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Gear

  • An egg, a spoon and Ursula

    Egg and spoon

    “I’ve never seen a gold egg spoon, but I’m sure it would do. Whatever the material, the spoon has to have a small bowl with a fine edge on it: a thick edge can’t coax all the egg white off the inside of the shell. The handle is short, for good balance and easy handling. >>>

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    iPhone Knows

    Apple has made it possible for almost anybody – a jealous spouse, a private detective – with access to your phone or computer to get detailed information about where you’ve been. Pete Warden Apple’s iPhone contains a secret file which keeps track of everywhere you go, say researchers. 110420 Guardian >>>

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    Mob Rules

    Mobile phone kiosk

    Africa’s mobile phone kiosks: tech hubs set to rival Silicon Valley? In the West, there’s an app for everything. In Africa, so goes the latest business/development mantra, there’s the mobile phone kiosk. The noise around Africa’s diy mobile phone culture sometimes sounds like a faint repeat of the dotcom hype from 1990s San Francisco. However, >>>

  • Guided By Tech

    When in Rome, do as the New York Times tells you. A recent travel feature about Rome at Night comes attached with not only the usual multimedia map but an MP3 walking tour as well. Great. Unless you happen to depend on the tourist dollar… Riffing off a recent Wired item enthusing about a crowdsourced >>>

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    Better creativity through software

    Check out the pros and cons of Rationale: an argument mapper for Windows. Conclusion? It’s a nifty addition to any journalist/blogger/critical thinker’s software toolbox. Chicken and egg, form and function, structure and agency: when I’m writing, I’m pretty certain that in order to be creative, to make something new, I need an argument, a structure, >>>

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    Hello Microsoft, Goodbye

    Hired by Microsoft to be an “enthusiast evangelist”, to “go out and mingle, bond and touch influential end users and show them all the cool things that Microsoft has to offer”, lifestyle blogger Stephanie Quilao quit after only nine and a half weeks. It wasn’t just that working for Microsoft made her feel like Martha >>>

  • Manipulating Media

    Steve Bryant only buys (into) media he can do stuff with: Media is changing from entertainment into utility. Media that can’t be manipulated is almost useless. When I listen to NPR, I wish I could freeze the broadcast and pull a link from the radio, send it to a friend. When I watch TV, same >>>

  • Storing Futures

    An iPod can hold roughly 10,000 songs. Increase the storage capacity every 13 years, something the size of an iPod could store one year of video in another few years. By 2015, you could store all the music ever produced. By 2019, you could 85 years of video – a lifetime’s worth of video. By >>>

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    Vista Launches… At Last

    How come it took Bill Gates five years to revamp his flagship bunch of code? Was it laziness? Procrastination? Perfectionism? Did Bill mislay his copy of Getting Things Done? One straight-forward answer is that in trying to compete against Apple and internet-based companies, in trying to anticipate whatever the future may throw at the PC, >>>

  • The New Game of Life

    Fancy joining in a consensual hallucination? Will Wright, creator of the Sims, joins the jostling for supremacy by the different tech and media sectors, their battle for the living room and every other space in which media consumers, producers, participants may soon find themselves. He argues that games have the potential for subsuming almost all >>>