A year ago I said that HDTV didn't make sense for me. But with the arrival of Tivo HD, the dollar weakening and making dramatic price drops less likely, and the Red Sox making the playoffs, I decided to make the jump and bought a Philips 42".

The biggest problem …

Trying to play the very first HD DVD that I've rented ("The Host"), I received an XBox blade popup that said "Can't play this content. Reason code: C66700B." Does anyone know what this is? Please don't tell me there are incompatible HD DVD formats or DRM restrictions that say "Oh …

I've got a few prototypes of content-aware image resizing running and the results are interesting, perhaps primarily because the algorithm works so well that usually you say "eh, what's the big deal?" Unless there are faces in the photo, but more on that later...

Coincidentally, I ordered some prints to …

I've never played Halo nor Halo 2. I've now played the first level ("Groundfall" or somesuch) of Halo 3. Gotta' tell you: my initial impression is that it's not as entrancing as Gears of War or Call of Duty. The cutscenes make absolutely no sense to a newbie, the level …

Excel 2007: The problem is that the 3rd column contains =a2*b2 ... (the first 500 numbers for 2\^32 pass, though...)

 13
 26
 49
 52
 81
 87
 93
 98
104
107
115
117
119
123
162
169
173
174
186

etc. etc.

Is there a pattern in there?

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casey chesnut has been \<a href="http://www.mperfect.net/blog/browse.aspx%3fbid%3d633261847266875000"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">playing around with augmented reality for the UMPC. I think he's going strictly for a technology demo, but the physical tags he's constructed seem to be about the right size …

Intel's announced the availability of a prototype C++ compiler implementing Software Transactional Memory, one of the central topics of this brilliant \<a href="http://www.knowing.net/ct.ashx%3fid%3df405eb51-5e89-4e9d-864f-529914e78017%26url%3dhttp%253a%252f%252fwww.dotnetrocks.com%252f"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">.NET Rocks show.

That's exciting, although …

I love this idea: a magnifying glass with a built-in expert system for identifying bugs. That's a nice combination of form and function. My thrill was clouded upon reading the that it only identifies "more than 50 real live bugs;" if you're going to do the hardware and firmware for …

I'm not one of those people for whom the task of composition is a somewhat mechanical extension of increasingly detailed outlines. Nonetheless, research consumes between 80-90% of the time I spend on a technical article (note I said time and not effort -- subjectively, writing text is two or three times …