FAIL

I’m pretty much out of ports on my TV. I’ve got a Motorola set-top box/DVR from ComcastXfinity (a crappy early model with hardly any disk space), a PlayStation 3, an Apple TV, and a Roku 2XS. I need the ATV for AirPlay from my iPad or MacBook Air, plus YouTube; I need the Roku because…

Well, 2011 has given way to the New Year, and AT&T have failed to fulfill their promise to upgrade the Android software on all of the 4G phones which they sold in 2011. Back in the summer I embarked on an experiment to see what life outside Apple’s walled garden would be like. The results…

The amazing thing about this crisis is the extent to which suffering and responsibility are completely out of proportion with one another. If you think about the people who are really suffering in the developed world today, none of them were executives at major banks, none of them were politicians involved in the construction of…

Like many people, I decided to buy an HP TouchPad last weekend. In my case it was mostly nostalgia: my first mobile wireless data device was an HP-200LX with a RAM Data Modem. But I digress. So last Sunday I went to Best Buy, and struck out. Fry’s ditto. So I came home and decided…

In an uncharacteristic spasm of organization, I just piled up all of my t-shirts on the bed and sorted out the non-keepers. There were 33 of them. Quite a few passed the first test – “Do I like this shirt?” – but failed the second: “Am I really going to wear this in the future?”…

Via Andrew, this graph shows the US Incarceration Rate from 1880 to 2008: As the CEPR report cited in the original post points out, the financial cost of this absurd policy is astronomical. “[A] reduction by one-half in the incarceration rate of non-violent offenders” would save U.S. state and local governments at least $14.8B/year, and…

Here’s a weird unintended effect. Yesterday morning I was working on my iPad using the BlueTooth keyboard. When I was done, I chatted to a colleague while I turned off the iPad and put both iPad and keyboard in my shoulder bag. Suddenly music started playing from my bag! Then stopped. Then started again! Eventually…

More from James Fallows: Counting the new Republican Senator Scott Brown from Massachusetts, the 41 Republicans in the Senate come from states representing just over 36.5 percent of the total US population. The 59 others (Democratic plus 2 Independent) represent just under 63.5 percent. (Taking 2009 state populations from here. If you count up the…

I’m heading to China for 19 days, and so the big activity this weekend is packing. I found myself enumerating all of the electronics gear that I’ll be taking: Apple MacBook Air – my personal laptop Dell E6400 – my work laptop Power brick for the MacBook Air Power brick for the Dell Mouse –…