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“Surprisingly, touchscreen laptops don’t suck”
Nov 30, 2012I laughed when I read the headline, and I have to agree. Sean Hollister, The Verge: With Windows 8, touchscreens are more relevant than ever before. However, some pundits have long believed that a touchscreen simply doesn’t belong on a laptop. Sometimes, they quote Steve Jobs. “Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical.” That’s Jobs in [...]
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Typing Speed Test: iPhone vs iPad vs Keyboard
Oct 30, 2012I’m a sophomore college student, and I haven’t used a laptop in about a year and half. Crazy right? I haven’t written about this yet, but a few weeks before starting my freshman year of college I decided to replace my aging laptop (which only lasted 30 minutes on a full charge) not with a [...]
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Oct 22, 2012
Jason Fried recalling a bit of advice that Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) gave to him and his group: He said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds. He doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. It’s perfectly healthy — encouraged, even — to [...]
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Sam Sommers: Situations Matter
Oct 7, 2012Sam Sommers was my Social Psychology professor last semester, and he gave a TEDx talk back in May that summarizes the most important concept we learned: context is is everything. From the video’s description: One of the strongest influences to shape human nature is also one that we usually overlook: context. Where we are, who we’re with, and what’s [...]
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Oct 7, 2012
Oliver Reichenstein: Promising to make you look wired and magically promote your content in social networks, the Like, Retweet, and +1 buttons occupy a good spot on pretty much every page of the World Wide Web. Because of this, almost every major site and world brand is providing free advertising for Twitter and Facebook. But [...]
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Oct 7, 2012
Yesterday afternoon, Jamie Hyneman, co-host of Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel, held a Reddit AMA or “Ask Me Anything” session. Adam Savage held one about a week ago as well. In AMAs, Redditors are able to ask the host absolutely anything they’d like to know more about, and the host responds to whichever questions they [...]
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Sep 17, 2012
If you haven’t heard about Caine’s Arcade before, watch the original viral video here. Caine is a 10-year-old kid living in Los Angeles who gradually built up his own cardboard arcade in his Dad’s auto parts shop. The elaborate arcade is an amazing reminder of the kinds of things a kid’s imagination is capable of. [...]
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Sep 17, 2012
At this point I’m not too far off from being 20 years old. T-w-e-n-t-y. There won’t be any -teen in my age anymore. I started thinking more about this toward the end of my second semester as a freshman. My English class was trying to figure out exactly when a kid becomes an adult, and we [...]
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A visit to the Microsoft Store in Danbury, CT
Jul 18, 2012Last weekend I took a day trip with my family to Danbury Fair Mall to check out the very first Microsoft Store in New England. Unfortunately I wasn’t there for the Grand Opening on June 24th, but Adam Lein of Pocketnow covered that spectacle quite nicely (with some great video coverage too). (Video from Adam [...]
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May 27, 2012
Derek Sivers on Kimo Williams, a mentor he met shortly before his first semester of college: Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me “the standard pace is for chumps” – that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than “just anyone” – you can [...]
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Thinking About the Entertainment Distribution Channel of the Future
Mar 26, 2012The Spark Jeff DeChambeau recently proposed an interesting alternative to Hollywood-style TV show production: why not have a Kickstarter for television? Proposed shows would be funded by the public, and funding for specific aspects of the show (its story, actors, props, etc.) could be bumped up if enough people chipped in. Funders can support the [...]
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Keeping Busy: Boyostarcraft.com
Feb 24, 2012I just put the finishing touches on a project I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks: Boyostarcraft.com, the official player profile site of one of my favorite Starcraft II players, Boyo (although I may be a bit biased). This is the nicest site I’ve ever worked on, and it’ll continue to grow and evolve [...]
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Human Factors: The Intersection of Technology and Liberal Arts
Feb 5, 2012Introduction Tufts University has two schools: a School of Arts & Sciences and a School of Engineering. I decided to come here in part because I wanted to keep my options open: I knew I wasn’t cut out to be a mathematically-minded engineer, but I also knew that I had technological leanings that couldn’t be [...]
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Jan 21, 2012
From Mike Lacher’s short epic: But with the dawn of the feast of Christmas did a beacon of hope manifest itself upon the inky horizon. Riding in upon a teal Ford Focus came a great warrior, a suitor of the gentlefolks’ granddaughter. Word had spread through the kingdom that this warrior worked with computers and perhaps even knew [...]
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Dec 11, 2011
A few days ago a young boy tugged on my hand and pulled me to a third floor window. Looking up at the night sky, he pointed at the full moon and said, “Ook, moo!” I looked up and said, “Yup, big moon,” and pointed at the Christmas lights in the plaza below, “See those [...]
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Lifehacker: Encourage kids to earn money via entrepreneurship
Dec 4, 2011Good advice and some great examples. Reminds me of one hot Summer day when my brother and I decided to set up a lemonade stand in the driveway and give it away for free. We were young so we didn’t really care about turning a profit. We ended up getting tips from 90% of the [...]
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Dec 1, 2011
Yup, your eyes are heavy and the room is dim again. The red, green, orange and blue trees still hover in midair. You think you have them all figured out; their story has been told, but after staring a minute longer you’ll find there’s still a lot more to know. Watch the central beam, and [...]
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Nov 29, 2011
Many years ago, probably when I was about 8 or 9 years old, I sketched up a drawing of something very similar to this in my “Invention Book”: a book I could look at when I was older (and had the knowledge needed to actually create what I had thought of). At the time my [...]
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Nov 21, 2011
Eyes heavy, room dim, the dots of red, green, orange and blue begin to glow. Like little, brightly colored suns, each one has it’s own aura. Rays extend into the dark before fading away. Look closer. A few rays shooting downward defy this limitation. Your hand doesn’t block them from sight, so they must be [...]
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Nov 4, 2011
You’re standing aboard the S.S. Whaletanic somewhere off the Cape where the whales hang out. This is your first time going whale-watching, so you’re pretty excited. No, you’re more than excited, you’re pumped to the max. Your feet vibrate as the boat’s motor purrs along, pushing the boat farther and farther out to sea. It’s [...]
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Oct 24, 2011
Apple’s ‘Celebrating Steve’ event was full of great thoughts, quotes, and stories, but there was one thing that Jony Ive said that I found to be particularly powerful and relevant to this site: Steve used to say to me, and he used to say this a lot, “Jony, is it a dopey idea?” And sometimes they were, [...]
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Oct 24, 2011
Ah, yes, SimCopter. I spent many a day rescuing people from roofs, runaway trains, and building fires way back when. A great game, made even better by the hum of helicopter blades, classical music and completely random radio ads and announcements: This is a public service announcement. When you lick stamps, make sure you get the [...]
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EA offering refunds on PC version of Tiger Woods 12
Sep 18, 2011Seriously EA? Your game’s multiplayer mode is a link to a browser-based flash game? Okay, you’re offering refunds, but if you knew that people wouldn’t be happy with it, why did you push it out anyway? This is why you buying Firemint (Flight Control, Real Racing), Popcap (Plants vs Zombies, Peggle) and other iOS developers makes me [...]
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Sep 17, 2011
According to a recent study: 9 minutes of viewing a popular fast-paced fantastical television show (Spongebob Squarepants) immediately impaired 4-year-olds’ [executive function], a result about which parents of young children should be aware. I bet kids do have a hard time concentrating after watching just 9 minutes of Spongebob; I’d probably be thinking about how [...]
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Sep 17, 2011
I clearly remember sitting on the floor of my elementary school’s library watching my teacher pull in a big old TV on a rolly-cart. TV days were great. I don’t remember much about Reading Rainbow, but I know that I liked The Magic School Bus more. Especially the one where Miss Frizzle shrinks the bus [...]