Rough Drafts

Now I can let you know what I’ve been beavering away at for the past month. PCMagCast’s first Security & Mobility Virtual Tradeshow will be happening August 23 and 24, with a full lineup of presentations and other goodies on computer security and mobility for businesses. We’re trying to replicate th

I loved my Leatherman and used it nearly every day, but after less than a year one of the clips that lock the tools into the “open” position broke off. It just wasn’t built that well. I took the thing back to REI a few months ago and exchanged it for a slightly more expensive […]

Stevie Wonder plays Sesame Street, 1972. Can’t help but thinking that kids’ music was way better in the 1970s! (via tuberaider)

1. It’s a complicated issue. A really complicated technical issue. The simplistic rhetoric of “demanding that ISPs treat all traffic equally” is a nonstarter, because ISPs have never done that. Peering arrangements, cacheing networks like Akamai, even the fact that you can get slow DSL for an averag

The free Democracy Player from the Participatory Culture Foundation is a slick tool for finding and downloading Internet videos. Unlike, say, YouTube, you don’t have to sit around and wait for a semi-crappy video to buffer before you watch it. Instead, you browse through single videos or channels th

I’m at risk of getting a reputation for pissing on Web 2.0, but here goes. The problem with “microformats,” which Technorati is pushing pretty hard, is that they seem to be no more than poorly implemented metadata standards. Take the rel=tag specification, for instance. This is a snippet of code you

Despite being a far inferior piece of hardware, the Nintendo DS continues to outsell the Sony PSP by a factor of 6. The PSP has a bigger, more beautiful screen. It’s got more sophisticated controls. It supports removable memory cards and works pretty decently as a video and audio player. And its gra

Princeton Tec’s Scout headlamp ($22) has 2 white LEDs and three brightness settings: bright, very bright, and blinding. It’s easily the most powerful LED headlamp I’ve tested. The plastic clip on the back holds the light to a hat brim nicely, but it broke off when I tried to wedge it around a partic

The Bake Shop Ghost, by Jacqueline K. Ogburn and Marjorie A. Priceman (Illustrator). Best new kid’s book I’ve seen this year–and I can say that despite having read it aloud at least 40 times over the past two months. The pictures are excellent, the story is original, and the hero triumphs by being c

Brain Age for the Nintendo DS ($20) is a videogame masquerading as a brain-training tool. The exercises include rapid-fire math, counting syllables, reading aloud, and even drawing pictures from memory. The friendly bobbing head of Japanese neuroscientist Dr. Ryuta Kawashima explains what each exerc

Adding a computer to your home theater no longer means crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. In the latest issue of WIRED, I review 4 PCs that handle video and audio with aplomb, and even play saved movies while burning DVDs, thanks to the powerful Intel chips inside. But guess what: The to

Last week, my haiku site, tinywords, appeared as the 30th-40th result on a search for haiku on Google. This week, it’s not in the top 500. What happened? I think Google is punishing me for mentioning the word “haiku” too many times in a previous post, which I admit I did in a fit of […]