I thought "erotica" was what women used to masturbate, whilst "porn" is what men use. YMMV.

> The 54Wh battery looks it improves the portability a bit.

A bit? A lot. I went from a late 2010 13" Air to a 2013 13" Air, and it's amazing. I basically don't worry about battery life any more. At all. Charges in an hour or so, goes all damn day. I don't know what the performance is like for heavy 3D games, but I can take it out to the park and sit in the shade on a bright sunny day, with the display fighting a lot of ambient light for a couple of hours of drawing, and still have tons of power left.

I've done a Kickstarter and watched quite a few Kickstarters. One thing I have learnt is that you should NEVER trust Kicktraq's projections in the first week or so; it is ALWAYS overestimating by a hell of a lot. It doesn't matter if you're a little campaign with a goal of $2400 or a big one with a goal of $700,000. You will get a tiny fraction of what Kicktraq estimates in the first few days.

Wonder if there'll ever be native clients for anything besides Android. I'm not even going to begin to think of touching this until there are - I really love that Evernote isn't stuck in my browser.

Also, yeah, not sure I trust Google to not abandon this like they did Reader or Wave. And not so hot on importing two and a half years of notes into Google, either.

> the iPhone app that translated signs you pointed the camera at

It's real, I've played with it.

Have you considered asking whatever the "people seeking to donate time" say they use for source hosting and going with whatever the majority loves doing?

I'd go with a couple of Pis. Some will say that's overpowered and you should use an Arduino, but there's one important thing about the Arduino: its IDE kinda blows.

Plus it will be a lot easier to update your code by pushing it to a Pi over wi-fi than by hassling with cables. And if you want to do stuff that needs a decent amount of CPU, you'll have it.

On the other hand you can get an Arduino into a lot less space than a Pi. Hell, get one or two of the Nanos too. You'll have the option of using one if you want a tinier package and can cram your code and data into like 32k.

I find that Illustrator has a compelling new piece of functionality about every other release, on average - though scanning over Wikipedia's list of features in each version, the worthwhile additions can be kinda clumpy:

8: My first version.
9: Transparency, a no-brainer upgrade.
10: Lotsa live effects, especially warping. Save for web which is awesome.
11/CS1: Not a damn thing, for my workflow.
CS2: see CS1
CS3: another meh release
CS4: transparency in gradients, separation previews
CS5: variable-width strokes
CS6: speed boost, at the cost of a UI revamp that I'm not a fan of

There are a fair number of features added for all of these releases; I just found a lot of them completely useless for the kind of art I do in the program. Some of them I bought, some of them I didn't - I think there was at least one in the CS1/2/3 releases that had the major feature of "crashed less on the latest version of the OS".

Decrypting Rita, the sci-fi comic I write and draw, has certainly been the most relevant to me this year.

It's about a robot lady who's dragged out of her timeline and scattered across four separate realities. And a couple of hive-minds, one of which intends to assimilate the whole Earth. Also of course it's about the other versions of her - a normal lady in the here and now, a dragon living with her elf boyfriend and girlfriend, and a wizard journeying to the center of her world of floating islands. I try to keep it pretty fast-moving and action-packed despite it swerving into "what is reality?" territory now and then, though the page update rate has slowed to a crawl as I deal with fulfilling the Kickstarter I ran for the first collection of it.

Homestuck is the best web comic around, IMHO. Andrew Hussie is consistently pushing the boundaries of what a webcomic "should" "be" and making this crazy pile of transcripts, animgifs, and the occasional game or animation work as a coherent whole.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Especially the appendices. It's lurid trash but it's also a delivery system for some very interesting ideas about thinking.

Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud. Note: I spend a significant amount of my waking hours drawing comics. If you care in the least about comics, as a creator or a consumer, this book will give you a lot to chew on.

d'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, by Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire. I credit this and their book on the Norse myths with my being what I call a "polyagnostic"; I knew from a very early age that there are religions that have come and gone, that their adherents believed as intensely as the ones we have now. With these as a foundation it was very easy to see Christian myths as, well, myths.

And some stuff I've simply enjoyed a lot:

The Stress Of Her Regard, by Tim Powers. Vampires, the tendency of Romantic poets to die of consumption, and a secret history of the world. I've read a lot of his stuff but I keep on coming back to this one every few years.

Against A Dark Background, by Iain M. Banks. As a SF writer he's most well-known for his "Culture" books; this one is outside that continuity. It's both comedic and tragic, as well as endlessly inventive.

Back in the c64 days, I saw a version of The Great Giana Sisters that had had its art hacked to be Super Mario Brothers. Well, a reasonable facsimile of the first level, at least; as the game progressed it pretty much reverted to being the Giana Sisters with a Mario sprite.

> an anonymous "thumbs-up" would be nice.

So would vote-stuffing scripts. This is why we can't have nice things.

Can you bring your own stuff into the workplace?

Maybe you could bring a Raspberry Pi and ssh into it to hack around, or jack a spare monitor/keyboard into it.
Maybe an iPad with Codea installed.

Also honestly I'd consider talking to the boss and getting permission to fuck around with this openly instead of doing it on the sly.

I second this. I'd upvote it if Slashdot's voting system wasn't so crazy. Also here's a list of young reader SF on IO9.

Most people are suggesting hoary old stuff from the 40s and 50s. There is a place for these, but I really don't know if they apply to a modern kid - it's hard to read stuff about "the future" when nobody has computers, cel phones, etc. Find well-regarded new books by NEW authors who are trying to write about the future we have NOW, instead of the future of the 1940s. Among other things you won't be filling your kids with a bunch of 1940s attitudes towards women.

I mean, I read a decent amount of the old stuff, sure, I even dug up the Lensman books and read them - but I read them when I was old enough to see them as being from a DIFFERENT TIME.

I find that my iPad has gotten me reading again. I have done things like curl up all day with it reading a hefty book. Its single-tasking nature means it's only a distraction if the book is boring, in which case why am I reading it anyway? The web feels a lot closer when it's only a window away than when it's a few swipes away, to me.

I used to have an immense library; then I moved back home to New Orleans three days before Katrina and lost pretty much all of it. My current library is the stuff that had never made it out to me from my parent's home, and a few things I bought since - both new stuff and old favorites I just had to have. And it underwent a couple of ruthless cullings, too.

It's still a pleasure to sit down in the couch next to my bookshelves and read a physical book, but honestly, it's just as much a pleasure to read one on my iPad. I will be delighted when people start paying attention to the typography and layout of digital editions like they once did to real books; that's really the only thing I find lacking.

I don't WANT more physical books in my house. Unless they're something like the broadsheet-sized reproductions I have of "Little Nemo In Slumberland". Fiction is perfectly cool with being virtual, in my opinion. I'd basically stopped going to the bookstore, and thus stopped keeping up on new fiction, but having the Kindle software available on my pad and my phone means that I can easily acquire books anywhere.