Rough Drafts

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 […]

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

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

Ever notice those “Free Speech Zones” that the authorities put up outside political conventions, trade summits, embassies, and basically anywhere else someone might feel like expressing an opinion? What’s up with that? Last I checked, the whole country was supposed to be a “free speech zone.” They t

Google’s newish Blog Search is a handy way to keep track of the “buzz” about a particular blog, in addition to posts from that blog itself. Just go to blogsearch.google.com and type the URL of your blog into the box. The resulting search results include posts from your blog, as well as other blogger

2006-10-31 banana.jpg, uploaded by dtweney. This month I will not be writing a novel. I will, however, be drawing every day, as part of a new group blog/drawing effort called DrawMo. I’ll be posting my drawings (some of the less hideous ones, at least) on Flickr throughout the month, as time allows.

From Mark Cuban’s blog, some intimate details on the Google YouTube Deal. This analysis is interesting because, according to Cuban’s informant, as much as $500 million of the $1.62 billion deal may have been set aside to pay off copyright infringement claims. But here’s the really interesting part:

The problem with Marie Antoinette is that it ends before the title character is executed. After watching that much profligate waste for two hours, I could understand the peasants’ rage perfectly. And by waste, I don’t just mean the French court’s–I mean Sofia Coppola’s. What a way to blow a bunch of

“I will stave off any more comments and just direct you to scoop up the book. It is like buying tiny contact lenses for the entirety of your perception, lenses made of sugar glass and strands of silk.” How could you resist buying a $7 book when the reviewer concludes this way? Dragonfly on a […]

I found out just last week that the poet Carl Thayler died last year. Thayler is a thorny, difficult poet, committed to the precision and beauty of carefully-chosen words. His poetry is dense, often allusive, and steeped in historical events and figures that many people now are not intimately famili