Rob Pegoraro, Washington Post technology writer, has a few words to say about Microsoft's Smart Watch (aka MSN Direct) technology in his review of the Suunto n3. All things considered, he had nothing good to say about it. The summary is: Style: Clunky Battery Life: Too short News: Too short …

For those interested in such things, the folks who do Cheetah3D for the Macintosh just came out with a version that includes a hardware renderer. It's a fairly nice package in terms of features and it's hard to beat the $59 price.

There's a good article appearing in the New York Times that follows the discussion of the CIA and questions about the intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq. Much of this information parallels a discussion that Carol and I had with James Woolsey, the former Clinton CIA Director, and …

The venerable NPR program Car Talk has stopped providing streaming versions of their programs in RealAudio and has switched instead to Windows Media Player. As noted in the comments from the site, you can access WMP from the Macintosh, so they aren't cutting Mac users out. Interesting (and hopefully informative …

After noticing the new IBM advertisements touting the benefits of open source (check out the IBM Open Source page), I was intrigued to see that it took only days for the ads to generate an article in BBC News. Maybe they were having a slow news day. Perhaps they were …

For a little insight into the (much) younger generation, here's an article from The Guardian (in the UK) to mark the release of Jack Black's film School of Rock

On the anniversary of the explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia upon reentry to the atmosphere, the Washington Post has an article about Jon Clark (husband of one of the fallen astronauts) and his son, Iain. The article is a sometimes-unpleasant account of some of the family events that preceded …

It appears that Clear Channel Communications (the ones who brought you the Do Not Play list after 9/11), have done it again. In my beloved former home of Chicago, they decided to sell the traffic reports. Huh? Instead of hearing weather and traffic to O'Hare airport, you will be …

When I initially read this article from OverClockers (a generally-PC site about souping up PCs in all sorts of interesting ways), I thought that it was a hoax, so I delayed publishing anything here about it. My thoughts were confirmed, and although somebody did put a PC inside of a …

With the recent problems with the Mars Rover, Spirit, the fine folks at Wired did an interview with Glenn Reeves, the software architect for the Mars Rover. In it, Reeves describes the basic process of bringing the rover back on line and how they wee able to regain control. He …

If you're looking for an answer to one of those annoying astronomy questions (such as "Will the Galileo probe blow up Jupiter in a chain reaction?"), the Christian Science Monitor has an article pointing you at astronomer Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy web page. The page contains a wealth of good …

The big claim of cable internet access over services such as DSL is the faster download speed (DSL is often limited to between 512kbps and 1mbps, whereas many cable providers have 1.5-3.0mbps maximums). Security Focus is carrying an Associated Press article that discusses recent moves by Comcast to …

For those looking for a solid (albeit not comprehensive) list of errors and omissions in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, here's a pretty good one.

Those traveling on Amtrak in the north-east corridor will be happy to hear that the train service provider is expanding their WiFi experiment to include stations in: Boston, Providence, Wilmington, and Philadelphia as well as Penn Station in NYC. This according to an article from CNet.

The Wilmington Star is carrying an Associated Press article that describes the plans by Best Western to have all of their hotels in the US, Canada, and the Caribbean offering free Internet access by September 1, 2004.

Just in case you have been feeling abused because of Enron and Worldcom and various other accounting scandals and figure that they can only happen in the US, I'd like to remind everybody here about Parmalat, the Italian food producer that is in trouble in the EU for false accounting …

Wired reports that Friday of last week a Federal Judge has declared unconstitutional portions of the USA Patriot Act that ban providing "expert assistance" to groups declared as terrorist organizations. The provision was struck down as being too vague and flying in the face of the First and Fifth Amendments …

An article from Wired discussed rock artist Peter Gabriel and his move (with fellow artist Brian Eno) to encourage new artists to look away from the traditional record labels and toward a direct relationship with their fans via the Internet. The pair were stumping support at Midem (a music conference …

Atheros Communications, makers of WiFi chips, has announced a new single-chip WiFi solution implementing supports the 802.11g standard. There is quite a bit of buzz about this, due to the applications in consumer products and portable devices, where size and complexity are key factors. Did I mention they're scheduling …

Bob Massey of the Washington Post has a favorable review of Apple's new GarageBand (part of iLife '04). He ends the review with "The GarageBand name hides a certain irony -- it's hard to make a song sound any way but slick and seamless in this program. But this same relative …