As far back as I can remember, green beans were high on my “yuck” list. Yucky green beans took either of two forms. First was boiled: even if they started out fresh (canned and frozen were more usual), by the time they hit the table they’d had all the life boiled out of them and […]

If you will indulge me for a moment, gentle reader, I’d like to spend a few paragraphs doing something relatively silly and perhaps even futile: reviewing a product that has already been redesigned and replaced. There’s a method to my madness, though, and I trust you will find some of my remarks about the Kenmore […]

This one really has me scratching my head. Maybe I just don’t get something obvious, but regardless, I’m clearly outside the target market. What we have here is a table with a seamless, one piece surface, the middle portion of which heats up to become a grill, and in so doing, bows inward to prevent […]

There’s absolutely nothing practical about this, but you have to admire someone who goes to this much effort just to prove it can be done. Someone added 5 PCI cards to a PC, each with 6 USB ports, and used the power from all 30 of those ports to supply the power to heat a […]

Ordinarily, I’m very good with deadlines. I’ll stay up night after night, consume endless amounts of coffee, and push anything and everything out of the way to meet a deadline for a book or article. Sure, there are occasionally circumstances beyond my control, but I’m generally on time—and in fact I typically do my best […]

I’ve always had a bit of a hard time figuring out what my occupation is, even when I had a conventional full-time job. For the past 15 years or so, I’ve worked with technology in various capacities—computer graphic artist, tech support drone, product manager, project manager, consultant, writer, and editor. The common thread seems to […]