Mark Andreessen’s new project, Ning, went live today, just in time for the Web 2.0 conference, where it is likely to be a hot topic. If you haven’t yet seen any opinions about Ning, it’s because Ning is a little hard to grok at first glance. I made an attempt to grok it today, and here’s what I came up with:

In an amusing review, StereoTimes, compared the the Sonic Impact T-Amp (shown here), a new $30 dollar digital amplifier, just slightly unfavorably to audiophile equipment costing $5000. The T-Amp’s perceived clarity allows sound-staging and stereophony to reach hallucinatory stereoscopy: near-field listening with the Celestion F15’s revealed a stereo illusion that would satisfy even the most […]

George Pendel’s Strange Angel is about pioneering Rocket Scientist Jack Parsons, who played a pivotal role in the creation of Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL). A self-taught explosives expert, Parsons also led a double life: He was fascinated with the occult, and was chosen by Aleister Crowley to lead the local chapter of the Ordo […]

Andy Hertzfeld, one of the creators of the original Macintosh computer, recently published a book, Revolution in the Valley, about his experiences at Apple in the late 70s and early 80s. The book is full of fascinating anecdotes and valuable lessons about software management, many of which seem awfully familiar to me. Andy’s love of […]

If you don’t already use bookmarklets, del.icio.us or an RSS reader, then the last few paragraphs of this post will be difficult to decipher, so I’ll start with some background: del.icio.us is a tagged bookmarking service (with a clever, hard-to-spell, and now much mimicked URL) that makes it easy to share bookmarks among multiple computers, […]

55 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena by Michael Bach

Wiring, a sister project to processing, is a programming environment and electronics i/o board for exploring the electronic arts, tangible media, teaching and learning computer programming and prototyping with electronics. It illustrates the concept of programming with electronics and the physical realm of hardware control which are necessary to explore physical interaction design and tangible […]

Some amazing glass art by Josh Simpson. Here’s what he has to say about it: I like to pack Planets with more information than the naked eye can possibly see. I’ve always been fascinated by technology. I couldn’t begin to build a micro-chip but some of the spaceships circling my planets probably have as many […]

From Boing Boing. My favorite, of these print-and-cut Victorian-style paper toys by Marylin Scott-Waters is this nifty Dream Theater. The marble mice are kinda cool too. Aren’t moving parts great?