Rough Drafts

Here are two upcoming PCMagCast events that I’m producing and moderating. Lots of useful info in both of them — check them out! SMB Bootcamp: How to Can Spam (Tuesday, July 25, at 2pm Eastern / 11am Pacific) A 60-minute overview of anti-spam technologies for small-medium businesses, featuring PCMag

Want to learn more about SMS, aka short message service, aka cell phone text messaging? Check out my new site, SMS411.net, which provides simple, easy-to-understand information on how to use SMS with U.S. cell phones. Although the popularity of SMS is rapidly growing in the U.S., we’re far behind th

Most tai chi chuan (aka taijiquan) videos are New Age snoozers of the yoga-hippies-on-the-beach variety. You’d never guess from them that tai chi is originally a martial art with serious defensive and offensive applications. That’s why I applaud Internal Damage: Advanced Tai Chi Chuan for Combat (DV

Without trying to defend the clueless Senator Ted Stevens, I still have to ask: Why was it stupid for him to say the Internet is a “series of tubes” but it’s smart when people in the know call it a “bunch of pipes“? Huh? (Yeah, I know Doc says it’s not just pipes, it’s also […]

Here’s a story I wrote a couple months ago that I really had fun with. The working title was “the palimpsest in the synchrotron,” which I loved, just because I got to use the words “palimpsest” and “synchrotron” in the same sentence. Over and over again. Just try saying it aloud, and you’ll see what

I can’t find a decent explanation anywhere of why the #1 soccer player in France would headbutt another player in the final moments of the big game. This is as good as any: “the lofty hermeneut within me saw it as the supreme existentialist gesture—le grand refus—at the very moment of being inducted

Leaving aside the tiresome journalists vs bloggers debate for a moment, here’s a chewy piece by Tom Stites about the failings of newspapers over the past 10-20 years to address the needs of all citizens. In fact, newspapers have been deliberately turning away readers from the bottom tiers of the eco

GoLite’s Wisp windjacket ($50-60) is made out of faerie wings. OK, it’s really made out of alien space fabric. Whatever the material, it’s mysteriously lightweight, so the whole jacket only weighs 2.5 ounces and you can squish it down to the size of a large orange and jam it into a corner of your pa

Blog comments are like drive-by shootings: Someone fires off a comment, then disappears, never to be seen again. There’s no follow-through, and it’s hard to engage in a sustained back-and-forth shootout, I mean, conversation. Subscribe to Comments changes that. It’s a free WordPress plugin that acco

The old grade school puzzler goes like this: Which is heavier: A pound of bricks or a pound of feathers? If you’re eight years old and you’re not paying attention, you say “bricks.” JP Rangaswami, who writes the IT blog Confused of Calcutta, used a similar analogy in a discussion I had with him last

The videonet is here. Data point: People upload 50,000 videos to YouTube every day. In turn, the site delivers 50 million video views each day. That’s huge. One of the most useful panels at Supernova covered “the rise of the videonet.” One of the panelists, Mary Hodder of Napsterization, quoted some

It’s a stellar networking event. The presentations were way too long, and too many of them were packed with empty platitudes about collaboration, change, innovation, “user generated content,” the “long tail,” blah blah blah. I nearly fell asleep several times. There was a lot of wit and intelligence