The birds nesting in the trees near my bedroom window wake me up earlier than I’d like in the morning, and at night they keep me awake, singing past 2 AM. I’ve taken to sleeping with earplugs, but then my alarm clock doesn’t wake me up. It occurred to me that there might be watches [...]

AT&T’s EDGE network is down in the midwest U.S. today.  They seem to think that it might be back today, or might take until February 5.
In the old days, back when there was just The Phone Company, they maintained better than five nine’s reliability.  Nothing would cause a widespread outage, and local outages didn’t last [...]

If you buy a Sony PRS-500 Portable Reader System (PRS-500), you can get 100 classic books “free” as ebooks. These are books that are in the public domain, so Sony doesn’t have to pay royalties on them, though Sony slaps DRM on them. I thought it would be nice to have a copy [...]

A few weeks ago in Sunnyvale, I was stopped at a traffic light on Lawrence Expressway, and slightly ahead of me in the next lane to the right was a small yellow car. It had a giant wind-up key sticking up out of the trunk, which was actually spinning, and the trunk was marked [...]

I bought my mother a Canon PowerShot A460 camera, and she really likes it.  It’s a fairly compact 5 megapixel camera, and quite inexpensive.
I’ve had a PowerShot G2 for about five years now, and it’s about time to replace it.  I’d like to get a digital SLR like the Canon Digital Rebel XTi for digital [...]

nerdgasm /nûrd-gasm/, noun, a feeling of euphoria brought on by exposure to a new piece of tech gear or software.
Seen in Boing Boing post by Cory Doctorow, referring to student reactions to the Neuros OSD set-top box:
I’ve had a couple of these circulating in my class at USC this semester and some of the students [...]

Someone invents this.
Charles H. Duell, commissioner of patents in 1899, is apparently misquoted as having said that “everything that could be invented has been invented.” However, maybe everything that should be invented already has been.