studies education ever intersects with my career in technology. Well, rarely — but when it does, it’s worth it.

The ravers at Burning Man will be impressed when you turn a single satellite connection into a Wi-Fi hotspot providing free Internet access to a couple hundred square feet of playa. But wait, you left your Wi-Fi router at home? No problem. Just use PCTEL Segue Soft Access Point software to turn your

LG’s sleek new flip phone, the LX5450, aims to prove that camera phones don’t necessarily have to take crummy photos. It doesn’t quite deliver that proof, but it gets closer than most. As a bonus, it’s got advanced Web browsing and data features that make it an entertaining and even passably useful

Tiny video cameras that record to flash memory cards are cute, but their lack of power, low image quality, and limited storage capacity mean they’re really just expensive toys. For quality video recordings of any substantial length, you need to use miniDV tape. Canon’s ZR-90 is a good choice, with a