I regret to report that both I and my column are going on a bit of a hiatus, as I’ve been seated as a juror on an extended civil trial in Boston. To fill some airtime, I thought I’d direct you to a few old columns that are special favorites of mine or that have connections to current events.
By the way, if you really have the urge to catch up on all of my past columns, just get a copy of Pixel Nation: 80 Weeks of World Wide Wade, an e-book published by Xconomy last month. You can download a free PDF version here or buy a $4.99 Kindle version at Amazon’s Kindle store. But for today’s installment, I decided to revisit four pieces from the past year or two and offer a few thoughts on each with the benefit of hindsight.
Public Radio for People Without Radios
February 13, 2009
This column was all about the Public Radio Player (then called the Public Radio Tuner), one of my favorite mobile applications. It turns my iPhone into a radio that can pull in a live stream from almost any NPR station in the entire country, not to mention dozens of on-demand shows like Car Talk, Fresh Air, and On Point. The news update is that the fine folks at the Public Radio Exchange (who will be taking part in Xconomy’s Mobile Madness company showcase next week) have recently come out with several great new apps, and are working on more. First, there’s the new, improved 2.1 version of the Public Radio Player itself, which went live in the iTunes App Store last week and has great features such as a sleep timer and a built-in Web browser. Then there’s a dedicated app for This American Life, the cult-favorite documentary radio show from Ira Glass at Chicago Public Radio, which comes with access to the entire 15-year archive of shows. Finally, PRX is working on a dedicated app for my favorite NPR station, Boston’s WBUR. That’s due for release sometime this spring.
The 3-D Graphics Revolution of 1859
December 19, 2008
I was never much of a collector until I started buying nineteenth-century stereoscope views a couple of years ago. We’re used to thinking of 3-D as a recent technological advance—the province of high-tech filmmakers like James Cameron—but these old cardboard-mounted image pairs (taken through separate lenses a few inches apart, like our eyes) remind us that the quest to
