Author: Andrew Kozloski

Yesterday The Apple Blog announced that the new iPad was going to be offering 30,000 free eBooks. The thing is, the free books are all hosted at Project Gutenberg (and have been for years) so any device with a web browser can access these eBooks, even a Blackberry. The headline, “iPad to Offer 30,000 Free e-Books at Launch” actually downplays their generosity. In point of fact, you can go read the 30,000 books RIGHT NOW on whatever machine you are reading this article! Apple’s offer is so downright selfless that you don’t even need to buy the iPad, you can still get the 30,000 books anway by clicking…

Customers of AT&T will soon be able to buy into an option that makes the phone work the way it’s supposed to, for the one-time low price of $150. It’s called the Microcell–just set up this little baby wherever you happen to be–it supports up to 4 phones at a time and it taps into an existing DSL or Cable connection, becoming its own AT&T mini-tower. (DSL or cable connection not included, AT&T subscription also not included). This has been in limited rollout for a few months in Raleigh, NC and one or two other cities, but it’s being made available nationally now, and you can almost hear the…

Image by 1up.com Every now and then the question of whether video games should qualify as art or not comes to the fore. A few years ago Roger Ebert famously concluded in his book “Answer Man” that games cannot be art because there is choice involved. Why anybody would want to know what an old man with bad taste in film thinks about video games is beyond me, but there you have it. Since then many have pointed out inconsistencies in his characterization of things, chiefly, that he used plays of all things as one of his main examples, and plays are all about choice: who is going to play the characters, what is…

For some time now there has been talk of Google just going out and building experimental fiber optic networks in the US to test out the infrastructure, and the response has been extraordinary. Including cities renaming themselves to Google to draw the company’s attention. Other mayors have swam with sharks and dove into frozen lakes. Personally, I think we could use more guys like these in the federal government. Google’s official blog announced last night that the deadline for applying to get the free ultra-fast internet is now over. As of that time, last night at 5:26 PM, they had received nearly…

Pictured above, an unmanned drone taken from the military blog Armybase.us. Washington’s unmanned drone airplanes will not just be Washington’s anymore. Robert Gates, the U.S. Defense Secretary announced plans to start selling and giving them to other countries, including Pakistan. In the past they had been sold only to Italy and Great Britain. South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Canada, and Spain have also shown interest, as well as a whole host of other countries to whom nobody would ever sell them. Never mind The Missile Control Regime pact from 1987, which makes the sale of autonomous fliers…

Using a combination of night vision, radar and motion sensor cameras, GM cars will soon be packaged with windshields that highlight important information right in front of you, with lasers no less. Other cameras pointing at your face can tell where you are looking, making your own car yet another place where you are no longer safe from surveillance….

It looks like the iPhone, already a kind of digital swiss army knife, will someday have walkie-talkie capabilities and be able to serve as a kind of spontaneous hub where information can be sent automatically to everyone in the group. Patents dating as late as last November, but only unearthed this week, describe the new functions….

Hewlett-Packard has just rolled out its newest design in the way of flexible display screens, or “digital paper,” as they are sometimes called. This is part of a collaboration with Arizona State University, and it began quite a while ago but no one has seen or heard anything about it for a couple years at this point. This week, however, a Dutch blog called Hardware.info got a short video of their latest prototype. Fortunately, the presenter was speaking in English….

Japan continues its long trend of inserting computers and cyborgs into all aspects of daily life, as it is announced that special versions of the Nintendo DS will be distributed to school students at the elementary and junior high levels. No word on how soon all the teachers will be fired….

Break out the cake and the candles, March 21st is Twitter’s 4th birthday.Yes, that means Twitter is an Aries. …