flickering pictures

When all this first started with Tunisia, I didn’t think there was any way the people could oust their president after some 24 years in power. I’d spent just a couple of weeks there in 2008, and people seemed more or less willing to accept the corruption of a government that was at least more [...]

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Or at least, there will be soon. The City of Boston is working on an app that uses your iPhone’s accelerometer to detect bumps while you’re driving, and its GPS to tell the city where the bumps happened. According to the Boston Globe, the iPhone is “sensitive enough to identify cracks and divots,” and test [...]

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For a while now, I’ve been convinced that the secret behind Wired‘s success is that its editors know their audience: a generation of ADHD technophiles that love cool new things but don’t want to read more than 50 words about them. The mag is chock full of charts, tables and pithy rapid-fire bursts of did-you-know [...]

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I’m poking around in the bowels of the site for the first time in ages, and just wanted to say I think its kind of awesome that an old post on DIY catapults, trebuchets and other siege weapons has been viewed nearly 14,000 times. What I want really to know is how many of those [...]

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I’m not sure it’s humanly possible to listen to this song for more than 60 seconds without doing a little bum-shaking boogie-woogie in your chair. Five or six years ago, a roomie of mine was heavily into stuff like the Smiths and Stone Roses, and I just couldn’t stand that 80′s sound. A few years [...]

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Just a quickie… For a week now, the world has been Googling Egypt like never before. But not in China, where search engines are blocking search terms like “Egypt” and “Cairo,” keeping people in China from staying up to date on Egypt’s mass revolt. Terms related to the protest are also blocked on Sina, a [...]

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As it was in Tunisia and Iran, Twitter is a major organizing tool for dissidents in Egypt, and it was certainly one of the sites the government was most concerned about when it took the unprecedented step of shutting down all Internet access across the country a few days ago. Back on Saturday, I posted [...]

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