They don't make 'em like that any more: things you can switch off

There's no shortage of guidance on writing English that people will want to read. In science and technology, however, can we apply the same guidelines without losing information?

As part of my campaign to eliminate wall-warts and external power supplies that don't have on/off switches, I've built a USB charger that has a mains switch. Why? Because nobody seems to sell one.

In a market dominated by the Amazon Kindle, it's easy to forget that Sony, not Amazon, made the first commercially-successful e-book reader.

How a non-existent English village ended up on maps, and the implications this has for how we handle information.

The built-in cd command in the bash shell is not as smart as it could be; but it's a little fiddly to extend its functionality.