Rough Drafts

I just had a short article about the upcoming Perseid meteor shower published in the San Francisco Chronicle. This was a fun piece to do–I got to talk with NASA scientists, enthusiastic amateur astronomers, and even dropped in on a stargazing party in the Los Altos hills, where I got to scope out so

Good advice on how to be creative: “If I was just starting out writing, say, a novel or a screenplay, or maybe starting up a new software company, I wouldn’t try to quit my job for a year and make this big, dramatic heroic-quest thing about it. I would do something far simpler: I would […]

Excuse me, but isn’t our whole country supposed to be a free speech zone??

Law student Thad Anderson has collected a bunch of government documents and made them available via P2P networks such as KaZaA and SoulSeek, through his Download for Democracy project. These documents are publicly available elsewhere, but they’re not always so easy to find. As Kim Zetter’s Wired New

For everyone but a few die-hard photography buffs, digital cameras are the way to go. A digital camera actually makes you a better photographer, because of the instant feedback it provides via the LCD–and because you get much more practice taking digital shots, which are free, than you do with a fil

A bunch of U.S. soldiers have been posting photos of their experiences in Iraq. This stuff is far more vivid than anything you’ll see on the news. If you want to know what war looks like, these moblogs are the place to look. It’s far more raw, immediate, and real than anything I’ve seen in […]

There’s been a bit of news about the recent NEA study, “Reading At Risk,” which found that only about half of Americans read books. Compare that to this interesting First Monday piece about the shift from print culture to Internet culture: The mentality Of Homo interneticus: Some Ongian postulates b

Null keeps linking to these personality tests, and fool that I am, I keep taking them. Wackiness: 40/100 Rationality: 46/100 Constructiveness: 82/100 Leadership: 72/100 You are an SECL–Sober Emotional Constructive Leader. This makes you a politician. You cut deals, you change minds, you make things

Imagine taking a 3-day ride into space, floating up underneath a massive air balloon. Sounds like Jules Verne, but it could be reality in the next few years. Although there’s a lot of excitement over the news that a private vehicle operated by SpaceShipOne entered space today, an intriguing alternat

For the past month I’ve been trying to get my daily haiku site, tinywords, a bit higher in the Google results when you search on the word “haiku.” I did this the usual way: By asking people to link to tinywords.com using the word “haiku” in their links. Results were good: Within a few weeks, […]

The iPod whose ribbon cable I accidentally punctured last week has been restored to complete health, thanks to a replacement cable from PDASmart.com’s iPod Parts Center. I got the new cable today, spent some time plugging it in (and reseating connectors when it didn’t work immediately), and voila–th

The July issue of Mobile PC is on newsstands now, and I think it’s our best issue yet. There’s a huge roundup of 33 digital cameras, a terrific guide to taking better digital photos, a primer on keeping your data in sync across multiple devices, and a roundup of portable audio players — and, of […]