Back when dinosaurs roamed the Internet and you could get a cup of coffee and a shoeshine for a nickel, before the kids all had their newfangled “Mybook” and “Facespaces” and the blink tag still seemed a pretty nifty idea, there was Brain Sausage. Brain Sausage was an early proto-weblog, created before such things actually [...]
A couple of good articles I’ve stumbled across recently on various current events: Barry Brake rejoices at the restoration of habeus corpus by the US Supreme Court. But sweet betty boop, how is it that this is even contentious? Certainly the cost of arranging hearings for these folks would be the merest fraction of the [...]
My friend and occasional boss Seth Dillingham is gearing up again for the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge, an annual bicycle ride fund raiser that benefits the Dana-Farber Institute, a research organization that battles cancer. Part of Seth’s fund raising each year includes a big Macintosh software auction, for which he’s now collecting donations. If you make Mac [...]
Nicholas Negroponte announced the next revision of the XO Laptop, the low-cost laptop designed by the One Laptop Per Child initiative for developing countries. The upcoming version eschews the typical laptop form factor, instead taking cues from the iPhone and the Nintendo DS to create a unit that opens like a book, has touch screens [...]
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Posted 21 May 2008
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OLPC
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Here are a couple of books I’ve quite enjoyed recently: Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical: Shane Claiborne, the author of this book, is an interesting cat. He’s passionately devoted to the idea of living according to Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament, especially with regard to the poor and disenfranchised. I particularly enjoyed his [...]
This morning on the way to work, I was thinking about the critics of the One Laptop per Child program. Lots of people maintain that, rather than sending a $100 laptop to kids in third-world countries, we would do far better to send them $100 in food. And to a degree, I think they’re right [...]
This is super-cool. The lads at GameTank recently unveiled Guitar Rising, an upcoming game for Mac and PC that’s modeled on Guitar Hero’s gameplay, but which requires you to play actually guitar parts on a real guitar. You’ll be able to use the guitar of your choice, as long as it has a pickup or [...]
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Posted 08 February 2008
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Music
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The traditional approach to designing a game with a narrative has been for the game designer to work like a movie screen writer: he creates a series of “scripted” events at various points in a game level which are followed from beginning to end, and which always occur in the same order whenever the game [...]
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Posted 27 December 2007
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Games
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Amazon has just introduced a new electronic book reader called the Kindle, which looks pretty interesting. My thoughts while reading the details: First mass-market use of electronic paper for a display. I wonder what the resolution is like? Ah, 800×600 with 4 levels of gray. (By comparison, the iPhone is 480×320, though it’s smaller and full [...]
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Posted 19 November 2007
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Books
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Since my job involves creating systems that underpin a bunch of websites, I’d ordered an iPod Touch for work as soon as they were announced. I’d been keen to get to spend more time with the version of Safari that ships on that device and on the iPhone, but wasn’t eager to tangle with AT&T [...]
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Posted 06 November 2007
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