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Blog
November 11 2008
I wrote this piece about a month ago as the Welcome for Make: 16, which will be on the newsstand soon. As I write this, there is panic on Wall Street despite Washington’s $700 billion rescue attempt. The crisis is not contained by U.S. borders, but extends to Europe and… read moreAugust 22 2008
Microsoft has received a patent on a "new and improved" Page-Up and Page-Down system. Timothy D. Sellers et al. was awarded the patent on August 19, 2008 for a "Method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments." Abstract for United States Patent 7,415,666 A method and system in… read moreJune 20 2008
This past weekend I watched a superhero fall to incredible lows and rise to unbelievable heights. I wasn't watching one of the manufactured Marvel superheroes on the big screen. I was watching Tiger Woods live on TV. I was watching him create one of the most compelling stories ever in… read moreApril 28 2008
Today, in most schools, science is taught as a body of acquired knowledge, but not as much as a set of tools and practices that were used to discover that knowledge and expand upon it. Students are expected to learn from lectures and textbooks, not labs with hands-on learning and… read moreApril 04 2008
(This entry itself had problems after posting and it took a day to fix. A good entry gone bad.) My sister, Doreen, who is seldom on the bleeding edge of technology, bought a Kindle in January and by March she was sending it back. My Kindle was a clunker. I… read moreMarch 21 2008
Our town, Sebastopol, had passed a resolution in November to permit a local Internet provider to provide public wireless access. This week, fourteen people showed up at a City Council meeting to make the claim that wireless caused health problems... read moreI Make... (Maker Faire Bay Area May 3-4)
March 18 2008
If you wonder what Maker Faire is all about, check out this video, created by eric michael berg, a video intern working with us out of New York. He came to Maker Faire Austin and put together this simple but... read moreFebruary 25 2008
Last May, I wrote about the City of Berkeley closing down The Shipyard. A communal workspace for artists and alternative techies, The Shipyard was organized by Jim Mason; it was built as stacks of shipping containers. After the shutdown notice... read moreFebruary 09 2008
"The telegraph made it possible for people in different places to read the same news." -- Valerie Komor We take news for granted. At the Money:Tech Conference today, speakers were talking about how to deal with real-time newsfeeds, which continues... read moreJanuary 27 2008
The comic "Over the Hedge" featured Make in its January 21st strip. Thanks to Poncho Alarcon of Monterrey, Mexico who spotted the turtle named Verne reading Make. I'm working on a piece for the next issue of Make called "Slow... read moreJanuary 18 2008
Macworld is about the excitement of the arrival of new "cargo," to use Jared Diamond's term from Guns, Germs, and Steel. As Diamond wrote, people with more resources see the world differently. It shapes our world view. The things we... read moreJanuary 18 2008
While looking at a library book scanned by Google, I found this image, the hand behind the scanner revealed.... read moreDecember 18 2007
Last week's Interaction Design class presentations at Stanford made me laugh. Scott Klemmer's CS147 class, a mix of undergrads and graduate students, demonstrated applications for mobile devices, which featured Nokia N95 (supplied by Nokia) and the iPhone. Each of the... read moreDecember 12 2007
Several items about books: Stephen Levy writes in his Newsweek cover story on the Kindle and Jeff Bezos: "When making mental lists of the most whiz-bangy technological creations in our lives, [...] we may overlook an object that is superbly... read moreDecember 03 2007
Amazon's personal electronic reader cannot go it alone. Here is an idea for the Kindle to become part of the social media landscape. Let's call it Kindle's Family and Friends plan. Similar to a few cell phone plans, let a... read more
