Edward Tufte, one of the preeminent authors and speakers on effective visual communication and design has some things to say about Apple's iPhone. Much of his commentary on the iPhone is complementary, but he has some suggestions, which seem pretty reasonable. If you have a chance, take a look. Thanks …

The wacky Fins at F-secure have decided to put an iPhone through its paces in a fridge and the result is a chilling video. Thanks to The Ultimate Apple Weblog for the pointer, and YouTube for the video.

Many of you know that I've had a large number of (annoyingly expensive) smart phones over the years. In general, I've been pretty loyal to Sony Ericsson, especially the Pxxx series (P800, P900, P910, P990) because of their large screen, pretty good web browser, email support, and, in the case …

TechDirt has an article that references a clip from The Daily Show which is pretty silly, but contains what appears to be an honest statement from Stewart saying "But to me, the situation is that there's a ton to gain for both companies. Viacom, they put their content on YouTube …

Sounds pretty good for Microsoft's new head of the pack. Although the folks at ARS Technica have some comments that bring into question whether this is because of new PC growth or not. Even so, new PC growth itself may have been helped by pent up demand for Vista... we'll …

Not surprising, and not necessarily for a "good" reason, the US Department of Transportation and the FAA have issued "an indefinite moratorium" on the upgrade to Microsoft's Vista OS , Internet Explorer version 7, and Microsoft Office 2007, according to an article from Information Week. The moratorium was placed because there …

After all the complaining about the power used by the nation's computers, the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that a study(admittedly commissioned by a computer chip manufacturer, AMD) indicates that the use is close to 1.2%. Not small, but nowhere near the 13% touted by some sources. It …

Lawrence Lessig has an article in Wired this week where he theorizes that municipal WiFi may be the Linux that keeps the Phone and Cable companies from dominating the last mile. Does he make sense?

There's a good article by Patrick McFarland on archival storage using recordable DVD and CD media. The upshot is that (for some pretty sound technical reasons) he strongly recommends DVD+R over DVD-R and specifically suggests Taiyo Yuden brand (less strength in that argument).

Well, Microsoft has announced Zune, it's answer to Apple's venerable iPod franchise. Let's see what it has to offer. The "killer feature" of Zune is the Zune Marketplace that supports Zune-to- Zune sharing of "full-length sample tracks" of songs, pictures, or playlists. According to the press release, you'll be able …

An article from PC Pro talks about a Xerox effort to create paper that automatically erases itself 16 hours after it has been printed upon. The process, called "transient documents", was demonstrated at a product unveiling in the UK. Not a lot of details, except some comments about the process …

I won't guarantee the results for you, but speedtest.net is the first speed test that I have seen that has come close to reality for testing my connections. Plus, they test against multiple locations, and it looks REALLY cool!

Just in time for the back to school rush, Apple's iPod content management system for Universities gains steam. According to an article in eSchool News, Apple's service that gets university lecture content online is being used by schools to allow people not enrolled in classes to get access to their …

So, given that we've now heard about 2 "defections" from the Macintosh to Ubuntu, I wanted to see what the fuss is all about, so that I could comment on things. So, I downloaded (via bittorrent) the latest (6.0.6) version of Ubuntu and gave it a whirl. My …

Just for fun, here's the article that I wrote on March 6th 2003 that spawned the idea for my recently issued patent. I still think it's a frightening idea, but at least now I might have some control over whether it happens. While writing a summary story on a Wired …

According to an article at treehugger, Volvo has a car that can run on five different types of fuels. It appears to have 4 fuel tanks and lots of safety features, too (which is a good thing because some of those would really cause a mess if you hit the …

Carol and I just returned from a great trip to London to celebrate our second anniversary and whilst digging through the mail upon our return, I found no fewer than three notices from companies that make patent plaques that my RFID Patent has been issued. The issuance of the patent …

A web page on Ohio University's web site details a series of incidents involving access to social security numbers of employees, students, and alumni... now, what they need with the SSNs of 137,000 alumni is a really good question, but it's not just them. This is yet another in …

Panic (makers of the Macintosh file transfer utility, Transmit) have posted a page showing web sites that appear to have lifted their icon (which is a small, blue truck). The site is tongue and cheek, but the violators appear to be real.

Good news for cab drivers, the environment, and Ford Motor Company. An article from The Auto Channel (hats off to Gizmodo for the pointer) describes the result of the experimental introduction of Hybrid Ford Escapes into the taxi systems in New York and San Francisco. The result is that the …