Rough Drafts

I read Thomas Friedman’s early book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, when I was trying to get a handle on what people meant by “globalization.” I’d been told it was one of the pithiest, easiest to understand introductions to the topic available. Although Friedman’s columns are occasionally insightful

Google SMS is a handy tool — just send your query as an SMS message to 46645 (“GOOGL” on the phone keypad), and within a few seconds you’ll get an SMS or two with the answer. I tested this a few months ago and found it worked pretty well for queries like “price 20GB ipod,” […]

Want to learn how to frail the old banjo? Patrick Costello wrote a couple of books on the topic last year, then gave away his books for free online. (You can still buy them on Amazon, though: just click on the book cover to the left.) Now he and his dad are giving away free […]

How quickly can you scan a grid of 20 seemingly unrelated images and guess the word used on Google’s image search that produced those pictures? Good fun! Guess the Google

This video game installation, currently playable only in Finland, is like Dance Dance Revolution — except it’s a kung fu fighting game, and you make kung-fu fighting moves on a mat to control your on-screen character.

Avast, ye scurvy swabs!

One of the big medical mysteries of the past decade is the alarming rise in the number of autism cases among children. In 1991, autism hit one kid in 2,500. It was rare enough that it lurked in the background, a spooky but not terribly immediate possibility for most parents. Since then, the rate has

Thought I’d post a quick tip on this, since I couldn’t find it published anywhere else: If you’ve got a table you want to put inside an MT entry, you’ve got to put all the HTML table code on a single line. Otherwise, MT will add <br /> tags after every line — and when […]

My latest feature for Mobile pits the top 10 notebook vendors against each other to see who provides the best tech support — and who’s the worst. No holds barred! UPDATE 6/16/06: This story got slashdotted. Woo hoo!

We’ve just published a second “100 Greatest Gadgets of All Time” story — this one featuring 100 of the best gadgets suggested by readers–including the slide rule, the Princess phone, and Merlin. The #1 gadget of all time, according to Mobile‘s readers? I don’t think you’ll be surprised to find out w

Somebody wrote a giant message to his sweetie in the Utah desert. A satellite captured a picture of it, and now you can see it thanks to Google Maps. (via Googlesightseeing)

I’m wasting way too much time playing shooting arrows into oncoming hordes of medieval soldiers, archers, and ogres. I haven’t had this much fun with trajectories since Gorillas.