Speechless: Dilbert Creator's Struggle to Regain His Voice

Speechless: Dilbert Creator's Struggle to Regain His Voice

The rules changed all the time—sometimes day to day, sometimes hour to hour—and whenever he tried to recite them, people thought, "This guy is nuts."

The rules dictated when and where Scott Adams, the chief engineer of the Dilbert comic empire, was allowed to speak. He could neither control them nor predict exactly when they'd go into effect. All he knew was that he'd woken up one morning and found that his voice had turned against him, imposing a set of bizarre restrictions.

The article is long, but absolutely worth reading. Fascinating story about Dilbert creator Scott Adams.

I want one of these right now!

Belkin Nubbin Turns Car-Lighter Socket into USB Port | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

I’m pretty intrigued by Belkin’s new widgets which slip into the 12v socket and turn it into a USB port, enabling it to charge pretty much every gadget ever.

Hard to believe that a $65 dog bowl failed.

Bike Designer Fails To Find Fortune With High-End Dog Bowl | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

MONTEREY, Calif. -- This carbon fiber dog bowl by bike designer Sky Yaeger was supposed to be her ticket to a new career – but despite being beautifully made, her $65 Splash-N-Go dog bowl is just not selling.

YouTube goes widescreen!

YouTube Embraces Widescreen Paves the Way for Hollywood Features - Webmonkey

As we pointed out last week, YouTube is now offering HD quality video on select movies. But one of the hallmarks of HD video is the widescreen aspect ratio (16:9 rather than 4:3) and now the YouTube site has been updated so that all video is now displayed in a new widescreen player.

As the YouTube blog notes, this means that the vast majority of videos on the site — which were uploaded as 4:3 — are now displayed with black bars on the sides (the empty space not used by 4:3 videos).

Two things:

1) Now, all I need is a free video editor that will actually let me edit the widescreen video that my digicam will let me shoot ... except I don't shoot in widescreen because I can't edit it.

2) This puts YouTube ahead of the WWE in terms of providing me with easily-accessible widescreen content. Not that I'm bitter.

Darth Toaster

Darth Toaster: May The (Break) Fast Be With You | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

The Darth Vader Toaster is pretty bogus: any real Jedi would just slice his loaf with a Light Saber and it would fall ready-toasted, needing only a quick slathering of butter and jam (blueberry for the good guys and red, red, raspberry for those on the Dark Side).

But until the Light Saber becomes a common part of the culinary toolkit (a true multi-tasker, we might add) then we'll have to settle for this junky plastic toaster, the result of pouring black beads into the mold-maker instead of the usual white. It's exactly the same as a normal thrift-store toaster, only it has the addition of a Darth Vader shaped element which appears to char the Dark Lord's visage into your breakfast bread. And we mean char -- in the picture the center section looks almost inedible.

Welsh Road Sign Features Email Auto-Reply

Welsh Road Sign Features Email Auto-Reply Instead of Correct Translation | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

What happens when people place too much trust in technology? Sometimes, the result is dangerous (sheep-like belief in GPS, for example). Other times, the layers of hilarity are startling. Take this story, a tale of bureaucracy and institutionalized ignorance from Wales.

Tonight's geeking-out roundup

Stories courtesy of Wired. Better headlines courtesy the former newspaper editor. (That would be me, by the way.)

Firefox goes on a memory diet.

Facebook gets a facelift.