For years, we’ve been stuck with the same old fonts: Arial, Georgia, Verdana, Times New Roman — web-safe fonts that a majority of web users have installed on their computer.

But lately, the web design community is abuzz — and the source of the excitement is around web fonts. "Web fonts" is a generic term that refers to the method of serving font files — the same type of files you have installed on your computer — to your website visitors so that you can guarantee they’ll have the appropriate type faces you want displayed on your web pages.

In this guide, we’ll discuss a way of implementing web fonts using free web services collectively called Google Font API.

From time to time, people ask me for an inventory of the tools and systems I use to get my work done. As a hard-traveling, working writer, I spend a lot of time tinkering with my tools and systems. At the risk of descending into self-indulgence (every columnist’s occasional privilege), I’m going to try to create a brief inventory, along with a wish/to-do list for the next round.

Soon we will be living in a magical future, a world without wires, in which all of our energy and information needs will be met invisibly, pulsing in the air around us, not causing cancer at all.

And only a century too late to save poor Nikola Tesla.

Tesla (1856-1943) was sort of the sad sack of the scientific genius world, brilliant and only a little insane, who nevertheless failed in most of his endeavors due to a lack of fiscal acumen and the conniving of douchebags like Thomas Edison. His AC was far superior to Edison's DC, but Edison proved better at publicity stunts. Arguably Tesla invented the radio, but Elmo Marconi beat him at the patent office, with the financial and political backing of the asshole Edison.

As connected social computing devices get smaller & smaller and nearer & nearer to us, the weight of the cloud gets lighter. We carry around immense computational power and almost immediate access to the global repository of information. The mobile phone will eventually pair with head's-up eyewear displays just as more and more people avoid catastrophic disease & injury through the aid of embedded brain-computer interfaces. As computation moves next to and into our bodies, the cloud is breaking out of the screen and washing onto our world. We grow more augmented with computation while our environment is getting smarter and more aware and increasingly able to communicate with us. It may very well be that in 5, 10, 20 years the world is a much more visual, dynamic, and communicative place than we can even imagine.

The case for digitally-driven stupidity assumes we'll fail to integrate digital freedoms into society as well as we integrated literacy. This assumption in turn rests on three beliefs: that the recent past was a glorious and irreplaceable high-water mark of intellectual attainment; that the present is only characterized by the silly stuff and not by the noble experiments; and that this generation of young people will fail to invent cultural norms that do for the Internet's abundance what the intellectuals of the 17th century did for print culture. There are likewise three reasons to think that the Internet will fuel the intellectual achievements of 21st-century society.

No, that's not me in the picture. But I would love one of these!

Researchers at Concordia University and the University of London have created 'smart' clothing, with embedded wireless biosensors that detect your mood and play voices and videos of people you want to hear when you're feeling sad, upset, excited, or lonely.

Japanese construction firm Shimizu Corporation has developed a series of bold architectural plans for the world of tomorrow. Here is a preview of seven mega-projects that have the potential to reshape life on (and off) Earth in the coming decades.