I have a problem with my laptop: it doesn’t provide sufficient warning when the battery is about to die. Yes, there is a tiny indicator icon in the systems tray, but who the hell’s going to notice something this small in the corner of the screen when they’re busy working? Inevitably a low-battery warning [...]

I just read this story at CBC.ca:

NASA managers decided to ground their shuttle fleet on Wednesday after a piece of insulating foam fell off Discovery during lift-off.
“Until we fix this, we’re not going to fly again,” shuttle program manager Bill Parsons said.

Bummer.

Technorati lists the biggest blogs in the blogosphere, as measured by links, meaning the blogs that have other blogs linking to them. The top 10:

Boing Boing
Instapundit
Daily Kos
Gizmodo
FARK
Engadget
Talking Points Memo
Davenetics
Eschaton
dooce

I only recognize a couple of them, and I don’t read any of [...]

Seven words you can’t say in kindergarten, a short, instructive video.
(via DiVERSiONZ)

I saw Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine last night, a documentary about the 1997 chess match between Garry Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue. Kasparov lost and then claimed IBM cheated. IBM’s behaviour was indeed suspicious. They had something like 30 grand masters as ‘consultants,’ but you have wonder if some of these guys [...]

Tags: chess, deep blue, kasparov, movie reviews

I just read that the U.S. wants to extend daylight savings time:
It would mean people would turn their clocks forward one hour on the first weekend of March [instead of April] and “fall back” on the final weekend in November [instead of October].
It’s supposed to save energy, but really it’s the answer to the question [...]

I enjoyed every aspect of Paul Auster’s novel, The Book of Illusions. It has tragedy, humour, romance, mystery, and a fantastic ending. It’s about a guy who deals with a personal tragedy by obsessively researching the films of an obscure silent-movie actor, and then writes a book about it. Which may not sound exciting, but [...]

For the next day or two, those subscribing to any of our RRS feeds might notice several small updates to Steel White Table and wonder what’s going on. Some apostrophes, quotation marks and other symbols were converted to questions marks during the recent WordPress upgrade, and we’re in the process of manually fixing these errors.