ben

Engineer Ben Kokes is a lot of things. He's an outdoor enthusiast. He's a Bronco mechanic. He's a tinkerer who builds electronic gadgets for fun. He's also in love.

I'll let him tell his story in his own words: "Once upon a time, a boy met a girl. Then a short amount of time later, the boy decided to design and build a ring for the girl, because doing things in the most complicated way possible is just what he does to show the love." To that end, Kokes made a ring. But not just any ring. It's a titanium ring with internal illumination.… Read more

NICASIO, Calif. -- Growing up in the 1960s, Ben Burtt was such a big "Star Trek" fan that when he went off to college at a school where he had no TV, he had his father record the audio from each week's episode and mail it to him.

Sitting in his dorm room, Burtt would listen to the shows with headphones on, taking in each new episode with no pictures. But he didn't need the video to understand what was going on. "It was so vividly portrayed with excellent sound effects," Burtt said, "… Read more

- Check out The Ben Show tonight at 10PM on Comedy Central for the season finale! Then watch his clips on ComedyCentral.com!

- Follow Ben on Twitter.

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The one thing everyone wants to know about Christian Gheorghe's life is the one thing he won't talk about.

In Silicon Valley, where the top talent at the hottest companies -- the Zuckerbergs, the Brins, the Cooks, and so forth -- are household names and paparazzi bait, Gheorghe's name isn't in play. Though he is a Silicon Valley CEO, his company, Tidemark, makes enterprise-focused performance and financial management applications, certainly not the sexiest of products.

But to a category of people who matter a lot in Valley -- the VCs -- Gheorghe is a bona-fide hero, … Read more

Potentially keeping the user entertained for hours, this app offers great graphics and is packed with humor. Talking Ben the Dog Free is a great alternative to the typical games and activities found in entertainment applications, and might be interesting to those who are looking for something different and need something to keep them occupied.

Talking Ben the Dog Free appears to be a pretty big app for a time-killer. After you install the main application, another download, of about 35MB, is required to actually use the program. The total size of the application tips the scales at around 50MB … Read more

I already know what you're thinking. I'm like that sometimes.

You're thinking: "What is he, high?"

You're thinking that because Ben Curtis, he who once used to invade your home through your TV and say, "You're getting a Dell, dude," believes he can make a comeback and resurrect the brand.

You're also thinking that because Curtis was once arrested for trying to buy marijuana in New York.

On the other hand, it's clear that Dell isn't in quite the shape that it used to be, and vultures -- … Read more

Great audio can be expensive, but Ben Carter's ambitious Kickstarter project aims to make a serious dent in the price of quality turntables. A $150 pledge secures an Orbit belt-drive turntable, fitted with an Ortofon phono cartridge. As I write this blog, and just a few days after the Kickstarter project was launched, Carter has already passed the halfway mark to reaching his $60,000 goal!

I spoke with Carter on Thursday; he has a background in marketing and consulting, and Bob Hertig is handling the engineering for the project. Orbits will be manufactured by U-Turn Audio in the … Read more

Talking Tom and Ben News is a spinoff of the popular Talking Tom app, in this case using the two characters Tom (a cat) and Ben (a dog) as "newsreaders." The app is downloadable from iTunes for free, and installs cleanly.

Talking Tom and Ben News consists of a launch screen showing Tom and Ben sitting at a news anchor's desk. If you say something to them, they will repeat it as a conversation between the two of them. You can also upload a video or photo that is displayed as a small movie on the "… Read more

PARIS -- Some in France and Germany want laws requiring Google to pay for the content it hosts on Google News, usually snippets of text with a link to the site where it was published. But Google, unsurprisingly, thinks that's a rotten idea.

"It's bad for publishers in the long run," said Ben Gomes, the Google vice president in charge of search, speaking here at the LeWeb conference. "The concern is with laws like this, is it clamps down on what you can do, because it breaks the freedom of the Internet."

Instead, he … Read more