Rough Drafts

“We went out one day and our Unix cows were missing,” [SCO CEO Darl] McBride said … “We looked in the Linux pen, and there’s a bunch of them in there that have our brand on them . . . in this case the copyright. Someone took our cows and we want ’em back — […]

Walt Mossberg Waldorf

“Litany of shite” — it’s hard to improve on Troubled Diva’s description of this excellent MP3 by Big Hard Excellent Fish; listening to it is a strangely cathartic experience. … It’s time to form a militant wing of the Apostrophe Protection Society … Why you should always use a serial comma … Let’s n

Intuit’s Quicken is the only software product I’ve used in the past ten years that gets consistently worse with each subsequent version. I started out with Quicken in 95 or 97, when it was a pretty stable, usable app, although it did have its quirks. Each version since then has been more complicated

I took apart a nonfunctioning 15GB iPod that had been hanging around the Mobile PC offices for the past few months. I pretty much just went right in, using a pocketknife to create a gap between the front (white) plastic and the metal back, which are joined together extremely tightly; once I’d create

“All prawns have this catastrophic event at two days and 11 hours past sell-by date” — Inventor James Larsson hooks up some capacitance sensors and an old computer to a Marks & Spencer prawn sandwich, and uses its decay to measure the passage of time. Am I the only one thinking about A Zed and […]

You can export your Blogger weblog and import it into Movable Type (and into many other weblog systems as well), but you can’t go in reverse: There’s no way to import entries into Blogger, as far as I can tell. What’s up with that? Now that Blogger has comments, and now that it’s got sufficient […]

Ancestors of Mobile PC magazine: Several galleries of early 20th-century technical magazine covers, including a big selection of mags by Hugo Gernsback, the founder of Amazing Stories. The future ain’t what it used to be!

It’s official: The U.S. Patent Office has absolutely no idea what it’s doing.

People often ask me if my religious studies education ever intersects with my career in technology. Well, rarely — but when it does, it’s worth it.

File under funny / sadistic: PeopleFallingOver.com brings you the news, photos, videos, and, yes, the dance remixes of pratfalls, spills, tumbles, accidents, drops, and sudden unexpected descents.

Jeremy Horowitz at iPodlounge has a pointed critique of Sony’s PlayStation Portable demos earlier this month at E3. The bottom line: the PSP is far from being ready to launch, and Sony’s strategy surrounding it and the Vaio Pocket media player (a supposed “iPod killer”) is confused and contradictory