The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine. Will Skype do away with phone bills? Think Craigslist, disposable cameras. Good read, with mini-case studies (Flip video cameras, mp3s, unmanned aircraft, health clinics) from Wired editor Robert Capps.

Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere. We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing and emailing needs. The low end has never been riding higher.

So what happened? Well, in short, technology happened. The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they're actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as "high-quality."

It happened fast, too. The early Web was full of quirky sites of individuals sharing in depth their hobbies, collections and niche expertise. They're mostly gone now, replaced by a wasteland of one-liners on Twitter and quizzes on Facebook.

Secret overlay: If Augmented Reality is so cool, why are app developers hiding it? at iPhone User News. There's lots of Web buzz about Augmented Reality --"The basic idea of augmented reality is to superimpose graphics, audio and other sense enhancements over a real-world environment in real-time." Yelp example at right.

The story has a hilarious point:

(restaurant site) Yelp has included the feature as an "Easter Egg" (in the iPhone 3GS); a secret hidden feature that you don't know about until you read this, even if you have the app. It's so secret, it took tech mogul Robert Scoble to find it.

He's posted some instructions on how to find it.

So you shake your iPhone 3 times. That activates a feature called Monocle. A message should come up if you activated it. A blue box will come up saying "the Monocle has been activated." It will create a button in the top right corner. Now you should be able to look at the bars, restaurants, etc. Only works on iPhone 3GS."

This "next big thing" seems so trivial: Overlays on a 3.5-inch screen.

Play along: Coolest CD case ever has theremin built in

(A Theremin is "an early electronic musical instrument controlled without contact from the player. " It can be mesmerizing.)

From Denver blog Backbeat Online,

The artists here is San Francisco-based Moldover, who appears to be an experimental electronic artist. While I hadn't heard the name before, you can rest assured it's firmly anchored in my consciousness now. The disc runs $50, but hey: working theremin included!

It sounds a little like a kazoo. There's an explanatory video, to boot.

Theremin World has more: Moldover CD case with built-in optical theremin

Treehouses: Prefabricated Shelters Offer a Jungle Eco-Retreat. Pretty, primitive.