Nontechnical people — for example marketers or small business owners — increasingly get the feeling they should know more about technology. And they’re right. If you can throw up a small website or do some real number-crunching, chances are those skills will help you feed your family. But how should they get started? —Ask Slashdot…
I recognize that people who sell laundry detergent are more interested in selling soap than using gender-neutral language, but as a married man who does his own dang laundry, I was a little miffed by the language that presumes the winner of this marketing stunt will be female. If the team tracks a consumer to…
I’ve been a fan of the faux-historical Boilerplate website for many years, so I was very happy to see this news. J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot banner are tackling the tale of a robot set in the Victorian Age. Paramount has picked up rights to “Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel,” a graphic novel-picture book hybrid…
Gameplay in Cow Clicker is insultingly simple — Bogost has described it as “Facebook games distilled to their essence.” Users obtain a cow on which they can click every six hours, and every time they click, they earn more opportunities to click their cow or their friends’ cows. Users can buy custom “premium” cows or…
I’m very happy with yesterday’s update of the Kindle app, which added an inline dictionary. Now I am seriously considering it for assigning class texts. I do wish that the Kindle offered a few more things. The ability to tag or otherwise sort comments, and email just one set of tagged comments (so I could…
This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It…