The Academy Awards were on TV last night, and the many retrospective montages showing 80 years of film made me want to write something about why few of those movies are available legally online today. Remember all those promises back in the late 1990s about how the Internet would soon allow people to watch [...]

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The Japanese love beer and they love automatic vending machines. So, naturally, beer can vending machines are plentiful. But what if you want draft beer? The Japanese also have that covered: This little gadget automatically tilts your beer glass to the perfect angle while dispensing beer with just the right amount [...]

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  The architecture of Angkor (in Cambodia, the seat of the Khmer empire from the 9th to 14th centuries) reflects the unique sophistication of the Khmer culture.  For example, there are the “elephant gates” of Angkor Wat, the main temple of Angkor, which are built to accommodate royalty that traveled on… well… elephants. [...]

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One of Intel’s anthropologists, Genevieve Bell, gave the keynote speech at the Australasian Computer Science Conference last year. After the conference, she was asked if it would be fair to characterize her job as reminding American technology experts that all Internet users aren’t Americans. Her frank reply:
“[T]hat’s certainly one way of thinking about [...]

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During the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, China will be presenting itself to the world in part through the architecture of the Olympic venues. Many of the buildings are now nearing completion, and I’ve put together a small collection of my favorite publicly available photos from Flickr.
1. Beijing “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium
Photo by CATIC-TEDer
The most [...]

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Some Chinese bloggers are questioning whether a lunar photo taken by a Chinese satellite is real. The doubters claim that the photo was copied from an old NASA shot. The Chinese government has been quick to rebut the claims, pointing out moon craters that appear only in the Chinese photo and arguing they [...]

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India’s incumbent telecommunications company BSNL has just announced plans to deploy a mobile WiMax broadband network covering a region with a population of over 200 million people. Mobile WiMax (a.k.a. IEEE 802.16e-2005) is a technology for delivering very fast wireless data communications over long distances. Download speeds on BSNL’s network are expected to [...]

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Online social networks have their own cultures. Erica Naone of MIT Technology Review (TR) writes that social networking sites’ growth outside the U.S. has exploded recently, but different regions have adopted different sites as their favorites. I find it interesting how each site has developed and grown in its own way. The [...]

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Unofficially crowned most bizarre gadget this year at CES, the Sony Rolly is an egg-shaped MP3 player (with stereo speakers) which also “dances” in a unique and expressive fashion, by rolling around the floor and “flapping” its… um… ears. Users can create their own “motion files” using Sony’s Motion Editor software, and then share [...]

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I’m bored with Google’s U.S. year-end “zeitgeists” (no surprise that Paris Hilton is still a top search term in 2007) — but there are still some interesting tidbits in Google’s monthly Zeitgeist Around the World, which lists the top-gaining search queries in various countries around the world.
The results can be quirky and interesting. For [...]

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