Posts filed under “tech”
Apple’s Devices Are Made of Blood and Misery. As Are All The Rest. So Do Something About It.
I’ve been following Mike Daisey’s work for quite some time, and was bummed that I missed his one-man show, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, when I visited New York this past November. Despite my weariness with This American Life, this week’s Daisey-centric episode is a must-listen. It includes an interview with Daisey, as well as [...]
The Best Podcasts of 2011, and The State of the Medium
Photo by HoundCat on Flickr. In the middle of the last decade, there were bright hopes that podcasts represented a new form of citizen broadcast media. But over the past few years, that promise seemed squandered, as rebroadcasts of public radio shows dominated iTunes’ top 10 lists, crowding out independent efforts. It’s understandable: producing a quality [...]
Hacker Jailbreaks a Kindle Touch
I’m a big fan of the new generation of e-ink Kindle devices, but Amazon’s hardware, software and commerce ecosystem is the most constricting walled garden of all. Though the functionality of the devices is limited by design, the Kindle 4 and the Kindle Touch are lightweight and relatively affordable tiny computers. (They’re also fantastic if [...]
Hey Facebook: Gender Identity Isn’t a Circuit
While setting up a “person” page for my writing and/or vanity this morning, I briefly became hopeful that Facebook finally was allowing individuals more choices for gender identity than male or female when I encountered a dropdown box suggesting this was the case. Facebook’s refusal to allow more inclusive and accurate definitions of gender identity is a [...]
Steve Jobs Is Dead, And So Is My Dad: Two Very Different Silicon Valley Stories
My Dad died five years ago, and I often dream of him. Two nights ago, I awoke from a dream in which I was attending a 70th birthday celebration in his honor. In a large field in Cupertino, the size of a high school football field, hundreds of people had come to salute him, for [...]