The next time someone asks you a question and you know they haven't bothered to do the obvious, to wit, look it up on Google, send them a link to Let Me Google That For You. For example, if someone were to write to me and ask if there's an archive of Gearhead columns, I might reply with "Try this link: http://tinyurl.com/yfg33ty". Voila!

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Look, I hate to bring this up, but there's something we need to discuss: Why haven't I heard from you recently? (No, not you, you've been in touch. It's this guy over here … ) Really, is it too much to ask that you put pen to paper … oh, all right, fingers to keyboard … and tell me what's on your mind?

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Augmented reality is becoming a big deal. What started as an interesting, albeit geeky, application of technology is starting to find real-world uses that are impressive, not to mention way cool.

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In last week's column (which was online only) I continued my exploration of a cool programming system called Runtime Revolution, focusing on the tool's object-oriented, event-driven architecture. This week we'll look at the product's English-like language, a style referred to as "candygrammar" by some cynics.

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Last week here in Gearhead I started to discuss a fascinating and powerful programming system called Revolution.

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When someone describes someone else as "long in the tooth" you know what they mean: That the target of the soubriquet is getting on in years.

OK, but do you know where that phrase comes from? The answer is from the horse world: Horses' teeth grow throughout their lives and, despite getting worn down by chewing hay and such, horses show progressively more enamel as they age. Thus, you can roughly tell the age of a horse from how "long in the tooth" it is. Now you know.

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Last week I began discussing Yahoo Pipes, a service provided by (as you might have guessed) Yahoo. This service is designed to route and transform data taken from one or more online sources and generate an output in RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), JSON and Atom formats.

I discussed the range of input source choices (generically referred to as "feeds") for Pipes, now I want to cover what you can do with the data.

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Microsoft Excel is brilliant. Except when it isn't. And a major place where it isn't is when you have an Excel spreadsheet with a number of cells containing strings (any sequence of ASCII characters) and you wish to concatenate all of these separate strings into one big string in another cell.

Excel does provide a function that, to the optimistic neophyte, would seem to do the job: It is, not surprisingly, called Concatenate.

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There have been many great steps forward in the world of computing: The mouse, the desktop and folder metaphor, object-oriented languages and … well, the list is long and highly debatable. I would like to offer up another entry to this roll call of genius: Remote desktop access technology.

When I were a young un' the only remote access you had was Telnet and you had to walk uphill both ways with barbed wire 'round your feet to get anything done. But I digress.

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Gibbs wraps up the saga of developing the Sentimeter, his near real-time topical Twitter sentiment analysis tool.

This week I wrap up the Sentimeter, my almost real-time Twitter topical sentiment analysis tool. Need to catch up? See http://bit.ly/BWveC.

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