Rough Drafts

“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

Beautiful photos of a Gunkajima, an abandoned island off the coast of Japan. (via BoingBoing)

If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist, right? That’s what Rumsfeld must be thinking: He’s banned camera phones in U.S. Army installations in Iraq. A total ban on camera phones in the military is coming up next, the news reports say. You can slash at the waves but you can’t hold back the tide…. […]

You probably don’t get many telemarketing calls on your mobile, do you? That’s partly because it’s illegal–but more importantly, there’s no directory of mobile phone numbers that unscrupulous marketers can use to target their campaigns. Well, you can kiss that precious bit of anonymity goodbye: the

Impressions from E3: The coming year will be pretty interesting for mobile gaming. The Nintendo DS (dual screen) is a somewhat goofy concept, but there are a lot of games in development and some of them look pretty cool. I got a chance to play with a few of the new games and was fairly […]

Video games are now a $20 billion industry, making them bigger than Hollywood (as measured by box-office revenues, anyhow; the film industry actually makes more money from videos and DVDs than they do from movie theaters). No surprise, then, that the average age of video gamers is going up–it’s now