One of the first magazines I can remember subscribing to (apart from Cricket and Ranger Rick) was Creative Computing. I started getting this magazine about 1980, after I fell in love with the neighbor’s TRS-80. It astounded me that he could have a computer sitting right there, on his desk, completel

Rarely has the Economist made such a wrongheaded call: Farewell to the flexibility fad

bali_water_temple_statue, uploaded by crderivative. Listened this week to an amazing talk by anthropologist Stephen Lansing‘s talk on Bali at the Long Now Foundation‘s seminar series. (Thanks to Jon Udell for linking to it.) Lansing’s talk is an account of how Balinese rice farmers managed to create

Not exactly for dummies, actually, but for beginners: Next week I’ll be hosting a webcast on how to select and set up an HDTV set. Two of Ziff-Davis’s top HDTV gurus, Robert Heron and Loyd Case, will be explaining everything you need to know. I’ll be asking naive questions (and we’ll take audience q

“PowerPoint presentations are like corporate karaoke” – Cubicle Culture – WSJ.com

Here’s a 5-minute video showing what happens when a laptop battery ignites: It sets off a chain reaction, where successive battery cells ignite, each one releasing more heat and increasingly big jets of flame (up to 6 feet high). Amazing and scary. As the narrator points out, you need to be careful

This is kind of cool: TextMarks is a service that lets you create your own custom SMS quick-response codes. People enter the code and send it to the TextMark short code (41411), and then they get the text that you specify, in return. I set up the keyword haiku to deliver the current day’s haiku […]

Memo to Britney: SMS is no way to break up with the father of your children.

Not because of my bluegrass banjo-pickin’ talent, but because I’ve just been selected to go take part in The Climate Project’s next training session, Dec. 1-3. Along with about 200 other volunteers, I’m going to get trained by Al Gore, so that I can go out and give presentations on the global climat

Kevan Atteberry says he’s the guy who designed Clippy, the animated paperclip in Office. I wonder who designed Einstein?

This morning the poll workers in San Mateo offered me a choice of voting on a traditional paper ballot, or using their one electronic voting machine: an E-Slate system from Hart Intercivic. After looking at the machine and being assured that I’d have a chance to review a printed record, I chose the

For the past year I’ve been toting around a USB drive that has a folder full of portable applications, such as Thunderbird and Firefox. That way I can run these applications (with all of my data) on any machine I plug the key into. (I set this up following PC Magazine’s instructions on creating the