I thought I would start a fresh series of Gadgets That Are Stupid: gizmos that seem to do things right but suffer a design flaw that renders them hazardous to one’s health, or peace of mind, or that of one’s partner. Here’s the first entry: An alarm clock. On the surface an excellent purchase: It even … Read more
Here’s a neat piece of software that does something useful: Prepares regulation size passport or ID photos from your snaps. Passport Photo costs $10 and will let you crop or extract from existing photos before saving the photos in a batch that can then be printed out from your home printer or sent to the … Read more
A few weeks ago I wrote about steganography — the hiding of information inside other stuff, usually referring these days to hiding data inside photographs (FEER column here, WSJ.com here; both subscription only). One usage I missed was in trying to track down paedophiles. So instead of bad guys hiding their bad stuff inside other … Read more
Steve Rubel tells of the imminent launch of Konfabulator for Windows, “a wildly popular OS X application that lets you run little apps called Widgets“. From what I can see Widgets are small applications that sit on your desktop and do things like collect data, tell you the time, inform you of new email, that … Read more