Image: David Cheung/Wired

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — The creator of Super Mario Bros. has big plans for Nintendo’s future … and very small plans for his own.

Shigeru Miyamoto, the head of Nintendo’s game design efforts, sat down with Wired last week to discuss how the company plans to win more fans to its Nintendo 3DS handheld, the remarkable collaboration between developers in Kyoto and Texas that created Mario Kart 7, and another blockbuster franchise that he thinks would be a good fit for East-West cooperation.

But it was Miyamoto’s final comments from this interview, which took place at N...

Google is offering Chromebook loaners at the Palo Alto Library. (Photo: Jessica Goodman)

If you find yourself in Silicon Valley and you need a laptop, try the library. In a first-of-its-kind pilot project, the Palo Alto, California Library will soon be loaning Google Chromebook computers to library patrons for as long as one week at a time.

The program highlights the Chromebook’s ability to operate as a kind of “disposable computer,” as Google puts it. With the Chromebook, most all data and applications reside on the Web — not the local machine — so it can easily be passed from person-to...