Rough Drafts

Pre-rolls — the short 10-15 second commercials that some video sites often make you watch before you get to the actual content you want to watch — are a bad idea. Here’s why: When you’re flipping the channels on the TV and you come to a channel with a commercial, do you stop and wait […]

Banjo!

Last week EBay’s Skype announced a new “unlimited calling” plan. Starting in January, the company will charge $30 for a year of unlimited SkypeOut calls to any phone numbers in the U.S. and Canada. (They’re offering an introductory rate of $15 if you sign up before the end of January.) This brings a

In which I make a fool out of myself by pretending to be a headbanger. PCMagCast Tech Tips Video: Sync Your iPod with Outlook More PCMagcast videos

I’m amused by this author “bio” on Harpers.org, which was clearly created by a computer geek in love with taxonomic classifications: This is Ford, Paul, an author and a human being. He is part of Authors, which is part of Human Beings, which is part of Connections, which is part of Harpers.org. Read

I may be way off base here, but isn’t Ms. Dewey uncannily similar to Microsoft’s earlier pathetic attempt at humanizing the computer, Clippy? Sure, one is a babe, and the other is a cartoon paperclip. But work with me here: They both have a pretentious, officious manner. They both rap on the glass t

The first installment in a series of short (2-3 minute) how-to videos from PC Magazine and PCMagCast, starring yours truly. In this video, I show you how to get rid of that animated puppy that pops up when you’re searching for files on a Windows XP machine. PCMagCast Tech Tips Video: Search Smarter

Groups of people are uncannily accurate at guessing the number of beans in a jar, the weight of a steer, and the like. In fact, the bigger the group, the more accurate its collective guess — a principle known as the Condorcet Jury Theorem. There’s a significant limitation, though: This only works if

This interactive Google Maps mashup shows how much different parts of the world will get flooded by a 1-7 1-14 meter rise in sea level. Navigate to the part you’re interested in and tell the app how much to raise the ocean, and a blue overlay covers up the parts that will get inundated. Scary. […]

Most shocking thing I learned last weekend: A huge Antarctic ice shelf disintegrated over a 35-day period in 2002, much to the surprise of the scientists tracking it. This shelf, designated Larsen B, was about 700 feet thick and covered 3,500 square km — about the area of Rhode Island. The scientist

What I think of as the Microsoft approach to product development is to cram as many features as possible into each product. Interface is an afterthought: All those features exist primarily for the benefit of the feature list, not the user, so who cares if the feature is buried three menu levels deep

What does your computer do when it’s asleep? Well, if you’re the giving type, it might be searching for intelligent life in the universe, helping find a cure for schizophrenia, or perhaps trying to fold some proteins. Scott Draves has a different idea. His collaborative computing project, Electric S