Ideas and Discoveries

With Hack Day fast approaching and my gadget-building reveries fading, I’m toying with the idea of making a web gizmo to generate machine tags.

User communities own and define technologies as much or more than the inventors. A piano from 1817 is the perfect example.

An Acropolis visit is an object lesson in the value of quiet design decisions amid colossal projects.

Nuit des Musées shakes up stodgy preconceptions about museums and reveals them as lively, relevant places.

I’ll be at Hack Day in London next month. Want to team up to build something outrageous?

Developer returns from vacation, discovers sky has not fallen.

The Paris Marathon prompts your correspondent to ponder what makes creative people tick in adversity.

In a promising concept that needs some refinement, YouTube DJs go head-to-head in a fight to create the best mix.

I kicked Microsoft Word to the curb seven years ago, and my plain-text world has been more productive ever since.

I was flattered last week by several pointers from various “design inspiration” sites which featured this site as a destination.

A creative totem distracts you from the mundane and everyday just long enough for your mojo to kick in and save the day.

Currency may well be the most important travel interface. In that match-up, Europe wins the coin toss against the US, whose coins border on the unintelligible.

“Avoid premature optimization” is one of the axioms of software development. It’s basically fancy talk for “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

The Seine overflows its banks, a sure sign of spring.

I expected nostalgic photos, but instead got insight into how technology works to spark design innovation.

Audio-obsessed museum visitors prefer to listen to their audio guides rather than look at the art, revealing a lesson in interface design.

An “empathy suit” helps designers discover how well their creations work for aging customers. Are there clues here for software and web developers, too?