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I tried a little experiment in 2008: living smaller. I caught public transport only. I got rid of extra lightbulbs. I baked my own bread. I froze my own dumplings. I didn't buy any gadget. I didn't buy any CD. I didn't get a flatscreen TV. No home phone; no home internet; no cable TV; no new art; no gin. Read more.

Wondering how to fully utilize that new iPhone, iPod or digital camera you got over the holiday? Check out the newly updated iPhone: The Missing Manual, iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual, and any of our award winning digital photography books. And don't forget you can Buy 2 and Get 1 Free by using code OPC10 in our shopping cart.

In my last post I talked about how anybody with enough money (a small 6-figure sum) could create a rogue certification authority (CA). This would allow them to generate certificates for any web site that seem to be genuine. That... Read more.

Let’s get this out of the way first thing. It’s Mah-tay, not M-eight. Like the drink, the creators of Mate, Nahuel Faronda and Laura Arguello, come from Argentina. If you’ve never tried Mate (the drink), you should - it’s tasty.... Read more.

In this interview Mike Mathieu, founder of Frontseat.org, discusses how he is helping to build “software for civic life”. Using publicly available data and web services (many of their applications use S3 and EC2) Frontseat creates simple, highly functional tools like Walkscore (rating neighborhood walkability) and Countmore (helping students in the recent elections decide which state to cast their... Read more.

Boxing Day, celebrated on the day after Christmas, is a British holiday that's migrated to Canada, and is slowly beginning to make inroads even into the United States. It had its beginnings in the late 18th century, when the landed lords of England, after having given one another presents after Christmas Mass began an interesting custom. After having received new dresses, dress suits, hats and so forth, they would go into their wardrobes and childrens' play rooms and find those things that they no longer wore or used or played with, presenting them as gifts to their servants and staff, a custom which eventually extended to giving inexpensive gifts and trinkets to their tenant farmers and needy villagers. Read more.

I'm just reading a Wendell Berry essay from 2000, entitled In Distrust of Movements, reprinted on a blog with the inspired name The Irresistible Fleet of Bicycles. I was going to just tweet the link, but realized that more people need to read this, and I ought to quote more extensively. (I hope that fans of Michael Pollan's books like... Read more.

2009 marks another year when Macworld and CES are scheduled for the same week. It'll be a great week for product announcements, but it'll also be a week of information overload. RSS feeds will overflow with gadget coverage. For those of us covering technology, it presents some logistical challenges, too. Which conference to attend? I'll be at Macworld again this... Read more.

Reading Om Malik's Nightmare on Tech Street piece, I wonder if we're actually just waking up from the nightmare. Yes, the abrupt collapse of demand for consumer electronics and their ilk will hurt tech companies--I'm bracing my own for the slowdown--but the icy bath that brings down a killing fever trades pain for gain. In a recent conversation with my... Read more.

Every one is talking about building apps in cloud or moving the apps to cloud. There are plenty of jobs on job boards looking for the people with the skills: "familiarity with cloud" or "expertise in cloud". The latest buzzword is "Cloud Computing". What is Cloud? Why all of sudden Cloud is a buzz? What are my options to move Java app to the Cloud? What are the features and limitations of the Cloud? How IaaS and PaaS will fit in the Cloud? Find the answers here or read more about cloud computing in our archives.

A year later, the IT industry was in the worst recession that it had faced in fifteen years, a time that became known as the Tech Nuclear Winter. Senior programmers with thirty years of experience and post graduate degrees - people who sat on standards committees boards and often served to shape the industry - could be found at coffee shops "working on their next projects" while waiting for a job to open up. Read more.

We now offer 700 books in DRM-free PDF format, including 130 of our bestsellers as Ebook bundles, which includes PDF, .Epub, and .mobi-compatible Kindle format. These can be easily read on the device and system of your choice, from your desktop or laptop computer, Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone or other mobile device. Also today, we've released all of our Head First titles in PDF format, and David Pogue's bestselling "iPhone: The Missing Manual," is now available as an iPhone App. Read all about it, and buy a few.

At the Program For the Future event commemorating the 40th anniversary of Doug Englebart's "mother of all demos" in 1968, I was privileged to hear an inspired rant by Alan Kay about the unwillingness of people to work hard to learn new skills. I'm quoting from memory, so the lines below are not exact, and there's no way I can... Read more.