Global Spin

A few years ago, I started a project to build something I’d wanted for a long time: a simple device that could read Wikipedia articles and Project Gutenberg texts. I called it a WikiBub. The point was to create something dirt simple on the cheap, instead of the usual “convergence device” that does everything (and [...]

Posted by Chris in Making Stuff, Technology on October 28th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

I often see a word in print long before I hear it pronounced. That’s fine for most words—”antidisestablishmentarianism” isn’t actually that hard to deconstruct—but it can get me in trouble sometimes. For years I thought misled was pronounced “mizzled”, and I never did decide how envelope should sound. Now that’s going to be a lot [...]

Posted by Chris in Language, Technology, Web 2.0 on October 6th, 2009 | Comments Off

In 1998, Apple came out with an all-in-one computer. At the time, all-in-one computers were stripped down CPUs crammed onto a monitor case. The term made people expect something ugly, cheap, and difficult to upgrade. What they got instead was the iMac. It was revolutionary, and it inspired copies all across the industry. In 2001, [...]

Posted by Chris in Technology on September 3rd, 2009 | 1 Comment »

While doing regular WordPress maintenance today, I finally bit the bullet and changed the post permalinks to something a bit more human-friendly. For example, the old and new URLs for a recent post are: http://globalspin.com/2009/05/22/1531/ http://globalspin.com/2009/05/livable-streets/ A bit nicer, right? Here’s the tricky part: the old URL still works, redirecting automatically so no one need [...]

Posted by Chris in Blog, Technology on August 5th, 2009 | Comments Off

Brad just pointed out that Google Reader added new features familiar to Twitter and Facebook users: marking a post as something you “like” and setting a status message. They didn’t remove similar features, though, so the result is a blur of options: So when I want to remember something, do I “star” it or “like” [...]

Posted by Chris in Technology, Web 2.0 on July 16th, 2009 | 2 Comments »