Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Popular Science Magazine Archives Go Online For Free

Popular Science magazine has put its entire 137-year history of issues online for free.  In partnership with Google, the magazine is offering a search tool that will allow you to read anything it ever published.  Here’s an example of a publisher who actually knows what it is doing in the 21st century.  There are very [...]


School Guy Brags About Watching Kids with Laptop Cameras

The show is called Digital Nation. This segment is called How Google Saved a School. Well, really? How did it? Come on now, Frontline. Let’s get real. There’s an assistant principal bragging on video about how he watches the students through their laptop cameras and finds out if they are using their [...]


Reading On a Kindle Is a Pleasure

After two years of reading reviews, watching products come out and compete, listening to people gripe about DRM and ebook pricing, I jumped directly into the fray and opted for the Kindle from Amazon. I am completely and utterly smitten with the thing.  It feels like a magic book.  No – more like a printing [...]


Barnes & Noble Nook is a Dreadful Failure

I’ve been so waiting with my bated breath and all for this magical Nook machine from Barnes & Noble.  I was in a right dither tonight about an hour and a half ago as I shoved my reading glasses into my pocket, put my regular glasses on my face and piled into my car for [...]


Film About Blue Brain: Attempt to Build a Working Brain Model

Using IBM computers, Dr. Henry Markram is building a model of the human brain that he hopes will take about 10 years to complete. Filmmaker Noah Hutton is chronicling the endeavor in an ongoing documentary that will be finished once the brain model exists. This is one of the most fascinating and important [...]


Amazon and Macmillan Raise eBook Prices

There’s been a huge battle of the ebooks going on between Amazon.com and publisher Macmillan.  Last week, Macmillan, in response to rotten Apple’s announcement of $14 and $15 ebooks on its new iPad, insisted that Amazon give Macmillan the right to choose its own higher ebook pricing for the Kindle ereader device.  Amazon got peevish [...]


Apple Declares War on Free Web Content

It’s hit me what I really can’t stand about the new Apple iPad.  It’s been mentioned by most of the reviews of this new tablet device, but I don’t think people are really getting the scope of what Apple is up to.  The iPad, like the iPhone and iPod Touch before it, does not support [...]


I Take it Back: Apple Tablet is Dopey

So after all the hoopla the Apple company has decided that it’s a good idea to sell an iPod Touch that you can’t carry.
The just-announced iPad is big, with a fullscreen display instead of widescreen, has no camera, and cannot multi-task.  So only one application at a time will run.  The fullscreen thing may make [...]


Apple About to Announce Extraordinary New Tablet Device

Apple really could be preparing to announce something pretty extraordinary for content publishing, creation and consumption today.  Its widely rumored tablet device will very likely put most other ebook reader devices out of business simply because the Apple product will be a real computer, useful for reading and for creating.  It will most likely build [...]


Polaroid Gets Smart – Brings Back Classic Instant Film Camera

Polaroid has used the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to announce a new line of classic instant film cameras!  Called the Polaroid PIC-1000, the camera will work with 10-packs of instant film just like the great old Polaroid cameras of the past.  This is a very smart move by a company that looked [...]


Remember the Book?

Remember the book?  Of course you do, because you have plenty of them in shelves, half-read, dusty, bent, torn, coffee-stained, wine-colored, smudged, smelly, misprinted, broken and cherished. They catch your glance as you walk from one room to another, reminding you of a year or a moment when you were doing something else but had [...]


Problem With Nook eBook Reader?

I’m looking at this new e-reader from Barnes & Noble called the nook and I’m a little worried.  It’s that split screen.  The top is an e-Ink display for reading your books.  But the bottom is a color LCD.  Look at that picture.  I don’t know about most readers, but I certainly don’t want that [...]


Cellphones are Destroying People

Look at that cover.  Look at exactly what’s going on there.  Makes you almost cry, doesn’t it?  It better.  Because if it doesn’t, then baby you’ve got it coming.  Chris Ware, one of our finest cartoonists did this cover for the New Yorker and made a comic strip for the issue.
I see people crossing streets [...]


NASA Makes a Free iPhone App

NASA has released a free app for the iPhone that offers dynamically updated information, images, and video from many of its ongoing missions.  NASA seems to be suffering through a confused decade in which it wonders what vehicle should replace its aging shuttle fleet, whether to dump the International Space Station into the ocean to [...]


Barnes & Noble eReader Device Might Blow the Kindle Out

Amazon’s Kindle could be headed for the woodpile.  The new Barnes & Nobel ereader device is coming at the end of November.
The new device is called the nook. Like book nook, I guess.  But this thing has a color touch screen virtual keypad like an iPhone and it displays book pages on an eye-friendly E [...]


International Space Station May Be Dumped Into the Ocean by U.S. Congress

Embedded video from <a href=”http://www.cnn.com/video” mce_href=”http://www.cnn.com/video”>CNN Video</a>
The International Space Station which has taken 11 years and $44 billion to finally bring to a state of completion may be scuttled when its funding runs out in 2015. How about that? One of the greatest achievements in human history – greater than the building of [...]


Amazon Shows Us Why DRM Must Go

Last week, Amazon.com unwittingly dealt an enormous body blow to the concept of Digital Rights Management (DRM) by remotely deleting legally purchased copies of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from all Kindle ebook devices.  The excellent TeleRead site devoted to all things e-book and e-reader has a very well-considered post about the dangers of DRM and [...]


Amazon Deletes Purchased Copies of ‘1984′ and ‘Animal Farm’ From Kindles

We have totally had enough of Amazon.com at Candlelight Stories and have completely removed them from advertising space on this site and permanently severed our ‘associate’ relationship with the company.  The reason is simple.  Over the weekend, Amazon went into customers’ Kindle ebook devices and deleted purchased copies of George Orwell’s classic novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four [...]


Amazing Pictures of Space Mission to Hubble

These are incredible, huge, and crystal clear photographs of the May 2009 shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.  The telescope is the greatest astronomical instrument ever devised and this is its last repair.  The mission was very dangerous because the Hubble orbits in an area with a high density of space junk.  A [...]


Apple is a Nightmare of Censorship

Look at the image to the left.  If that image disturbs you to the point of banning the comic book, you are unintelligent.  No doubt about it.  It disturbs Apple so much that they’ve removed the comic book from their App Store.  Clear censorship.  The comic book is by author Cory Doctorow who has written [...]