Travels with Rhody

I’ve never written a song in my life until this weekend — and by the standards of my composer and musician friends, I still haven’t. But after getting the $4.99 Garageband app for my iPad 2 yesterday, I wanted to see how hard it would be to record a little ditty using the built-in recording [...]

It was a perfect Bay Area day today — low 60s and sunny. So I loaded up the Camelbak with icewater and camera gear and Rhody and I headed over to Redwood Regional Park, in the hills above Oakland. I made a video of the hike using the iPad 2 and iMovie. Check out the [...]

A mockingbird has taken up residence on this corner of Potrero Hill. He (I assume it’s a he) starts singing every night around 3:00 a.m. and keeps going until noon. I’ve seen him perching on telephone poles and satellite dishes, but sometimes he also hides in the trees up on the hillside.
I captured a bit [...]

People often ask me whether I have favorite apps to recommend for the iPad. I’ve written three roundups on this subject: 26 Apps to Drive Your iPad Wild, 10 Fantastic Photo Apps for the iPad, and iStocking Stuffers: The Best Apps for That iPad Under the Tree. But I thought it would be fun and [...]

I took my mountain bike out on a ride around San Francisco yesterday, and somewhat unintentionally, I think I wound up tracing much of the route of the San Francisco Marathon. I realized this when I got home and saw from the readings on Everytrail—the GPS trip tracking software I’d been running on my iPhone—that [...]

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My fun digital project for this week was learning how to use Google Building Maker, a tool released last month that lets anyone model 3-D buildings using Google’s aerial photographic data, then submit the finished models for inclusion in Google Earth.
Google has already populated the urban cores of many cities in Google Earth with 3-D [...]

Larry Hardesty, an old friend and colleague from Technology Review (now with the MIT News Office), has turned me on to a new local jazz-fusion group that I’m really excited about. Ra Quintet is their name; Larry describes them as “Bach meets Bird meets Black Sabbath,” or if you prefer alliterations from a little deeper [...]

When I set out to write “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” two weeks ago, I really meant to put all seven projects into one column. But I’m famous around Xconomy for my inability to say anything briefly. If 800 words are good, then 1,600 words are even better—that’s my motto.
The point being that [...]

Whether the fall is back-to-school season for you or not, there’s always more to learn. In last week’s column I outlined three fun weekend projects involving new technologies for digital self-expression. My suggestions covered art (digital “finger painting” with an iPhone app called Brushes), writing (”lifestreaming” with Posterous and Friendfeed), and photography (building three-dimensional photographic [...]