blog by reference

I started reading The Register's archaeology piece on the British 'Liberator' laptop last night and I blew my entire time allowance for original reporting. Go read that piece instead. Their entire history series is uniformly readable. Better, it is surprisingly non-conspiratorial. That's a difficult trick to pull off when looking back on dead, incompatible machines.

If you are looking for a way to keep your houseguests civil over the long holiday weekend, I suggest the game 'Chronology'. Players maintain a timeline of cards. On each turn, they must place an event, like invention of the safety pin, correctly in their timeline. Gameplay stops when a player builds a timeline of some predetermined length. If you buy one of the more deluxe editions then you can remove all the sports and popular culture cards and still have enough decent technology cards left over for a game!

Many of the best cards are dated from patent applications. I can imagine a free, online version of this game that just draws patents from USPTO. You would probably want to exclude any patent filed in the last thirty years.

I'm sure that The Register merchandising team is already hard at work on a special edition 'ROM expansion pack' for this game. I hope it available in time for Christmas. I think it should come in either a collectable colorburst crystal tin or a reproduction of the Liberator's pleather case.

Colorburst Crystal
Photo credit: allelectronics.com