Next post Previous post Warning! This is one of those blogging-about-blogging posts. If navel-gazing 1 like this annoys you, move on. Blog comments are a contentious issue. Most political blogs have t
“Six hours’ sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool,” Napoleon famously prescribed. (He would have scoffed at Einstein, then, who was known to require ten hours of sleep for optimal p
With the chaos of different screen sizes and a new generation of web browsers, the design paradigms of layout and typography have shifted away from static layouts and system fonts to dynamic layouts a
(Or: Why Windows 8 Scares Me -- and Should Scare You Too) I was very excited when I saw the first demos of Windows 8. After years of settling for mediocre incremental improvements in its core products
Newspapers exist to inform readers about the news, about what’s going on in the world. That’s why we read them. After all, they are called newspapers , right? No. Well, sort of. And yes, in the past—t
It’s been two weeks since the launch of Writer for Mac, and it went off like a rocket. We sold almost 5,000 copies in two weeks. Of course, version 1.0 had some birth defects (1.01 is out now), but th
By Ole Begemann More about me and contact info June 18, 2012 Last update: June 20, 2012 Engine compartments of a 1982 Mercedes-Benz Series 190 (W-201) and a 2010 Mercedes Benz Concept Car called "Shoo
I keep hearing people talking about Apple finally going “thermonuclear” on Google with the forthcoming iOS 6 mobile operating system. No, it hasn’t. In fact, there are good reasons why it can’t, thoug
Next post Previous post As I made my tea tonight, I thought about how just a little bit of thinking about a little annoyance was able to make my life a little better. Here’s how I make tea at home: I
Watching the Microsoft Surface event video , I sensed uneasiness. Not panic, but discomfort. Some will argue that I’m simply spoiled by Apple’s on-stage polish, but Monday’s Microsoft event struck me
Last week, Readability CEO Richard Ziade [announced](http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement/) that Readability’s acceptance of reader fees and their publisher payment system is ending. In th
Out There A Career Waiting for E.T. to Phone Jill Tarter once complained to me that she had no poetry in her soul. It was 1990, and NASA was getting ready to undertake a survey of the 1,000 nearest st
When we built websites we usually started by defining the body text. The body text definition dictates how wide your main column is, the rest used to follow almost by itself. Used to. Until recently,
SO THE EX just moved to Manhattan’s most iconic private housing community. It is a large residential complex of oversized, renovated apartments set in an 80-acre private park. The sprawling collection
If you want to know whether Apple’s going to continue its remarkable growth in the next five or more years, there’s two things you need to look at: Siri and iCloud. Apple continues to improve hardware
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The hype surrounding Sculley’s CES announcement of the Newton was immense, a precursor of the hoopla that would later accompany Steve Jobs‘ keynotes for iPods, iPhones, iPads and other post-Newton gadgets. But it didn’t change anything right away. Sculley, in fact, was demoing vaporware: The…
If you want to venture into New York City's subterranean nether circles, let Jeff Roth be your Virgil. To a basement two levels below the bustling streets near Times Square, for example. Just past som
The Computer Lab's Beyond Cyberpunk Hypercard stack Beyond Cyberpunk! Update : It's Memorial Day weekend here in the US, and the Ars staff has a long weekend accordingly. Many will spend that time rel
There are at least three dozen sessions marked ‘to be announced’ on Apple’s WWDC schedule. Many of them are positioned in the largest room, one normally dedicated to the keynote address. Whatever is being announced at WWDC, a huge amount of programming has been planned and rehearsed for it. It’s…
Look Now for Venus to Cross the Sun, or Wait Another Century NOTED The transit of Venus in 1769 drew scientists’ attention not only in Britain but also in its American colonies. Credit... APS Collecti
A series of three interesting papers appeared today on astro-ph presenting a very exciting result: researchers at the Space Telescope Science Institute are finally able to predict with great precision the details of the collision of our Milky Way with the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest massive spiral…
Illustration by Robert Neubecker. For a few hours last week, I’d planned to write a column about the “ five-second rule .” Scientists at Manchester Metropolitan University in England had released a st
After a “hands across the Apple world” edition last week the Macalope promised he’d get back to punching jerks this week and he’s a mythical beast of his word. First some silly punditry from Mashable
It has been widely rumored that Siri will be supporting 3rd party apps. Right now most heavy users of Siri have become accustomed to the multitude of apologies and I-don’t-knows that accompany out-the
As some have already noted, the damage done to Midtown Manhattan in The Avengers could easily top $160 billion, all told (here’s the original source of that estimate ). That’s a lot of money. By compa
Home iOS iOS 6 Features and functionality from Android, BlackBerry, webOS, Windows Phone and more, still ripe for iOS 6 inspiration What will Apple bring to iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad with iOS 6 ? W
A reader writes: Why do nuclear power stations (and other power stations, for that matter) have cooling towers in that weird half-hourglass shape? I presume the guys who built them knew what they were
Politics Steyer Says He Can’t Disclose Hundreds of Millions in Assets Lachlan Markay U.S. News Tekashi69 Testifies Against Gang: We Did ‘a Lot of Crimes’ Pilar Melendez Politics Non-Partisan, but Not Neutral Lewandowski’s Testimony Was Basically Senate Campaign Launch Sam Brodey, Hanna Trudo opinion…
People always ask me how they can make great coffee. I’ve never had a good universal answer. The real answer is to get an expensive grinder 1 and an inexpensive AeroPress , then brew freshly roasted b
If you’re one of the people who likes to skim reviews and are not interested in scrupulous breakdown: I’ll save you the time and just say I love this thing. The Das has had its drawbacks with calibrating myself to blank keys and its behemoth size - but I don’t regret it one bit.
I first heard about…
M y younger brother Dan gradually put on weight over a decade, reaching 230 pounds two years ago, at the age of 50. Given his 5-foot-6 frame, that put him 45 pounds above the U.S. National Institutes
There’s been lots of buzz on the topic of whether or not you should learn to code. As an engineer, I don’t have unbiased thoughts on the matter. I tweeted Jeff Atwood’s piece because, well, I agree that it’s pretty silly to think that the world is going to be a better place if the Mayor of New York…
Apple Apple has introduced significant improvements to the iPhone's camera capabilities in nearly every iteration of the device. And while rumors about the next-generation iPhone have largely concerne
I believe that many Apple observers have been too invested in picking off the low hanging fruit of obviously out-of-touch commentators, columnists, and analysts. Apple is winning. It’s fun to pick on the idiots, and we do tune in for the affirmation that engenders, but that’s not insight. It’s a tag…
I perform all my own stunts. Some people get sweaty palms when they look down from tall buildings, but for me it’s when it’s time to upgrade WordPress or migrate to a new server. As nervous as I may g
Let’s get a couple of things straight right off the bat. First, it’s absurd to take the opinion of an obvious Apple partisan like me about Windows 8. I’ve been using the Mac for more than 20 years, so
Holy Crap, I’m Programming on My iPad: A Web Developer’s look at Diet Coda No seriously, I was 1 . Honest to God, I did real programming and fixed a couple of real bugs for an imminent new feature/product on Vimeo using Panic’s Diet Coda . I even did it all using just the touch-screen keyboard…
From left, Nancy, Van, and Michael Wolff in 1958. On the way to visit my mother one recent rainy afternoon, I stopped in, after quite some constant prodding, to see my insurance salesman. He was press
On a bright May afternoon in 2007, a German artist and printmaker named Hans-Jürgen Kuhl took a seat at an outdoor café directly opposite the colossal facade of the Cologne Cathedral. He ordered an es
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