Alexander Stuart

Photograph copyright © 2015 Alexander Chow-Stuart. A couple of weeks ago, our family was lucky enough to have a tour of Dash Robotics' facility in Sunnyvale, California, where Nick Kohut and his partners have a young startup designing and manufacturing remarkable little robot bugs that you can control with your smartphone or tablet.  My son, Hudson, and I had first seen these at a tech convention in San Francisco organized by getgeeked  and SVEntrepreneurs . We had been impressed by both the robots' speed and agility - as well as by the fact that you can build the robot's "skin" from a single sheet of plastic, and swap it out later if you want to change the robot's color or design.  Photograph copyright © 2015 Alexander Chow-Stuart. Nick Kohut, cofounder of Dash Robotics. Photograph copyright © 2015 Alexander Chow-Stuart. Nick, who showed us around the Dash facility himself, met his partners, Andrew Gillies...

Our six year old daughter Paradise loves the Keys-To-Go keyboard, too. Photograph copyright © 2015 Alexander Chow-Stuart. When our son Hudson and I recently attended the getgeeked event in San Francisco , one of the products that most impressed us was a simple bluetooth keyboard from Logitech, called Keys-To-Go. Slim, light, colorful and with models for both iOS (including Apple TV) and Android, perhaps the best feature of Keys-To-Go is its FabricSkin coating, a pleasing waterproof (or at least water-resistant - not sure you can surf with it) plastic coating that can be wiped clean after any unfortunate spills, and is also great for working in sandy or wilderness environments. The keyboard is surprisingly light and portable. While it's not full-size, it has really comfortable spacing, and despite its ultraslim 6mm depth, the keys actually tap like a "real" keyboard, giving you a satisfying sense that you are actually writing! It's great for an iPad or ...

P hotographs Copyright  ©  2015 A lexander Chow-Stuart. Our six year old daughter Paradise had a big day this week. On Tuesday morning, she wrote (or dictated) four stories in a row, each one quite magical. In the afternoon, she learned to balance on her bike - and rode for two or three miles with us a couple of days later. Of her stories, my favorite was this one, about Whitey, her pet mouse, who sadly died recently...but who lives on in this beautiful tale of her ocean adventure in a coconut and her friendship with Whistle the Dolphin. Paradise and I actually found a coconut washed up on the beach last year, and imagined that it might have sailed across the great Pacific from Hawaii or some South Seas island. Perhaps it's the very one that Whitey the Mouse traveled here in! P hotograph Copyright  ©  2014 A lexander Chow-Stuart P hotograph Copyright  ©  2014 A lexander Chow-Stuart