One day,Erica and her husband took the kids out for ice cream, and she noticed a big advertisement hanging above the counter. It said, “Bring in your digital photographs. We’ll put them on ice cream cakes.” She found the manager and asked what was involved. “It’s simple,” she said. “Just bring...

PHP is mainstream. Wherever you look, you will see PHP meet - ups, job openings, and major companies using this open source language to support their business. An open source language with such humble beginnings is now heavily rooted in the enterprise world. PHP is brushing shoulders with the “ the big kids ” now — the...

Pick one. Test-drive a few luxury sports cars. A Ferrari, a Lamborghini, a Maserati maybe? Or compare the top First Growth Bordeaux from 2005. Maybe an Haut-Brion, Latour and Mouton-Rothschild? Alternatively, go play in a social media application. Perhaps creating your profile on Facebook or blogging about your passions or sharing...

LEGO has been a part of my life since I was about four years old. My first sets were basic LEGO SYSTEM sets. However, I soon lumped to the early TECHNIC sets that were beginning to appear on the market. Because I was one of those kids who had to take everything apart to figure out how it worked, TECHNIC seemed like a good fit for me....

In 1985 I brought home a new shiny Commodore Amiga 1000, about one week after they were released. Coming with a whopping 512K of memory, programmable colormaps, a Motorola 68K CPU, and a modern multitasking operating system, it had “awesome” writ all over it. Metaphorically speaking, of course. I thought it might make a...

One of the most gripping yet improbable stories spawned by the computer revolution, Hacker Crocker is a classic American-dream success story set on the razor edge of high technology. Ejovi Nuwere takes the reader on the roller-coaster ride of his extraordinary life, from the bullet-riddled, drugged-out streets of one of America's...

Managing files and finding stuff after you’ve organized it are things you’ll know about after reading this chapter. The chapter also covers loading up on applications, both from the App Store and directly from developers’ Web sites. (If you’re not sure now what the differences are, don’t...