A lady walks into a bar–only this time the punch line is that it’s a Genius Bar. As a long-time PC user, my relationship to Apple is complicated. Love ‘em because they’re beautiful, admire the way they work. Hate ‘em because they’re closed systems, the complete antithesis of everything that the information age should be. [...]

Yes, it’s a Trekian buzzword, but telepresence creates the illusion that something or someone is with you.

Now that all PCs cost about the same and run about the same at any given price point, they’ve become commodities. All except the Mac, that is. The Mac is like the mythical siren, designed to lure us with gorgeous work from bevel to the box, and expecting a premium to be paid for its good [...]

A pocket video recorder is the 21st century version of pen and paper. You can whip it out, document, and then share the moments of your day. The top contenders in the pocket video space are the Flip camera and the Kodak Xi8. Flip’s got the catchier name and it captured high definition video first. [...]

I have become my Grandmother. She was the one that spent  a bulk of each day pleasantly sleeping in front of the television. The instant she’d wake she’d fret about the fact  that she never slept.  As we age sleep problems do increase, but so does fretting about them. While I’m not my Grandma yet,  I’m now [...]

Report from Digital Downtown

Held in NYC this week, CEALineShows/Digital Downtown a June preview event focused on innovation and a sneak peak at the holiday season drew its share of news. Here’s what some attendees had to say.
The Geek in Chief Addresses the Crowd
Does it take to long to renew your driver’s liscense?  Is [...]

The new $489 Kindle DX is the Big Kahuna of Amazon’s growing Kindle reader family. With its large 9.7-inch screen (the Kindle 2 available now only has a 6-inch screen), higher resolution (1200×824 instead of 600×300), and svelte, lightweight format, it’s meant to make heavily formatted and overly large documents readable. While it won’t be [...]

There was a time when the thought of not being connected gave me hives. Now I’m willing to pay a premium to find a place where I can be disconnected for awhile.
In the Air
My first safe haven to go was the airplane. A flight was a place to read a book or watch a movie [...]

Joining Intel’s Classmate PC and the One Laptop Per Child PC, the Mini-Note is the latest foray into the sub-notebook PC for the classroom.
To laptop or not to laptop, that is the question many schools are asking. Parents should take heed. More and more schools have begun to require a laptop and at younger [...]

Actually, it’s a movie, not an ode. Since gadgets have kept me duly employed for nearly 35 years, I thought I might spend a few moments reflecting on what gadgets mean to others. Sheer joy or bane of existence? Making life simpler or making it darn complicated? Defining personality or making all personalities identical?
With [...]