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I was standing outside this morning, looking at my driveway, and it got me thinking about the nature of suburban property and the new realities we all face. My driveway, you see, needs to be replaced. It was resurfaced years ago with a thin layer of asphalt that was all the cheap bastard that owned [...]

I’m one of those dinosaurs whose computer still exists as a collection of components mounted in a large aluminum box. Therefore, unlike the mobile device users who are laughing at the crusty immobility of my platform, I don’t have to throw the whole thing out when it gets too slow. I can fix it! Desktop [...]

Copper is neat stuff. It’s malleable, ductile, resists corrosion, transfers heat readily, and can be easily soldered. In various forms it is incredibly useful. There are around 50 pounds of copper in an automobile, and 11,000 pounds in a diesel locomotive, for example. One of the less useful forms that copper takes is when it [...]

I’ve lived in New Jersey now, off and on, for nearly twenty years, but I’m not a native. I was born in Michigan and have at various times lived in New York, Indiana, Rhode Island, Maryland, California, New Hampshire, and the British Virgin Islands. None of the places I’ve lived has been perfect. They all [...]

I got a kick out of this. It was revealed this week that the share of downstream Internet traffic generated by Netflix customers’ streaming movies reached thirty percent in the last measuring period. Thirty percent. But as eye-opening as that figure is, it’s not what I got a kick out of. In some bit of [...]

Google has always had to walk a fine line between profiting from search results and giving users more power over what appears in them. They try to make sure that what we see is relevant to us, while at the same time legions of SEO specialists and their clients try to game the system to [...]

Looks like it might. Hard on the heals of my excellent first impressions of IE9 RC I had a little bit of a jarring return to earth in the matter of installing Beta/RC versions of products. I started Windows Media Center and activated Netflix so I could watch another espisode of my current obsession, “Rescue [...]

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 RC (Release Candidate) today, and after finishing up some work hacking up a Windows installer script, I downloaded and installed the new version to take it for a spin. IE hasn’t been my default browser for awhile now, and I wondered whether MS could regain that coveted slot in the system registry. I switched [...]

Finally someone among the digital elite is talking sense on the subject of Internet anonymity. In an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, Facebook product design manager Julie Zhuo speaks frankly about the effect that anonymity has had on the level of civility online, and some of the things Facebook and other sites are [...]

As a young programmer just starting out, newly married, working on my employer’s stuff during the day and my own stuff during the evenings, I often struggled to convince my growing and social family that they had to leave me alone when I was working. As Jason Fried explains in this excellent video from October’s [...]