“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

“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-Ya

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 podc

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 star

Your shoes are destroying your feet. More specifically, they’re messing up the perfectly-balanced, coordinated bipedal gait that our species evolved over millions of years. That’s the argument touted by a lengthy article in New York magazine this week, You Walk Wrong. Its starting point is a number

If you follow my daily haiku magazine, tinywords, you’ll notice that it hasn’t exactly been “daily” for the past week. In fact, I’ve missed quite a handful of weekdays over the past couple months, and I’ve got a big backlog of submissions I haven’t read yet. I apologize for that. Since January, I’ve

I’m on the latest episode of John C. Dvorak’s video show, Cranky Geeks, this week. This was a fun one: The guests were former Ziffians Annaliza Savage and myself, both of whom are now working at Wired.com, and we had a lively, pugnacious conversation with Dvorak about filesharing, China blocking You

This incredibly compact, bike-oriented multi-tool has five different sizes of Allen wrench plus a Phillips screwdriver head, all of which folds up into a little pod about the size of a walnut. Sometimes I’ll carry it in my pocket or toss it in shoulder bag; mostly I keep it in the under-seat pouch o

The annual TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Monterey, Calif. is a terrific, mind-expanding experience for all who attend. Or so I’ve heard: The $6,000 price tag has, so far, kept it well out of my reach. That’s why I checked out the Bil Conference, also in Monterey, a free, t

This is one of the most difficult stories I’ve edited in a long time: How Good People Turn Evil, From Stanford to Abu Ghraib. Kim Zetter did the interview with Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist who is famous/notorious for his 1971 “Stanford prison experiment,” a psychology study in which some students

For people who love punctuation, there’s always something to grieve about: Humans have trouble understanding semicolons, and computers can’t handle apostrophes. Fortunately, there is the Semicolon Appreciation Society for those of us who know and love this mark.

Brendan Vaughan’s collection of real-life tales of ingenuity, What Would MacGyver Do?, recently republished by Penguin, has a great premise: It’s a collection of true stories featuring the kind of situational hacking (bombs defused with paperclips, sheds converted into aircraft) that the TV show Mac