One thing Apple does truly brilliantly is the cardboard boxes its products come in. Microsoft, not so much. (parody video)

Career columnist Penelope Trunk has a great idea in her column this week: The caffeine nap. Drink a cup of coffee, then immediately take a short 15-minute nap. By the time you’re done napping, the caffeine is kicking in and you can wake up quickly, alert and refreshed.

Aerogel is the world’s lightest solid — and also the most porous. I’ve got a story on Wired News this morning that explains all about this really cool material, how it was used in NASA/JPL’s recent Stardust mission, and how some companies are commercializing the stuff. This story was really fun to w

If you wanted to catch a few particles of comet dust speeding through the vacuum of space at 6 kilometers per second — without damaging or destroying those particles — how would you do it? Faced with exactly this problem, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory focused on aerogel — an extremely

Tom Lantos is my congressman, and it’s principles like this that keep me voting for him every single time he comes up for re-election: Congressman quizzes Net companies on shame | CNET News.com

Anyone else have problems with T-Mobile Hotspots in Starbucks bumping them off the network and reconnecting every 15-20 minutes? It’s really annoying.

Locke blogged my story. I blogged his blog of my story. Then he blogged my blog of his blog of my story. Now, I’m blogging his blog of my blog of his blog of my story. Ain’t trackback fun? Krugle Blog » instant replay or infinite recursion?

I’ve got not one, but two stories about search engines appearing today. Here Comes a Google for Coders, on Wired News, talks about a startup search engine called Krugle, which will let programmers find source code and documentation online. Krugle debuted last week at Demo. My story adds some details

A new search technology from Google makes it possible for law enforcement officials to examine personal documents from your hard drive, without your knowing it, according to the digital-rights advocacy organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Released last week, Google Desktop 3, the lates

For most people, open source is a synonym for free software. But for programmers, open source is about sharing code, building on the work of others and not having to reinvent the wheel — at least, that’s the ideal. In practice, code reuse remains very low, because it’s often too hard for programmers

Elmore Leonard’s rules of writing. (Sadly not included: Don’t center your copy, since it makes it fucking hard to read.) Category | Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle (via 43 Folders)

Winner, best business writing, February 2006: Annalee Newitz: “investors have turned their burning, collective gaze from the wastes of Mordor to the human world of Silicon Valley again” AlterNet: Son of Dot-Com