I’ve just published a new article over at The Blogfathers regarding online privacy, photo sharing, and blogging about your kids. Please visit and share your comments. Here’s an excerpt: I’ve often considered the important issue of online privacy for myself and my family. I’m not concerned with any of the crazy kidnap/murder/stalking scenarios that the [...]

If you’ve been noticing an increase in the number of smudgy fingerprints on your computer screen, it may be because your young children are spending more time online. With new services coming from companies like Lego and Disney that are aimed right at them, it might be wise to keep some glass cleaner nearby. — [...]

I’m just Mr. Software lately. Every morning my kids ask me about the weather so they can get dressed. This is my first attempt at building a simplified weather forecast page for them. It’s the weather report for today and tomorrow in a kid-friendly format. Once you’ve got it bookmarked, your kids are just one-click [...]

I’ve just rolled out an API for the Big Huge Thesaurus. Need synonyms? Give the free API a try.

I can see why people become podcasters. It’s the toys. I bought some recording gear recently, my very first recording purchase, actually. I’d been trying to do some screencasts on another blog and just wasn’t satisfied at all with the sound quality. So I spent about $170 and bought a condenser microphone and a pre-amp/mixer [...]

The LA Times ran an unusual editorial yesterday. Here’s the first sentence: Many publishers consider the Internet, and Google in particular, a greater threat to their livelihoods than Osama bin Laden. — It’s not journalism – Los Angeles Times A greater threat than Osama bin Laden. But in the very next paragraph it says that [...]

A man spends 10-20 hours every day with a woman in a virtual world. He “marries” her. Is he cheating on his flesh and blood wife? Of course he is. He may not be having sex with his virtual mistress but marriage is about a lot more than who you have sex with. Sitting alone [...]

I’ve been a fan of The Art of War—the famous Chinese military treatise written in the 6th century B.C.—for a long time. Particularly, the Lionel Giles translation which was originally published in 1910 and is now in the public domain (and in digital e-book form thanks to Project Gutenberg). I’ve been wanting to do a [...]

Zooomr is still not live and the situation doesn’t look good. Their database server crashed just 15 minutes after Mark III launched. In their latest blog post, Kristopher makes a desperate plea for hardware and help. Is this the end of Zooomr? I hope not. But whether it ever comes back online or not, recent [...]

I wish Zooomr the best of luck launching Mark III. At the same time, as a developer interested in their open API, I can’t help but wonder about the cause of the complete failure of Mark III to launch anywhere near on time. It’s now six days late (not counting the aborted attempt in April) [...]