Rough Drafts

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 […]

“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