The U.S. Library of Congress has just made public over 2000 vivid color images from the years 1939 through 1944. The subject matter of the photos encompasses aviation, railroad and technology workers from that period as well as farms, cityscapes and panoramas of the American west. Most of the photos made use of the Kodachrome process, now all but obsolete, resulting in high color saturation and detail. The pictures are in the public domain and can be viewed on Flickr.

The photos were taken by government photographers working for the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI)

According to Reuters News Service, tech magazines are changing some of their focus from the latest high tech gadgets to more practical matters.  Responding to  the worldwide recessionary economy, many tech magazines have begun to add articles with home improvement advice or with instructions on how to upgrade older tech gadgets.  The current generation of tech gadgets, including Apple’s iPhone, Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii can be easily upgraded with software.  Easy upgrades mean that devices are replaced less often.

Bog Garrigan, Chief Executive of IDG, is quoted: “We acknowledge that consumers have less discretionary income these days, and businesses are under pressure.”  IDG, publisher of 300 magazines and 500 websites,  is the largest tech media group in the world.

On a more positive note,  the leading tech magazine Wired launched a British edition this month with a 2 million dollar marketing budget from publisher Conde Naste.  Editor David Rowan is quoted as saying, “There’s quite a strong economic case for launching in a downturn.”

Read the entire Reuters article here.

The tweenbot is a cute little robot with a cardboard body which NYU art student Kacie Kinzer conceived of as an experiment in the kindness of strangers. The tweenbot is equipped with a flag stating its intended destination. It can only move forward and can’t anticipate or avoid obstacles, so it depends on passerbys to set it back on course when it gets stuck. The results of the experiment were suprising.

Read more about the experiment on the Tweenbot website.

As April Fools Day dawns (April 1), computer experts around the world are waiting to see the impact of the Conficker.c worm. A worm is a type of computer virus which self-propagates, spreading across networks. If the Conficker.c worm becomes widespread, it could slow down network traffic and impact performance of individual computers. Read more about this worm on the CNN website and at Wikipedia.org.