We take it for granted that we almost always have cell service, no matter where you go around town. But there are places — the desert, the forest, or the ocean — where you might not have cell service. In addition, there are certain jobs where you must be able to make a call even […]
I ran into an old episode of Hogan’s Heroes the other day that stuck me as odd. It didn’t have a laugh track. Ironically, the show was one where two pilots were shown, one with and one without a laugh track. The resulting data ensured future shows would have fake laughter. This wasn’t the pilot, though, […]
Considered by many to be just a dull output for sequential text, the command-line terminal is a veritable canvas to the creative software developer. With the cursor as the brush, entire graphical user interfaces can be constructed, or even a basic text-based dashboard on which values can be updated without redrawing the entire screen over […]
Predicting the future is a dangerous occupation. Few people can claim as much success as Arthur C. Clarke, the famous science and science fiction author. Thanks to the BBC and the Australian Broadcasting Company, we can see what Sir Arthur thought about the future in 1964 and then ten years later in 1974. Perhaps his […]
To the average person, walking into a flour- or sawmill and seeing dust swirling around is unlikely to evoke much of a response, but those in the know are quite likely to bolt for the nearest exit at this harrowing sight. For as harmless as a fine cloud of flour, sawdust or even coffee creamer […]
Until the release of Windows 11, the upgrade proposition for Windows operating systems was rather straightforward: you considered whether the current version of Windows on your system still fulfilled your needs and if the answer was ‘no’, you’d buy an upgrade disc. Although system requirements slowly crept up over time, it was likely that your […]
Near my childhood home was a small river. It wasn’t much more than a creek at the best of times, and in dry summers it would sometimes almost dry up completely. But snowmelt revived it each Spring, and the remains of tropical storms in late Summer and early Fall often transformed it into a raging […]
If legend is to be believed, three disparate social forces in early 20th-century America – the temperance movement, the rise of car culture, and the Scots-Irish culture of the South – collided with unexpected results. The temperance movement managed to get Prohibition written into the Constitution, which rankled the rebellious spirit of the descendants of […]
In the early days of the World Wide Web – with the Year 2000 and the threat of a global collapse of society were still years away – the crafting of a website on the WWW was both special and increasingly more common. Courtesy of free hosting services popping up left and right in a […]
It was such an innocent purchase, a slightly grubby and scuffed grey plastic box with the word “P O L A R O I D” intriguingly printed along its top edge. For a little more than a tenner it was mine, and I’d just bought one of Edwin Land’s instant cameras. The film packs it […]