year

I am jealous of people who have a kitchen space where every last thing is organized. It's not as easy to accomplish as it seems. I'm not talking about the obvious things, like where to store the food processor when not using it. Rather, I am thinking of a small, seemingly minor thing that can lead to clean, efficient kitchens: the flatware drawer.

My flatware drawer houses my forks, knives and spoons, but in a haphazard manner. Yes, I have a utensil separator, but really it's more bother than it is worth. Besides the fact that it … Read more

Congratulations to Werner Vogels, the now legendary CTO of Amazon and one of the principle drivers of the Amazon Web Services vision. InfoWorld announced Sunday that Werner earned its CTO of the Year award. The accolades are rolling in from all over, but I think all agree that this was a well-deserved recognition for Werner and his team. In fact, Werner's recognition of the team effort that led to this award just makes him that much more of a class act.

What leaves me shaking my head, however, is that it took this long to see the incredible feat that Amazon pulled off, and the leadership that pushed a retail goods company to see compute capacity as a logical extension of their business.… Read more

It's year-end time, and the critics are weighing in with their year-end lists, from the maddening mix of obscure and popular at Pitchfork to the back-and-forth over at Slate.

I'm not a music critic, so I don't get to listen to hundreds of new CDs for free. That means I've missed plenty of the music on these critics' list, though I know I hate No Age and am indifferent to Girl Talk.

Even so, without checking the data, this year seemed pretty good: TV on the Radio, Beach House, and Portishead all made strong impressions, and … Read more

Today we have a fantastic interview with Prince of Persia level designer Michael McIntyre from Ubisoft. It's been nearly 20 years since the first PoP game, and Ubisoft has taken the series in a radically different direction. Unique art design and a new, fluid acrobatic system combine to make the newest PoP installment an instant hit. Check out the game here.

On the second half of the show, NDC and CMC help us to tackle some Calls from the Public. Big ups to Dr. Ethan for getting his 404 fix not once, but twice daily. We're not encouraging "click fraud" but we wouldn't criticize listeners who delete their entire 404 podcast collection and re-download everyday.

NDC recounts her close encounter with Danika McKellar, known for her unforgettable portrayal of Winnie on The Wonder Years. Apparently she's really into Math. CMC tries to explain that Seth Rogen's drastic weight loss is for an upcoming film role, not because he finally stopped taking bong rips for breakfast.

Holiday spending on electronics for family members remains high on the to-do list, according to a survey by IDC and the National Research Network (NRN).

According to results from a survey of more than 3,000 consumers, 62 percent indicated they planned to spend the same amount or more on electronics for family members this holiday.

Those surprising results come as big-box electronics retailers face a challenging time. Best Buy announced a 77 percent drop in earnings and call for employee buyouts earlier this month and Circuit City filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last month.

Nonetheless, consumers are maintaining their … Read more

I've reviewed a gazillion speakers, and I can't remember more than a few dozen of them. They're just a string of big and little boxes; some sounded really nice, most were merely OK, and surprisingly few were truly awful.

Magnepan's speakers stand out from the crowd first because they're so thin, the MG 3.6/R is 1.5 inches thick, and standing 71 inches high, it's really tall. But it was the sound that blew me away. It's an incredibly clear, high-resolution sound, and sounds decidedly unspeakerlike. That's why it's the Audiophiliac's Speaker of the Year.

As I said in my Home Entertainment magazine review "That's why the MG 3.6/R will sound like a revelation to first-time listeners; the gap between the sound of real, live music and recorded music feels a whole lot smaller. The speaker projects a more full-bodied, three-dimensional soundstage than any box can; correction, the MG 3.6/R's sound was bigger and deeper than I've ever heard from a speaker retailing for less than $50,000. With the MG 3.6/R instruments and voices emerge closer to their real-life scale and size. Clearly, Magnepan engineers changed the way speakers move air."

Instead of the usual woofer and tweeter, the MG 3.6/R uses three "planar-magnetic" drivers: a 55-inch tall aluminum foil "ribbon" tweeter; a 199-square-inch 0.5-mil-thick Mylar midrange diaphragm; and a 500 square inch Mylar woofer. The speaker is essentially a panel that moves air, and projects sound from its front and rear surfaces. The drivers are Magnepan patented designs, all manufactured at the company's factory in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. American hi-fi at its best.… Read more

Tom and Rafe name their favorite technology of 2008 and pass along some faves of the listeners as well.

Listen now: Download today's podcast… Read more

LA Auto Show a mix of highlights and doom, Green Car of the Year, your cell phone becomes a traffic probe, Chrysler offers a "Web Edition".

• Full LA Auto Show coverage

• Nissan 370Z has rev-matching manual gearbox

• Billion dollar deal to create places for EV's to plug in?

• Chrysler "Web Edition" package debuts

• Nokia and Navteq turn cell phones into traffic probes

Update 8/7/09: Animal Collective's "Merriweather Post Pavilion" is my favorite album of 2009 so far, and I don't imagine that will change. By the rules of the game, I can't have two Animal Collective records on the list, so I changed my 2004 entry to Arcade Fire's "Funeral." I also made some other changes to recent years' favorites.

I stumbled across an excellent post on Google on Nick Carr's blog today, and scrolling through past entries, found this intriguing list of his favorite album from every year since he … Read more