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Freewrite Alpha Review: Can This Minimalistic E-Typewriter Cure My Writer’s Block?

The $350 keyboard types like a dream, but its biggest boon for writers is its incredibly small screen.

This Question-Answering Typewriter Is Like if We Had Siri in the ’70s

What if smart assistants pre-dated Star Wars , smartphones, or even personal computers?

This Simple USB Dongle Could Help the Average Person Type 600% Faster

The CharaChorder X makes keyboard mashing a genuinely useful technique.

Google Debuts New Chrome OS Launcher—and It Has Serious Windows Start Menu Vibes

The new launcher should make it easier to find and organize apps.

Lego’s Latest Fan-Designed Set Is Going to Confuse an Entire Generation of Builders

So it's a laptop, with a keyboard, but instead of a screen, it makes images on paper?

The SMS Has Been Able to Rent a Car By Itself for Three Years

Happy birthday, SMS! Today marks the 28th birthday of the SMS aka the Short Message Service, the way GSM phones used to send text messages to each other. In other words, texting is now as old as the Big Bopper and Caligula were when they died. Neil Papworth of Sema Group sent the first SMS…

This Is the Perfect Keyboard

The Happy Hacking Keyboard Type-S is the Platonic ideal of keyboards.

Honolulu May Soon Ban Texting While Crossing the Street Like a Dumbass

You already know that texting and driving is against the law, but for a few years now cities across the US have considered making texting while crossing the street illegal. Honolulu is one of those cities. Honolulu’s City Council passed a bill Wednesday that makes it illegal for pedestrians to use their phones while they’re…

Is It Really Possible to Learn to Speed Read?

Ninety-five percent of college educated individuals read at a rate between 200-400 words per minute according to extensive research done by University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Dr. Keith Rayner. However, there exists a small, but rather vocal subset of people who insist that they can read several times faster than this using various speed reading…

Tell Us About Your Cross-Platform Emoji Miscommunication

Half the time I send an emoticon I have no idea what the person on the other end is actually seeing. Which may seem pretty trivial, but is not entirely trivial! A lot of care goes into crafting a chat or text so as to relay tone and intention without body language. The emoji is…

Why You Should Never Use Pixelation To Hide Sensitive Text

Pixelation is great for hiding faces and covering up nakedness, but it’s not good for disguising text. It’s so bad, in fact, that it might not even protect you at all. The explanation comes by way of Dheera Venkatraman, who expertly explains the premise in great detail on his blog. The simple version goes a…

I Wish I Could Read Wikipedia Like This

I love Wikipedia, but too often the articles are just not that easy to read. It’s not that my English isn’t good enough. My English good. There is Simple English Wikipedia, but it doesn’t cover as many topics and it’s not as thorough. No, what bothers me about reading Wikipedia isn’t the language, it’s the…

How Braille Was Invented

Braille was invented by a nineteenth century man named Louis Braille, who was completely blind. Braille’s story starts when he was three years old. He was playing in his father’s shop in Coupvray, France, and somehow managed to injure his eye. Though he was offered the best medical attention available at the time, it wasn’t…

How Unicode Brought the Digital World Together

Encoding symbols and characters in digital form is fairly easy—but making sure that everyone in the world is doing it in the same way sure isn’t. Fortunately, Unicode came along—but how the hell does it work? The Unicode Consortium has the unenviable task of looking after more than 100,000 characters and making sure they’re encoded…

Test Your Typo Finding Skills in This Stressful Timed Test

Spot a typo on the Internet? Get your pitchforks, saddle up the horses, write to your Congressman and raise hell until it’s fixed. Or… just leave a nasty comment! Truthfully though, typos suck. When you’re reading something, blatant tyops (heh) can smack your eyes and snap you back to consciousness. It’s like being pinched in…

Google Axed SMS Search Thinking People Wouldn’t Notice

Shocking no one, or very very few people, Google turned off its SMS search service on Friday. Reports of the outage have begun to sloooowly trickle in on Google forums and Reddit, but for the most part the spacetime continuum seems to be holding up. Google created SMS Search as a way for users with…

Wikipedia plans to roll out a low-bandwidth version of the site accessible via text. Because the more you know.

Evernote and Moleskine Team Up to Help You Digitize Your Pen and Paper Scribblings

At this point, one of the last things keeping most people from composing all their notes in digital form is that they’re fond of physical writing. Old habits can die hard. Realizing this, Evernote and Moleskine have teamed up to create Moleskine notebooks specifically designed for use with Evernote. These new notebooks utilize a special…

The Sound-Word Index Helps You Express Yourself Online

Communicating in plain text can be really tough; it just doesn’t allow the subtlety, nuance and level of emotion that humans need to understand conversations properly. If you struggle with it, the Sound-Word Index might be able to help you out. A pair of Royal College of Art graduates, Blanche de Lasa and Stina Gromark,…

Nuance May Be Scooping Up Swype For $100 Million

Nuance is reportedly acquiring Swype, the company behind the popular keyboard alternative for Android. The purchase price is estimated to be a cool $100 million. It’s an interesting purchase for Nuance which is regarded as one of the top voice recognition companies. Swype is not involved in voice, but is a popular keyboard that lets…