Marc Perton

This might be old, but I just saw it on a car this morning. Sort of says it all when it comes to manufactured patriotism. And ribbons.

Last April, inspired by a scan on Modern Mechanix, I wrote this post about William Ross Aiken, who designed a workable flat-panel TV in 1958. Yesterday, I got an email from Aiken’s daughter, informing me that the inventor passed away in February, and she was putting his personal collection of electronic gear up for sale [...]

When I saw the cover of the latest issue of Wired, with the tagline “Manga Conquers America,” my first thought was, great, yet another tired retelling of the growth of manga in America. Fortunately, the actual article, by veteran journalist Daniel Pink, tells a very different story, about the growing market for underground fanfic manga [...]

I’ve been shopping at Amazon.com for years, and have occasionally found the service’s product recommendations useful. But over time, as the store has become larger and its inventory more diverse, it’s become harder for those stressed algorithms to come up with truly useful recommendations. For me, this reached its apotheosis with the recommendation above, suggesting [...]

The idea of ringxiety—those phantom cellphone rings and vibrations that you sometimes think you hear or feel, even when you’ve left your phone at home—has been around for a couple of years, with various theories floated about the phenomenon’s root cause. ?I think the phantom ring can all be tied into your love life [...]

I’ve been using gadgets, widgets and gizmos on my computers for as long as I can remember. Even before tools like Apple’s Dashboard and Konfabulator/Yahoo Widgets, there were programs that let you put the weather, calendar and annoying eyeballs in your taskbar. And, of course, before that, there were TSRs, those memory-resident programs that, in [...]

One spring day during my junior year of high school, a friend came up to me and said, “Did you hear? Ian Curtis killed himself.” Dumbfounded, I replied, “Who?” At the time, my musical tastes were evolving, and this friend, who was always a step ahead of me, briefed me about Joy Division’s history, and lamented [...]

Back in the day, I used to occasionally play with a Mac program called Tappy Type, which made your computer sound like a typewriter (what can I say; I’m easily amused). The program, a relic of the pre-OS X days, was never updated for modern Macs or ported to Windows, and its developer has apparently [...]

When I was a kid, the space race was as big a deal as the cold war and the arms race—in fact, it was inexorably tied to those parallel contests. And the event that started that competition, the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union, happened 50 years ago today. For those who don’t remember [...]

I have to admit I’m pretty impressed with Popular Photography’s ongoing coverage of “the war on photographers.” After all, it’s a magazine better known for reviews of lenses and curmudgeonly columns about glorious old pre-war cameras. So, the magazine’s (and its website) continued focus on the issue of photographers’ rights is something of a fundamental [...]