The announcement of it caught me by surprise today, but Facebook released a new app called Messenger, a standalone iOS/Android app that handles just your Facebook messages. It adds a couple features to make it well suited to phone-to-phone communication and group planning, but it’s mostly a pretty simple app. I used it a bit…

I decided a couple months ago to just remove Flash from my computer outright. I’m not really outwardly in a pissing match against Adobe or their technology offerings (though I feel like they no longer represent the pinnacle of great creative software like they did before they bought Macromedia, and incidentally I think Macromedia’s products…

1. The defense budget will start coming under serious scrutiny. Our military is the absolute archetype of inefficient government bureaucracy and lack of accountability to boot. We are #1 in military spending per capita by a long shot. 2. There will start to be a serious conversation about drug legalization. For one thing, making drugs…

So I’m having my Pop Tarts this morning, when all of the sudden, I get a call on my phone from Cupertino. Immediately I recognized the number and picked up. “Steve, how’s it going, man?” “Aaron, it’s been awhile since I called.  Sorry about that.” “No worries, man!” We shoot the breeze for a bit.…

So I’m walking down the alley way to go to the gym (seriously) and undecided that waiting for my Bluetooth headphones to get replaced by the OEM was far too much of a first world problem for me to handle, so I took it upon myself to order a new pair using Amazon’s app. Note…

Make no mistake. My advice to you is that you unequivocally should be upgrading to Lion if you haven’t already.  Almost all apps that were working fine on Snow Leopard are working just fine in Lion (unless the developer of your software is enough of an asshole to not get with the program and support…

I’m tired of hearing people quibble over who’s getting unjustly taxed. Here’s a simple system for calculating one’s tax burden. This will cause the budget to always be balanced and unambiguously make sure everyone is paying their fair share of taxes. Best of all, it ensures that even when there is a wealth gap, our…

People LOVE to notice new behavior in Apple hardware and software and liken it to an Orwellian future in which Apple is harshly dictating what you may and may not do with your computer. Maybe you have looked at a new Mac machine with less IO than before and cringed, or you saw that documents…

Whenever there is a push for increased regulation on industries in the US, we always seem to hold ourselves back due to the threat that we’re biting the hand that feeds us. It’s profoundly troubling to me that we have given ourselves this mindset that Americans’ jobs and livelihoods are merely a byproduct of companies…

Though my very favorite part of new OS X releases is invariably John Siracusa’s review of it on Ars Technica, it’s a bit… esoteric for the average reader and perhaps for most of my friends (few of whom actually read my blog, but I digress), so I have decided to share a few thoughts on…