technical

I have always believed that the old and the new can coexist with extreme joy.

Microsoft appears to believe this too.

In a promotion that melds the dying world of magazines with the living world of Wi-Fi, select copies of Forbes are enjoying a Wi-Fi router, which oozes 15 days of free Wi-Fi through T-Mobile.

This fetching gift was first noticed by someone on the Slickdeals forum -- handle BigMacG4 -- who wondered whether anyone else had been fortunate enough to be gifted this way.… Read more

If you've never been to a wedding that ended in a punch-up, you really haven't lived.

There's always something so bracing in seeing people devolve to their true, animal state, drunk and flailing their fists.

Someone at Microsoft clearly has recent experience with such a thing, as the company Monday released a new ad that describes the constant spat between fanpersons of Apple and Samsung as a battle between two tribes of the insane.

We are at a wedding. Everything seems fine, until someone with a very large Galaxy phone gets in the way of someone with … Read more

Planning a burglary always seems to take so much time in the movies.

Joints must be cased. Hoods must be bought. Cars must be tuned to perfection and driven by people who aren't terribly clever.

One man, though, allegedly used technology to bypass some of these irritants.

As the Kansas City Star reports, Steven Alva Glaze stands accused of 14 counts of criminal damage, attempted burglary and real, actual burglary.

The owner of one of the homes believes that Glaze found a simple way of discovering if she and her son were home. He allegedly placed a GPS device … Read more

Having faith in other people is often as sensible as having faith that your bus will arrive on time.

People are, by their very nature, mercurial. The current world of supposed sharing often makes them more selfish, as they must spend more time considering how to present themselves publicly at all periods of the day.

It's somewhat surprising, then, that Apple still enjoys the loyalty that it does.

Wander past any Apple store and there always seems to be half the neighborhood in there.

And whenever surveys of brand loyalty are performed, Apple so very often seems to be … Read more

So you've had a couple of beers.

You meet a nice person of your target sex. Well, they seem nice, given that you've had a couple of beers.

At some point, one of you raises your beer cup to clink cups with the other.

The minute the cups clink, you are indelibly linked. At least you are if you're using Budweiser's special Facebook-friending cups.… Read more

If a man in a bar offers you a laptop for $70, you know it's probably stolen.

Yes, he might be wearing glasses and look a little like Bill Gates, but, please think, it's probably stolen.

Similarly, if someone tries to sell you an iPhone for a radically reduced amount, suspicion should surely be your guide.

Police in San Francisco are now using a slightly suspicious method to test your suspicions to the full.

Officers in plain clothes (which presumably means plaid shirts and 7 For Mankind jeans) are wandering around areas known to be popular for stolen … Read more

Some people drive high.

They shouldn't, but they're high, so they don't really know what's good for them and what isn't.

Should they get stopped by police, the long nose of the law can sometimes sniff the presence of marijuana in their car.

Should they happen to have nosed their way into some cocaine, there might be traces of white powder around their nostrils.

As yet, though, there hasn't been a machine that can detect the presence of such drugs on one's breath, as there is for alcohol.

Scientists in Sweden, however, believe they have made some progress in creating such a device.… Read more

The iPhone is fragile.

Oh, I don't mean in the marketplace. Necessarily. No, it seems that if a stripper sits on it, Apple's fine machine might break.

I say this not from personal experience, but from the evidence apparently presented by Kenny Powers on Twitter.

In what seemed like a nifty piece of ribald marketing, Powers -- star of HBO's "Eastbound and Down" -- used Twitter to declare his iPhone only marginally operable after being crumpled by a stripper's behind.… Read more

You know those people who wave their iPhones about everywhere they go, in a desperate need to record every moment of their lives?

You're one of them, aren't you?

At least there's a very good chance you might be, if Apple's new iPhone ad is to be believed.

For, in an attempt to re-pluck your emotive twang-elements, the company claims that every day more people take pictures with an iPhone than with any other camera.

I am not sure how the company knows that, say, my engineer friend George doesn't take 65,000 pictures on … Read more