Author: Amy Vernon

I was struck by something when I began reading Digg’s list of its “Ten stories you’ll be sorry you missed this year.” None of the stories had anything to do with tech. Oh, how times have changed. When Digg launched in 2004, it was almost completely a tech site, much like its predecessor, Slashdot. It was a place where people shared, commented and voted on the latest and greatest stories in tech and science. Part of the reason Digg quickly expanded its reach is because it did grow beyond its roots. By 2007, the Offbeat category was extremely popular and memes and quirky humor was as much at home on the site…

Laugh synth for iOS has just been released, compatible with both iPhone and iPad. Laugh Synth makes it possible create laughing sounds with a simple touch of the screen to control different characteristics of the laugh. Users can even sample their own sounds to create custom laughs. This is as easy as recording any sound you want (laugh, scream, burp, meow, whatever) and trimming to only use the portion of the waveform you want. Touch the screen to control the pitch and the level of effects present in the sound. Add reverb or other effects to further enhance the laugh. Have a look at the app by watching…

In the not-too-distant past, Macs were a relative rarity in the laptop bags of those attending open source conferences. Not so anymore. I recently had the chance to go through some download data from SourceForge for an article on the site’s blog and talk to Community Hacker Rich Bowen about what the data meant. Windows downloads led the pack by far, and Mac and Linux download levels swapped positions over the past couple of years. Bowen told me out he saw people whipping out MacBooks at ApacheCon and other places he never would have seen them a few years back, anecdotally supporting the overall trend…

There’s a lot of hand-wringing over the so-called “dumbing-down” of America. We don’t read, we can’t write except in and LOLcat-speak, we barely know who’s president. Technology often takes the blame for some of this, with video games and the abbreviated speech of texts and Twitter squarely in the sights of our educators. But e-readers are beginning to create new readers and are getting more people than ever to buy books and read them. We’re buying 57 books a second in the United States, between the paper and electronic varieties. And though sales of print books have been declining (not precipitously,…

Remember the amazing self-portrait of the monkey that was making the rounds the other week? The Cliff’s Notes background: A photographer, David Slater, left his camera unattended for a little while while he was in the forests of Indonesia. A female black macaque got curious, as monkeys are wont to do, and picked it up. The image accompanying this article was among the results. The photo, first published in the Daily Mail, quickly made the rounds on the Internet and a monkey star was born. This photo was published simply EVERYwhere. TechDirt wrote an interesting piece about the copyright issues…

For the first time, we’re spending more time in mobile applications than surfing the web via desktop or mobile browsers, according to a new report. It’s worth noting that this report comes from Flurry, whose business model rests on ever-increasing mobile app use. (From the company’s site: “Flurry increases the size and value of mobile application audiences, helping more than 40,000 companies in over 75,000 applications on iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7 platforms.”) But even so, the news is likely either true or pretty close to it. Consider that the sales of smartphones and tablets…