I recently got something odd in my email. No, not a spam offering to help me get rich by investing in penny stocks (that’s not odd; I get those every day). What I received was an offer from Microsoft to join the Windows One Care “perpetual beta.” The offer was apparently sent to some participants [...]
One of my favorite moments in “2001” is HAL’s rendition of “Daisy” as Dave shuts him down. For me, it captures HAL’s vulnerability in an incredibly poignant way. HAL isn’t just a malevolent AI; he’s a child who’s grown up too quickly and can’t cope with the challenges of the adult world (the same, of [...]
I didn’t get to see the 30-foot robot elephant inspired by the works of Jules Verne when it was paraded through the streets of Nantes, France, last year. And I’m going to miss it again next week, since its next appearance will be in London. Oh, well. Maybe it’ll make it across the Atlantic at [...]
What can I say? I did a post for Engadget on overclocking the MacBook Pro’s GPU, and it just seemed like a natural fit.
Jason has started a great new meme with his “Web 0.0 Test” about O’Reilly’s Global Network Navigator, one of the first web portals (though, of course the site had come and gone before that term was ever applied to a gateway like GNN). And now that Jason’s gone and started this, I can’t resist adding [...]
A few hours ago, I had no idea who William Ross AIken was. Now, thanks to this post on Make, he’s my new hero. Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. But I do have a soft spot for unsung pioneers of tech, and Aiken is nothing if not an unsung pioneer. It turns out that [...]
The feeds at the right are now powered by FeedYes, which is able to both parse a web page and turn it into RSS, and then turn that into Javascript for posting on a site. Unfortunately, it looks like there are still glitches, since, as of now, my Engadget feed isn’t showing up. FeedYes seems [...]
An Engadget reader from Kuala Lumpur sent this in. It’s apparently an electronics shop set up in a KL mall. Readers debated its provenance, with some convinced it was Photoshopped. But several Malaysian readers actually trekked to the mall themselves to confirm its authenticity. Such is the reach of Engadget: not only does a store [...]
One thing I’ve got to say for my old boss Sondhi Limthongkul: he’s not afraid to take risks. Back when I was working for him in the early 90s, he launched an Asian business magazine (Asia Inc), a regional English-language daily newspaper (Asia Times) and was poised to launch a satellite when the Asian boom [...]
While the rest of the blogosphere was off celebrating April Fool’s Day yesterday, we took the opportunity to commemorate Apple’s 30th birthday (even if Apple itself chose to ignore the holiday). Our feature on Apple’s “good, bad and ugly” products struck, I think, a good balance. We didn’t indulge in fanboy exuberance (well, at least [...]