Author: Chris Dodds

  • Holiday Gift Guide 2012: Mobile Worker Edition

    There’s something about traveling for work that hardens a person and makes them hate their fellow man, at least for the duration of the trip. The stress of getting from point A to B tends to bring out the worst in people and it’s just an unpleasant experience for everyone involved.  Get out of my […]

  • Game review: Eufloria HD is a relaxing, ambient strategy game

    When most people think about strategy games, they probably imagine scenarios pitting orcs against humans, or the U.S. versus the U.S.S.R, or maybe the Vasari versus the Advent. What they probably don’t think of is space battles between rival groups of plants, but that’s the premise of Eufloria HD, a real-time strategy(RTS) game recently ported […]

  • How technology companies are improving voice recognition software

    While voice recognition software has certainly improved in the two decades, it hasn’t exactly been the blockbuster tech that Ray Kurzweil predicted. My first experiments with the technology were playing around with Microsoft’s Speech API (circa Windows 95) and early versions of Dragon Naturally Speaking. Both were interesting as “toys” but didn’t work well enough […]

  • OLPC’s sci-fi inspired tech replaces human teachers with software

    The wise sage, Derek Zoolander, once asked: “How can we be expected to teach children to learn how to read if they can’t even fit inside the building?” Depending on the context, that might be a fair question, but let’s extend it further. What if there is no school building? Or even a teacher? For […]

  • Game review: Letterpress is an addictive word game crippled by Game Center glitches

    The rise of touch-based gaming has brought on a lot of interesting takes on old games as well as completely new gaming ideas, but browsing through Apple’s App Store for word games, there are really only four options: Scrabble, crossword puzzles, hangman, and the various clones of each. Even the popular Words With Friends is just a […]

  • Game review: Super Hexagon requires your full attention and brain capacity

    Many of the best video games are immersive. They pull us in, disconnect our brains from the real world, and let us pretend, at least for a while, that we are wizards, superheroes, or Italian plumbers. Some game-makers achieve this effect by using fancy graphics or creating expansive, complex environments. Others, like Terry Cavanagh (who […]

  • How to delete application caches in Mac OS X

    If you’re struggling with a crashing Mac app or just trying to clean-up the remnants of an uninstalled program, deleting application caches can be a good place to start. Application caches are used by both native and third-party applications to store temporary information (like a recently visited webpage) and speed up load times. In general, […]