Info Tech
Gmail IMAP
I am very excited about IMAP support on Gmail. Maybe it isn’t healthy for someone to be so excited about e-mail … but this is huge.
Why? Especially when I already have a reliable IMAP service I’ve been happy with for years?
Well, first of all, lets talk about why IMAP is different from POP. Most people […]
Camera Shopping
(Click here to see a side-by-side comparison of the cameras discussed in this post.)
Buying a compact digital camera is always a trade-off. In such a small box, if you stuff a feature in one side, another feature pops out the other end. That wouldn’t be so bad if companies were honest about the trade-offs they’ve […]
Wisdom of the Crowd?
In his book The Wisdom of Crowds James Surowiecki relates an anecdote about “Francis Galton’s surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the butchered … weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged.” While individual guesses varied widely, the median of the crowd’s guesses was spot-on. The implication being that […]
Easement
iPhone owners are up in arms about the fact that Apple blocked third party applications. Personally I think these people should focus their wrath squarely on the practice of SIM card locking which should arguably be illegal. I think the Brazilians have the right idea, with their anti-SIM locking campaign.
As John Gruber points out, the […]
Moon Map
Via How Design: “Moon Mapping from the U.S. Geological Survey Astrogeology Research Project.”
{design, maps, moon, astronomy}
Tweets vs. Lifelog
As of now I will stop posting tweets to this blog. Once again this blog will become a space reserved for long-form blogging. You can continue to read my tweets in the sidebar on the right, or over at my Twitter page.
At the same time, I’ve stopped using Twitter as a feed aggregator to create […]
Foreigner Friendly?
Every Taiwanese has a National ID Card 身分證 with its own unique number, not unlike a Social Security number in the US. The difference is that every legal permanent resident in the US also has a Social Security number, but foreigners living legally in Taiwan are given a different number. Instead of a National ID […]
Treo Woes
The Palm Treo is a decent device, but it costs twice what it should and it hasn’t been significantly upgraded in years. Unfortunately, I need one. I need one because I dearly depend upon my Pleco Chinese-English dictionary, which I use several times a day. I also need one because my Treo 650 suddenly died […]
Wikitization
Back in the old days, when Wikipedia was new, there were just a handful of rules, and one of the key ones was “Ignore all rules.” Or, more specifically:
If a rule prevents you from working with others to improve or maintain Wikipedia, ignore it.
Wikipedia has changed a lot since then. Just read Andrew Lih recount […]
.mac vs. web 2.0
A year ago I wrote about various alternative services I use in lieu of Apple’s .Mac suite of online tools. With Apple’s recent upgrades to .Mac, I thought it worth returning to the subject to see if there is any way I could justify paying the $99 a year for services I’m already getting elsewhere […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
