Think about something as simple as a household appliance.  Got it in your mind?  Good!  Now think about all the materials it is made out of.  That's metal, plastic, glass, heating elements, wiring, etc.  Lots of different stuff, right?  Now think about how many people were involved in making these things.  Think about the mining of raw materials, getting the materials into a usable form, the manufacturing of the actual product, etc. 

This is what modern industrialization has created!  An amazingly effective system that produces everything around you.  I once watched a TED talk on the subject (forgive me, I don't remember which it was), and the speaker talked about how production has changed from expert craftsmen creating everything by themselves to modern production, which is segmented into small, simple tasks spread to millions of people.  He talked about how it would be nearly impossible to recreate something from scratch because every step is so desensitized to the others.

Well, one man has (somewhat) done this nearly impossible task.  Thomas Thwaites decided he wanted to make a toaster from scratch.  And to him, from scratch meant from scratch: from mining and refining the material to the final product.  The article I read from Gizmodo explains his struggles.  Some of the most difficult parts seemed to be refining the iron for his toaster into steel and finding the right designs.  The article is a great and interesting read, so you should go read it.  His final product was a toaster that melted about 5 minutes after it was plugged in.  But still, the 9 months put into this project is amazing, and proves how amazing industrialization has become.

Here is a link to the article: http://gizmodo.com/#!5794368/why-its-harder-than-you-think-to-make-a-simple-toaster

A while ago I found an enteresitng application for the Mac.  It is called BetterTouchTool.  It is an application that can add gestures.  It can add gestures to the trackpad, a magic mouse or a keyboard.  I have been using it with my laptop's trackpad, and it is amazing.  With 55 different gestures, as well as 5 modifier keys, 275 different gestures could be added to do things such as scale text, scale windows, control volume, open applications, etc.  The application is very user friendly, and the possibilities it has for gesture based computing are amazing.

Here is the link to a download: http://blog.boastr.net/

In class, we have discussed web browser rivalry quite a bit.  About whether Firefox or Chrome was better and about how hardly anyone likes IE.  Well, I found an article about web browser popularity, and it organizes it graphically in a really nice way:

http://gizmodo.com/#!5788665/the-popularity-of-web-browsers-visualized

It is interesting to look at the graph and see how the popularity and features have changed with web browsers through the years.  I had almost forgotten about Netscape, literally the browser back in the day.  The graphical organizer makes it easy to analyze the data on the subject and see the rise and fall of browser empires.

An article on Lifehackers brought up an interesting topic: how much does gaming actually cost?  Yeah, consoles range from $180 for the Wii and $300 for the PS3 and the Xbox, but that doesn't count other costs.  Then there is the cost for the games and the chordes and the extra controllers and the additional features etc.  When it is all taken into consideration, the cost of console gaming is way more than it initially looks.  Controllers can be between $20-40 and games can be anywhere from $30-60. 

Take the the collection in my dorm right now.  Currently, side by side, my roomate and I have and Xbox360 next to a Wii next to a PS2. 

Now, the PS2 is no longer worth very much.  If I were to sell it, I might get $100.  Combined, my roommate and I have about 5 games for it, which are probably less than their original price.  Lets estimate conservatively at $100.  Then there are the controllers and memory cards.  Lets say total it is about $250 in price.

Now take the Wii.  It costs about $180.  We have probably over 20 Wii and Gamecube games for it.  So, since some of them are old and maybe not worth much and other are more expensive, lets give them a modest average of $25 a game.  That is $500 of games.  Add in the controllers and nunchuks, that is an ultra conservative $100.  So, for our collection, that would be $780.

And then there is the Xbox.  It costs around $300.  Two controllers and an HDMI cord totaling about $80.  Counting the 4 games and 1 online game, it would be about $150.  So, total, we have $530.

So, total for the console games, my roomate and I have around $1500 in stuff.  In comparison, on my computer, I have 7 games that I have spent a total of around $30 on (thank you Steam for having amazing sales!) plus all the free online games that I want.  It really makes you wonder about whether console gaming is still going to keep itself up being so expensive.

I remember when I first got my iPhone and was super bummed out that it wasn't Flash compatible.  "Everything on the web runs on flash!"  I said to myself. "How am I going to be able to do anything?"
I was wrong.  Since that moment several years ago, I have run into a problem with not having flash on my iPhone maybe twice.  It turns out the big hubbub about Apple's mobile devices not having Adobe Flash wasn't that big of a deal.

Well, I found an article on TechCruch that agreed with me.  It refuted the arguments that the iPhone or iPod touch or iPad were any less without Flash.  The fact of the matter is that not much is soley run on flash anymore.  Yes, YouTube and some other video players are Flash based, but they are accessible by other formats as well.  Also, HTML5 is on a great rise, and will most likely replace Adobe Flash in its functionality on the web in the years to come.  So, when Steve Jobs decided that his products didn't need Flash, he was right, and I see no reason why it wont stay that way.

TechCrunch article: http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/28/apple-flash-suck/