Gadgetopia

Introducing BunnyRegex: easy regular expressions, and mini-languages inside of PHP: Here's a great little regex library for PHP that uses a dead-simple syntax that someone should have thought of way, way before this. include("BunnyRegex.php"); $pattern = new BunnyRegex(); $pattern->bol() // ^ ->digit() // \d ->exactly(4) // {4} ->string('/') // / ...

Intel helps fingers type faster highlights a new product, Fastap, which has been developed by Digit Wireless that helps speed up text messaging on mobile phones. "Fastap was developed by former Apple ergonomic design boss David Levy as a way to make it easier to enter text using the tiny ...

Hardware as art: Microsoft meets Philippe Starck: Since Apple seems to have pulled a Microsoft, we'll balance that out with this story of Microsoft pulling an Apple. No, they're not going to over-price their products in a concerted attempt to achieve and remain at single-digit market share (sorry it ...

Apple profit rises 48 pct, helped by iPod sales: This is significant. I guess I can't taunt Mac users with "single digit market share" anymore, at least in the notebook market. Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's chief financial officer, said in an interview that the company had a "fantastic quarter," adding that ...

I love this. Here's how you approximate bookmarks in a text file being viewed in a browser: To quickly jump to a section, use the Find feature! Look to the right of the section you need to find its five digit "search code". Highlight all five digits of the code. ...

every number has its own significance: You need to know why all these numbers are significant. Really, you do. 6 is the smallest perfect number. 25 is the smallest square that can be written as a sum of 2 squares. 3367 is the smallest number which can be written as ...

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Spambot Hunters: Josh Clark is doing some crazy fun stuff to counter comment spammers on Big Medium. I love it. Big Medium counters this by covering its tracks, never using the same field names twice. Every time you visit the page, all of the field ...

On PHP: Matt from WordPress fame gets all uppity on PHP5. Fast forward 3 more years and PHP 5 has been, from an adoption point of view, a complete flop. Most estimates place it in the single-digit percentages or at best the low teens, mostly gassed by marginal frameworks. Even ...

How many people actually shut off JavaScript in their browsers? In the Web development world, you're constantly advised not to depend on JavaScript because "[insert double-digit percentage here] of Web surfers shut off JavaScript." I have never known someone who shut off JavaScript. I have used a lot of computers ...

High-tech 'repo man' keeps car payments coming: This seems like a really great solution to keep people honest about their car payments. A new gizmo is upping the odds that even the most hard-knock customer will come up with the car payment. Hooked into the ignition system, the gadget comes ...

Meet the Life Hackers: Here is scientific proof that bigger computer screens make you more productive. The stats are buried in another article about general productivity (I think -- I didn't read all of it). On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - ...

If you have a four-digit name (or less), there's a new pastime called "Vanity TinyURL." If you remember, TinyURL is a redirection service that cuts down any URL by keying it to a code at the root of the TinyURL site. They're up to four characters now, so you can ...

I'm a pretty forgiving person when it comes to customer service, and it takes a lot to piss me off, but Buy.com managed to do it today. My friend wanted to go wireless in his home, so I ordered a bunch of gear for him. I ordered the wireless cards ...

Cornell University isn't playing nice with its Apple-toting students, and they are up in arms. Sort of. Cornell is currently conducting a beta trial of Napster's music rental service, which only supports Windows 2000 and XP, leaving anyone with a Mac in their dorm room out in the cold. To ...

While I'll always be a little bitter about Gateway leaving South Dakota, they have one feature of their Web site which I adore: serial number lookup. Somewhere on the case of your Gateway machine is a sticker with a 10-digit serial number. It starts "00." You can input this at ...

One of the things that drives me nuts about Microsoft is the licensing. The other day, I found myself wishing for a book or a class on Microsoft licensing so I could understand it...then I realized how utterly absurd that was. Understanding licensing should not be a core competency of ...

My wife sent a Hallmark eCard to someone today. She picked a format then typed a paragraph or so of text. The length of her prose was nothing out of the ordinary. Hallmark then generated an email to the recipient and CC'd my wife. In this email was a link ...