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Media & Tech

5 eBook Apps that Amazon and Apple Will Fear

How do you autograph an ebook? by Daedalus Howell Dec 29, 2011 – 03:40 PM Daedalus Howell   Given Amazon’s pre-Christmas blitz and Apple’s prowess with any object they care to precede with a lowercase ?i,? there’s a significant chance that you’re either reading this on a Kindle or an iPad. Dozens of e-reading devices…

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Media & Tech

Siri, Please Teach Google Voice to Listen

Sometimes using one’s smartphone is like playing a game of, well, ?telephone.? Half the time no one can hear you and when they can, the message gets lost in translation ? even when it’s not actually being translated. I’m convinced that mine is actually a ‘smart-ass phone? given how it willfully drops calls, truncates texts…

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Media & Tech

Getting Siri-ous

Building real-time voice-recognition into our gadgets has been a holy grail for technologists ever since an onscreen superhero commanded an artificial intelligence to do his bidding in some sepia-toned sci-fi serial. Who this first human-computer interlocutor was, exactly, is lost to the annals of speculative fiction, though its echoes can be heard from?Star Trek?to the…

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Media & Tech

iCloudius: Apple’s Man in the Sky

When it rains it pours for Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The lauded gadget guru qua rainmaker came out of medical leave to formally introduce attendees of Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference to a bevy of new products, among them the much anticipated announcement of the iCloud. Apple’s own spin on so-called cloud-computing, which, sans the…

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Culture

From Kindling to Kindle

Will the future of reading affect the future of writing? James Joyce, it is said, became so disgruntled while drafting his first novel that he threw it on the fire. His girlfriend rescued the work-in-progress from the flames, and the subsequent rewrite became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Such acts of…

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Media & Tech

Will the future of reading affect the future of writing?

James Joyce, it is said, became so disgruntled while drafting his first novel that he threw it on the fire. His girlfriend rescued the work-in-progress from the flames, and the subsequent rewrite became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Such acts of literary self-immolation and redemption could only occur in our once-analog…