Here are three great reasons to buy a new laptop now. These don’t even include the fourth great reason — you want one! The Great Recession The “Great” Recession has pushed so many buyers out of the marketplace that manufacturers, distributors, and resellers are all pushing their margins to razor thin levels — or even operating below margin just to keep the doors open. Unless you are one of the 9.2% of Americans, who are currently unemployed, this can actually be to your advantage. Not only are the store aisles Read More

A recently released TED Talk given by Kevin Slavin of Area/Code, a company that makes “cross-media games and entertainment”, demonstrates the extent to which our world is being shaped by algorithms. He uses an example of financial markets 70% of which are apparently ran by so called “black box trading” or “algo trading” where algorithms decide on what to buy or sell, when, and for how much. He mentions the “flash crash of 2:45”, a sudden 5 minute dip in the markets the cause of which is still being debated. Read More

It is interesting how luddite the world of DJing can sometimes seem considering how electronic their music is. When optical discs (or CDs) were emerging on the scene we had many DJs resisting the trend believing that CD technology makes things too easy compared to what is required to physically manipulate a vinyl record. They also romanticized about CDs removing the ability to “touch the music” that is playing like they with vinyl. I suppose they were oblivious to the fact that they weren’t quite touching the music given that Read More

According to some religious myths it is the “word of god” that created “the heaven and the earth”. Ironically, there may be some truth to the idea that “words” have so much power. There is a source code to the universe. Science is the process we use to reverse engineer it. Every new piece of the source code of the universe that we discover gives us that much more power over the universe. We can modify the source code to suit our needs and desires and build new programs to Read More

A great thing about modern smartphones is that you don’t have to settle for pre-installed apps like we once had to on our old cellphones. This makes them much like PCs, where we could always hunt down for new programs to try out. Your stock Android browser might be adequate, but there are better Android browsers out there, and Dolphin is one of them. At first sight Dolphin reminds me a lot of Chrome on desktop computers, with its tabs and main toolbar looking very similar. There is even that Read More

According to a study done by Science Express reliable and constant access to online information is affecting how we use our memory. Instead of remembering facts ourselves we remember where we can find those facts. This phenomenon was observed even before the age of the internet when people operating in groups know that they can get some information they need from specific persons in that group (someone that may be an expert on a given field). Instead of bothering to remember said information, they just remember the person from which Read More

Macs are a pretty powerful platform to compute on out of the box, but there are ways you could be taking advantage of them that you don’t even know about! Do you want to pimp your mac? Check out this collection of tips and tricks for Mac users: 1. Enable “Tap to Click” Regular laptop users click a lot. Unfortunately, the Mac trackpad requires a pretty decent amount of pressure to make a click. Mac users can bypass this by enabling the “tap to click” feature in system preferences –> Read More

Koopik has just launched their new daily deal service nationwide.  The new service aggregates daily deals from thirty-five different sources, so you visit one web site instead of dozens.  Even better, you can subscribe and have Koopik pick (or “pik”) deals for you and send them to you via one daily email. Koopik’s core strength is filtering out the deals you don’t want to see and filtering in the deals that you do want to see.  The first filtering is by location.  Once you set your location, you only see Read More