Somewhere in my Twitter stream I happened across an interesting Kickstarter project. If you don’t know about Kickstarter, it is where those with good ideas but without funds can post their project to garner investors. The project that caught my eye is one to create a low-cost robotic scanner for libraries, museums and archives. The […]

Those who know me well know that I’m actively involved in my wife’s campaign for County Supervisor here in Sonoma County, California. So you might say that voting is dear to my heart. I want people to get out and exercise their right to have a say. Although that election is still a ways off, […]

I wrote the title of this post at a bar in Monterey tonight, literally on a napkin (see picture), before walking back to my room. Earlier in the day I had taught a 3-hour workshop on technology planning. In both preparing for, and giving, the workshop, it was beginning to dawn on me the full […]

A couple things happened recently that reminded me of the old chestnut “garbage in, garbage out”. One was that after I spent hours trying to debug why my Perl program was not producing the output I expected, it finally occurred to me (after sleeping on it) that I should check the input file. Sure enough, […]

As is typical, all geek eyes were glued on Cupertino today as Apple unveiled it’s latest iPhone. Although many expected the iPhone 5 as predicted by some, they instead unveiled the iPhone 4S. But if all this was about was launching a slight upgrade to an existing hardware device I wouldn’t be writing this post. […]

With all the Kindle Fire brou-ha-ha, the fact that Amazon is coming out with a new kind of web browers, dubbed Silk, may have been missed by some. I know, “Yawn” you say. Between Firefox, Chrome, Safari, oh, and yeah, Internet Explorer, why do we need another browser? That’s a good question that Amazon might […]

The other day I went to Google Maps and looked at my neighborhood. My mouth dropped open. It was way off. And when I say “way off” I mean WAY off. There are roads that don’t exist. There are misnamed roads. There is a road that exists, but that Google Maps doesn’t show. And perhaps […]

The other day I had a reason to check out a software package. It’s open source, so grabbing it wasn’t the issue. But like most web applications these days it had a pile of dependencies — common dependencies, to be sure, but setting things up by hand can be a pain, and likely to take […]

The other night I noticed a few TV ads pitching movies — not to see them in the theatre, but to buy them on BluRay. That’s when it hit me. Although I was never all that into buying movies in the first place, I realized that even if I had been I would be so […]

Writes Eric Hellman: The following is an obituary Of Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, who died yesterday. Its author has dedicated it to the public domain, which allows me to reprint it here: Michael Stern Hart was born in Tacoma, Washington on March 8, 1947. He died on September 6, 2011 in his home […]