The first thing to understand about the Digital Age and the home computing revolution was that it was all one big accident. Actually, it was more like a series of little accidents. With other inventions, like cars or washing machines or bread, we had a good idea of what we wanted and [...]
We’ve been inspired by sites like Bash.org and their funny, but very old and stale, IRC quotes. So we’ve decided to bring that concept into the 21st century by starting a collection of memorable tweats from the wild, wild world of Twitter.com. Because, well, somebody had to think of it first. Enjoy these virtual messages [...]
The smartphone set has so far been smugly confident that they’re staying ahead of malware. But desktop and laptop users know what’s coming: there is no such thing as a completely secure computing system, and smartphones are no exception. Already, a few smartphone viruses have been spotted in the wild; they use SMS and Bluetooth [...]
OMG! I can haz LOLCatz on teh Internetz! If you haven’t been living in a closed box for the past five years, you’ve noticed that the Internet has caught LOLCat fever. It’s the Internet meme that wouldn’t fade. It’s the main business for a handful of sites and blogs all over the web, including LOLCats.com, [...]
No matter where you are in the world, it seems that technology and courts don’t mix very well. The legal profession seems to be particularly challenged at keeping up with the rapidly changing field of computing. And in turn, coders, developers, and geeks of every stripe seem to unanimously shy away from legal matters. [...]
Well, after Google, Yahoo, and MSN, what else is there? While the Big Three fight at each other’s throats over an increasingly smaller pile of scrap, there’s a whole world of unknown search engines out there just begging to be explored. Some are worse than others, some are specialized, but all of these will [...]
The initial argument for how the Internet was better for you than television went that TV dumps tons of mindless garbage on you, while the Internet, being interactive, gives the audience a chance to micromanage the content and hence improve it, resulting in a more cultured, thoughtful experience for all. Then Web 2.0 came [...]
Stunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” provides us with useful advice: “Omit needless words.” One needn’t be long-winded to compose a literary masterpiece; consider the beauty of a haiku poem, or the eloquent minimalism of a Chinese fortune cookie message. Micro-blogging is the spin-off from the blog revolution. It rode into the popular culture [...]
Once upon the 20th century, we had the phreakers. Phreakers were phone hackers; they’d use various equipment and techniques to rig the public phone system, getting free calls, snooping on private calls, even running their own private network, and generally abusing the telephone system for naughty stuff. Then along came the computer age proper, and [...]
Mobile gaming has taken off in recent years, getting more and more sophisticated. Games that used to be the exclusive domain of the console and desktop platforms have made their way onto mobiles, and the graphics get richer and more beautiful every year. For the adventure and role-playing gaming crowd, sometimes they ask for something [...]
