Stop Those Annoying Pop-Under Ads

Essay

I thought, when I switched over to Firefox a long, long time ago, I had left behind the indignity of the whole pop-up ad banner. Perhaps I simply began visiting fewer porn sites (just kidding!). But whatever the reason, I began to notice that when I shut down my browser I would find half a [...]

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Garmin Forerunner 405 Keeps on Tracking

Technology How-To

As an avid runner and cyclist, I wanted to track my workouts more effectively. So about 3 years ago, I purchased the Garmin Forerunner 405–at that time, a brand new product. Several thousand miles later, it is still the best choice for me.
The Garmin Forerunner looks like a regular digital watch–not an oversized data console. [...]

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Cloud-Based Email Archiving Solves Perfect Storm of Problems

Technology How-To

Remember last year when the the Mayor’s office was routinely deleting emails? Policy chief Michael Kineavy said he assumed the emails were being backed up (blame the IT department!)–and described his practice of emptying his inbox every day and then emptying the deleted items folder for good measure. Kineavy defended his actions as just his [...]

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Create a Hyperlocal News Ecosystem to Serve the Community

Building Community

Yesterday, Patch (the hyper local news publisher funded by America Online) launched a Westwood, Massachusetts site–the 11th town so far in Massachusetts. I met the editor and am impressed that they are making an effort to cover the news in this town of 15,000–potentially filling the void left when the Daily News Transcript stopped being [...]

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Massachusetts Open Meeting Law Changes This Week

Building Community

Significant changes to Massachusetts Open Meeting law take effect on July 1, 2010. The new rules do not directly promote collaborative technologies–e.g. how a town might use a wiki to improve governance, for example, but some common sense clarifications do open the door to removing some anti-technology sentiment. And I think the documentation requirements will [...]

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Drupal for Smart People: Drupal Gardens

Technology How-To

Drupal is one of the most popular and free content management platforms used to build sophisticated web sites. A new service, Drupal Gardens, provices a hosted and simplified version of Drupal so you can start without the installation and configuration tech tasks that put this out of reach of most users. Drupal Gardens is not [...]

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Hybrid Electric Bikes for Fun, Green Commutes

Active Transportation

Electric bikes have been around for years but recent advances in battery technology and Bedford, Massachussets company Pietzo, may have finally made them practical for commuters seeking an environmentally-responsible alternative to gridlock. I test rode several today, and I encourage others to hop on one of these bikes and learn how it could change your [...]

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The Accidental Vegetarian

Creative Life

Meat is overrated. After several weeks since I ate meat as part of my diet, I’m not really missing it. So I guess I am coming out as a vegetarian. It’s no big deal. But it wasn’t something I decided, planned, or forced myself to do. It just happened.
My family started thinking more critically about [...]

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Access TV: Playing Out of the Box

Building Community

Westwood Community Access Television is using a simple, but powerful combination of old and new media technology to jumpstart their efforts to bring public access TV to Westwood, Massachusetts. While the administrative and technical details for taking control of local origination programming are still underway, we are using Ustream to livecast from our minimalist control [...]

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How to Copy Music from your iPod to your Mac

Technology How-To

Life was good when you had your iPod all synced up with your old computer. Then, you lost that computer somehow. You didn’t care because you had 8 GB of songs safely stored on the iPod, right? Then, you bought a MacBook and thought, “I’ll just plug the iPod in and sync it back to [...]

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