News and Views
Subservient Chris Shakes His Moneymaker for the New Year
Have you ever done anything embarrassing for money? Trading in time for working at a job you hate probably doesn’t count (we’ve all done that); I’m talking about something a little more… freelance. I knew this kid in seventh grade, for instance, who would eat disgusting concoctions (like ketchup and cricket milkshakes) if the price [...]
How to Give Your Home Office a Steampunk Look
Steampunk is one of the more popular artistic themes currently being applied to modern home offices. The mixture of technology, science, and vintage antiquities makes steampunk all the more appealing to many geeks. Steampunk itself is a popular genre of science-fiction commonly referred to as speculative fiction. Much of the look and feel of steampunk [...]
How (and Why) to Back Up Your Data
I, like most people, like to think of the work that I do on my computer as pretty important to me. As a result, losing that work, be it a thousand lines of fresh source code, new graphics that took my art-inept self hours to create, or a tiring paper for school, would be absolutely [...]
Five Ways to Sell Your Old Electronics
Selling you old electronics is a great way to fund your next gadget purchase, build up a savings account, or simply make some extra money when you need it most. Electronics are notorious for dropping in value in a relatively short amount of time. This means that your window of profitability fades soon after purchase. [...]
Five Things You Should Know About Pawn Shops
Pawn shops have been around in one form or another for the past 3,000 years. They offer services similar to those of modern banking institutions including loans, consignments, and storage. A pawn broker has to wear several different hats including merchant, loan officer, banker, and even historian. A good pawn broker buys items for a [...]
How to Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence Using Your PC
Did you know that your PC (Windows, Linux, or OS X) can help in the search for extra-terrestrial life? As long as your processor and/or GPU is free to crunch large chunks data at some point during the day, you can participate in one of the largest and most successful extra-terrestrial research projects currently taking [...]
Five Everyday Products Made Possible by NASA
NASA has accomplished a lot since its founding 53 years ago in July of 1958. In addition to sending humans to the Moon, NASA has also been behind some of the biggest technological breakthroughs of our time. Many of these advances can be found in products we use as part of our daily lives. For [...]
Boycotting SOPA Supporters is All or Nothing
Frequently controversial domain name seller Go Daddy recently came under fire for publicly supporting the United States House of Representatives legislation known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Go Daddy appears to have reversed course and is listening to customer concerns. Several other companies are still listed as supporting SOPA. Assuming you might have [...]
I Wish You a Merry Christmas
Since Thanksgiving, howling Arctic blasts had pummeled the cabin’s sturdy door all night, every night, as if to seek entrance. Was this simply a reminder from the great, white north that something was coming — something big — and that the time for preparation was at hand? The dawn of a new day would soon [...]
Crowd Funding is the Future of Technology
Simply saying that the future of tech is in the cloud only tells part of the story of where the technology industry is heading in 2012. One might say the heart of any startup is in how it receives the funding it needs to get started. With the rise of crowdsourced funding sites like Kickstarter [...]
