Category: Uncategorized

  • How ebooks mute texts.

    Texts used to speak for themselves. Once upon a time, the scribe hunkered over his parchment, squinting through the candlelight, ignoring his aching back and cramped wrist. Yet no matter how hard he concentrated, he made mistakes. Inevitably, words were duplicated, key letters left out, entire lines forgotten. In other words, the text asserted itself—it…

  • Libraries and ebooks.

    Libraries may be doomed. The digital age will force these beloved community institutions to streamline, prioritize, and (ultimately) reinvent themselves. In fact, this transformation is already underway. Libraries (like mine) are incorporating digital assets into their collections. At the moment, I’ve got Born to Run, The Accidental Billionaires, and the A Game of Thrones quadrilogy…

  • Kindles at camp?

    Camps have traditionally banned gadgets. In the woods, iPods and cell phones are illegal contraband, banished along with fireworks and drugs. Life at camp, many argue, should hearken back to a simpler time: when a game of “Angry Birds” involved dodging bird poop and “conversation” meant a fireside face-to-face rather than thumbed pseudowords at 140…

  • How little hardware flaws drive me crazy.

    Stuff breaks. Every so often, something I buy conks out, goes on the fritz, or just plain stops working. Blessed warranties to the rescue! Apple replaced my iPod touch at least twice: once for a stuck power button and again for a temperamental headphone jack. And Lenovo (after a month-long, maddening back-and-forth) fixed a blown-out…

  • Why tweet?

    A week or two ago, I explained how Twitter is not just another inbox. It’s meant to blur by–a stream we visit occasionally but don’t follow post-by-post. Smart twitterers learn to ignore the service’s constant background noise. But this raises another question. If no one’s really listening, why tweet at all? Why post something that others may not…

  • Why no electronics at Harry Potter’s Hogwarts?

    Hogwarts is a no-gizmo zone. The Harry Potter books make it clear that electronic contraptions simply don’t work within the magical castle’s confines. But why not? The ever astute Hermione Granger offers an explanation: “All those substitutes for magic Muggles use–electricity, computers, and radar, and all those things–they all go haywire around Hogwarts, there’s too…

  • Unpacking Jerry’s apartment(s?): continuity errors in Seinfeld’s pilot.

    Television pilots are tricky things. They’re test episodes, meant to gauge whether a concept will fly or not. Seinfeld’s pilot, first broadcast in July of 1989, nearly failed the test. Screenings met with a tepid response from audiences, who complained about pointless stories and uninteresting characters. But when I go back and watch Seinfeld’s opening…

  • Package design 101

    I love cereal. Breakfast cereal nears culinary perfection–appropriate for any meal, snack, or dessert. But certain situations do require certain cereals. Sometimes you need Froot Loops’ frivolity, austere moods demand bran flakes, and so on. The secret to eternal happiness may well lie in one’s ability to discern the right Cheerio for any given moment.…

  • Don’t get Twitter? You’re doing it wrong.

    I used twitter for years without knowing why. The microblogging service long ago went viral, but I lingered on the shore of the mainstream. “What is this for?” No one I knew actually tweeted; I felt like a guest three hours early for the party. It is social media, after all, and I was shouting…

  • Apple iOS 4.1 release steals Google’s thunder.

    Talk about timing. At the very instant Google was announcing a major revamp of its premiere product, Apple rolled out an update of its own. Now this could be coincidental. But maybe Apple saw an opportunity here–a chance to steal press from its chief rival in the smartphone space. After all, relations between the two…