1978

Editing on the go

A well-designed image editor can make the difference between quickly editing and sharing your photos, and getting bogged down in hours of tedious corrections. XnView Portable is a surprisingly feature-filled image editor that's made for easy, on-the-go image editing. While it doesn't allow serious retouching work, it's a great choice for basic and intermediate editing tasks.

The program's interface is attractive and intuitive, with sleek graphical buttons and well-organized menus. A browser pane enables you to easily navigate to and view thumbnails of your images. The program's features aren't particularly exciting, but all the … Read more

Retro Tech: Mego's 2-XL

When I was growing up, the closest thing we had to artificial intelligence was something called 2-XL (if you're younger than 30, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about). We've always had trivia games--what made this one interesting, especially to a generation that's just seen Star Wars, was that these trivia questions were asked by a plastic robot.

In 1978, when I got my hands on 2-XL, I was ecstatic. It was the it toy back then. 2-XL was a trivia robot created by Michael J. Freeman, an inventor with an interest to educate … Read more