The Technology Chronicles
News and views from the digital frontier.
“There isn’t much proof that I exist”: Meet the London bike courier conquering Twitter’s underworld of parody accounts
Follow @calebgarling It was 4:30 AM on a Friday and the light on my phone began to blink. An email. I rolled over to check it. “Holler!” it read. “I run Vice_is_Hip, what do you want to chat about?” He identified himself as Jimmy Avis. But I didn’t know anything else. After almost half a Read More
Is the mystery barge really just a Google party boat?
The mystery surrounding the barge under construction near Treasure Island took another turn Friday when television station KPIX, quoting unnamed sources familiar with the project, claimed the box-like structure will house luxury showrooms and a party deck for tech giant Google to market Google Glass and other gadgets to invitation-only clients. The station’s sources claim Read More
Lines shorter as iPad Air goes on sale in 42 countries
As they usually do, Apple customers queued up at stores in 42 countries around the world Friday as the company kicked off what it hopes is an “iPad Christmas” with sales of the latest model, the iPad Air. But the lines were reportedly shorter and the atmosphere more muted than in September, when the new Read More
Techies advocate ditching work/life balance
At a recent software programmers conference at the San Francisco Grand Hyatt, one senior engineer, Nick Floyd, stood up to give a talk on the work/life balance. Ditch it, he said. The idea of work and life being separate is outdated and impractical, he claimed. Instead, Floyd proposed something new: Nerd Life Balance, Read More
Google unveils long-awaited Nexus 5 phone & KitKat software
When Google introduced the Nexus One in 2010, its first flagship smart phone, the tech press corp breathlessly wondered if it was the “iPhone killer?” Nobody really talks that way anymore. It turns out there was no iPhone killer. Instead, the battle for mobile supremacy evolved into a war of attrition, as manufactures and Read More
The ‘next’ David Pogue and Walt Mossberg arrived a decade ago
Follow @calebgarling Yesterday The New Yorker ran a piece entitled “Waiting For The Next Technology Critic” in which it ruminated on the sort of smart voice that would eventually replace The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and The New York Times’s David Pogue. Both made big names over the last decade as preeminent consumer tech Read More
Twitter more visual with automatic photo, video previews
Twitter became a little less text-centric and more visual Tuesday by embedding automatically displaying photo and Vine video previews in its tweet stream. Twitter updated its website and its iPhone and Android apps to make photos and videos easier to see than before, when users would have to tap a link. Now, “previews of Twitter Read More
Google adds image & video editing tools, as it strives to drive Google+ use
The rise of digital and mobile photography has made it a snap to capture hundreds of high resolution images every day — or thousands in a long weekend. But it’s presented the parallel problem of sorting, editing, storing and sharing files that can quickly fill hard drives. Google thinks it can ease the quandary. Moreover, it Read More
