It's an oh-so-basic blog feature that's been missing from Blogger since the beginning of time.  Finally, they caught up with the rest of the world and announced they now support static pages.  Until now, poor Blogger users had to hack their templates half to death to build static pages and even then, they would still pop up in your blog's feed and other odd places.

Netflix has been pestering me for ages to signup for a 14-day free trial.  Considering their fairly high-quality Internet streaming service, I decided to give it a try over the holiday season.  As expected, Netflix asks for a credit card so they can convert your free trial into a standard subscription.  I had no intention of going that route and planned to cancel my account after my 14 free days were up.  Only Netflix counts to 14 differently than the rest of us.

I admit it: I’m attracted to shiny new tech objects.  Fortunately I’ve learned to (sometimes) curb my desires and not (always) buy the latest iThis and eThat.  But I do have a remarkable collection of defunct digital widgets and gizmos from the last 20 years of working and playing in high-tech.  My basement runneth over.

We recently made an effort to clear the cruft, but wanted to avoid simply sending it all to a landfill.  eBay, Amazon and Criagslist were out as we lacked the time to post, package and ship dozens of gadgets.  Instead, we found two excellent, environmentally- and socially-conscious options.

I've seen some crazy tech designs in my life.  For the most part, I like designers that ride on the bleeding edge -- they move gadget design forward; new and better tech gadgets are born as a result.  But unless this unit comes with Bluetooth speakers that float along side it, this MP3 player will not be one of those forward-moving gadgets.

Drupal’s Views module is hugely powerful, but not always pretty.  Exposed filters are no exception.  The Views Filter Pack claims to do this but has some serious problems, including a lack of activity in the issue queue for the past three months.  This article gives a quick look into a new module I built to help improve the user’s experience with exposed filters.

I’ve been doing it for more than 20 years now, playing a sport that few had heard of.  Even my parents hadn’t seen an ultimate game until they came to watch me at a tournament in the mid 90’s.  Beyond the underdog attitude and the slacker social culture that surrounds ultimate, there is a crucial piece that separates it from other sports: Spirit of the Game, also known has good ol’ fashioned fair play.

Representatives from Google, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia are meeting at the Vatican to help the Church better understand the Internet.  That’s good since the Vatican seemed unable to do a basic Internet search.

Chris Wilson at Slate Magazine recently wrote an article criticizing WhiteHouse.gov for its move from a proprietary content management system (CMS) to the open-source Drupal CMS.  Unfortunately, Mr. Wilson has his facts wrong.  Let’s go through his arguments one at a time.

Criticisms of Google data aggregation and privacy policies abound.  In hopes of stemming some of that negative press, Google recently announced the Google Dashboard, to “offers a simple view into the data associated with your account.”

While cleaning my office – a once-a-decade event – I came across a receipt from 2 Dec., 1998. It was for a 10.1 GB hard drive costing $245. Last week I bought a 1TB drive – 100 times the capacity – for just over $90. Though Moore’s law originally predicted processing power, it’s often quoted for any tech-related increases. In this case, storage per dollar increased 27,000% over roughly 11 years – it doubled every 16 months – even faster than Moore predicted!