Like The Turdly Widgets

May 22, 2017

Hello internet friends,

hey, it is still Monday-ish. Stop complaining. (Hahaha. As if someone would complain.)

Anker

If you bought an accessory for your smartphone-ish device on Amazon lately and especially if you picked the one with the rating over the one that is a tiny bit cheaper, you probably bought something from Anker. (And – free consumer advice: if you didn’t you probably should have. I have a whole lot of their stuff and I’m very satisfied, indeed.)
The Verge has more: How Anker is beating Apple and Samsung at their own accessory game

Turdly

Neural networks seem to be fun. At least if we use them for something useful – like coming up with new names for colors: An AI invented a bunch of new paint colors that are hilariously wrong

Before Effects

These days every single moving picture looks like it has been thoroughly manipulated on a computer. But how did they do these things before that was possible? Well, at least for one aspect you’ll know after you’ve clicked here: When TV Logos Were Physical Objects (That Eurovision thing is amazing.)

Widgets

I haven’t actually seen a fidget spinner in real life but I am already sick of the internet jokes about them. I’m even sicker of people who decided that these probably extremely harmless thingies are in any way dangerous or bad. Honestly, don’t be grumpy. Every generation has their useless toy, the kids these days have the fidget spinner. Apparently this is something that needs to be said: In Defense of Liking Things

That was quite alright, wasn’t it?

Toodles!

They're Good Newsletters, Brent

May 15, 2017

Hello internet friends,

if you use twitter – and oh boy, do I understand a “oh hell no!” reaction to that idea – you probably have seen the account that rates dogs. Today we learn about the guy behind it: We Rate Dogs – Matt Nelson Turned Joke Twitter Account Into Successful Business Overall he seem to be a pretty okay dude.

@dino_rates

This is Nodo. He likes to eat plants and looks fantastic in his armor. 12/10 would pet.

The Amazing Dinosaur Found (Accidentally) by Miners in Canada – that is indeed pretty amazing. I can’t really see the feathers, though.

@convo_rates

This is Talking About Weather. It helps to connect people who might not have much in common and works well to bridge awkward silences. 10/10 would talk again.

Letter of Recommendation: Talking About the Weather – I’m all for it. At the moment I have to interact with a whole bunch of different people and since somehow everybody is either talking about football or the weather and I don’t know anything about football, I’m all for having this rather safe subject.

@car_rates

These are Group B rally cars. They’re very fast and loud and amazingly unsafe. 13/10 would watch.

Group B rally cars are awesome, and we just drove some – to be fair, they “only” drove two of the not all that famous ones, but these are still lovely little cars.

@clone_rates

These are Guy Fieri, the Guy From Smash Mouth, and the Guy From Insane Clown Posse. They’re probably clones.
And now we need to break character – they’re probably not very good clones, either.

But the theory that they are clones is a good one: A Unified Theory of Guy Fieri, the Guy From Smash Mouth, and the Guy From Insane Clown Posse Being the Same Person (and/or Clones) – so there is that. Let’s just do it this way. 11/10 would meme again.

@robot_rates

This is robot falcon. It warns real birds of dangerous areas. What a hero. 14/10 how nice.

Robo-Falcons Will Scare Off Actual Live Birds at the Edmonton Airport – If that works this sounds like a great solution. And maybe even fun for someone who gets to chase birds with that little drone.

Toodles and きっと勝つ!

Tycoon

May 8, 2017

Hello internet friends,

it is Monday again. The weekend is over. But what is a weekend, really? A Marxist might point out that the weekend is an act of corporate trickery, a dangling carrot that keeps workers tethered to their jobs.

Rollercoaster

I pretty much enjoy the diverse Tycoon games – you might remember them from yore – Transport Tycoon, Rollercoaster Tycoon and some more. I don’t enjoy them as much as this guy, though: Player Spends A Decade Polishing Epic Theme Park In Rollercoaster Tycoon 2
And that is indeed a pretty epic theme park.

Listening

Good god. More Android phones than ever are covertly listening for inaudible sounds in ads

Runner

I honestly don’t know what to think about the trailer for Blade Runner 2049.
Mostly it is… too much? We’ll see. I’m not hoping for much.

Railroad

I mean, sure – Japan’s Newest Train Is Basically a Luxury Hotel on Rails – but which Belgian detective will have to solve a murder on that one?

That’s all for this week. Stay strong.
Toodles!

Great Balls

May 1, 2017

Hello internet friends,

let’s start with some great news: We are going to Mars![1]

eBooks

I like to read a lot, usually medium-agnostic. Paper, digital, whatever. (In fact, if I could, I’d have a “eat, sleep, read, repeat” lifestyle, but… eh.) Apparently one of my favourite ways to read – if only because it hides my tsundoku better – is just not cool anymore: How eBooks lost their shine: ‘Kindles now look clunky and unhip’
But then that’s alright with me – after all I’m clunky and unhip, too.

Fyre Fyre

I don’t even mind being clunky and unhip – because if I weren’t I might be in the Bahamas now, being angry: ‘Rich kids of Instagram meets Hunger Games’: Guests at luxury Fyre Festival where tickets cost $12,000 ‘mugged, stranded and hungry’
Who would have seen that coming? Apparently not this dude Fyre Festival Head Billy McFarland: ‘We Were a Little Naive’ even when people who know what they were talking about saw a whole lot of warning signs: I Worked at Fyre Festival. It Was Always Going to Be a Disaster.

Game, Set, Match

I present to you: important journalism. Was Uber’s CEO really the second-best Wii Sports tennis player? (Not important per se but very amusing in either way. His uncle said so.)

Hail Robot

Just in case you wonder: Is Wall-E Satan?

Now have a good May 1st. And maybe you get an incovenient rash if you celebrate Loyalty Day instead of International Worker’s Day today.

Toodles!

  1. By now I can assume you understand this kind of “we” as in “we humans” and not some kind of “we, including you and me,” right? Because I’m not going to and I doubt any future Mars astronaut is reading these emails.  ↩

Press Hard

April 24, 2017

Hello internet friends!

Don’t worry, I didn’t forget you today. (To be honest, though: I almost did. Long day at work, then went and sat around in the sun a bit to read. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Juicy

I’m still laughing about the Juicero. A 400USD WiFi-connected machine that squeezes very expensive juice out of aluminium pouches. Just like this dude I Just Love This Juicero Story So Much: People just squeeze the bags. How dare they. Juicero CEO Begs You: Do NOT Squeeze Our Juice Bags
But you know, it’s not only snark here. There’s even some meta snark about what ~we~ can learn from the whole thing: How Juicero’s Story Set the Company Up for Humiliation

Show-y

I really liked the whole kottke.org guest host week last week. Mostly because what Tim Carmody collected as best of the web pretty much hits the nerve of old-school web geeks like me.
And then of course there’s the article on Ze Frank’s The Show which was basically a daily vlog before daily vlogs were even a thing. (There was a reboot, which was… underwhelming. But, eh… let’s remember simpler times when an US president Bush was the worst thing we could imagine for the world. And let’s watch the monkey dance. With a free advice by a young pre-fame Chelsea Peretti. Whose brother is now Ze Frank’s boss.)

Instagramable

Finally, an article about a hashtag: #Vanlife, the Bohemian Social-Media Movement
This is actually a rather interesting and realistic look into what it takes to be a social media influencer these days.

Brains

The fact that there are actual real life people who think that this is a good idea is just boggling my mind: We Are Entering the Era of the Brain Machine Interface
It’s bad enough when people have to use some skill to interface with ~the machine~ – do we really want to lower that bar even more?

Toodles! (This is funny: Comedians in Cars Driving Fast & Furiously)

Hey Dingus

April 17, 2017

Hello internet friends,

I hope you all had a nice time playing with some eggs this weekend, but here we go – another Monday!

Furious

There’s a new Fast and Furious movie and this time it is not about tuna sandwiches. (Or tuner sandwiches. Ha. Ha. Sorry.) But what is it about? Well, some journalists did the maths and now we know:
These Graphics Chart The Decline In Street Races And NOS In Fast And Furious Movies
Important work.

Audio Hack

These days voice is a command line to networked computers. So what Burger King did – hijacking the Google Assistant for a commercial – is basically a hack. Tzk.
(Also, ha, ha, “hack” is also the German word for minced meat. Which is on burgers. I’m sorry. Again.)

Emoji

Maybe you’re living somewhere where it is still a public holiday today. Then you might have enough time to watch this rather nerdy and very interesting talk about the whole history of emoji and how they work: Emoji for fun and profit

Chicken Music

Guess which company sells more than half a million music CDs a month in Indonesia. I bet you didn’t guess KFC, but that’s what is happening: Selling CDs in Indonesia’s KFCs.
Do you want to have more chicken stuff from Indonesia? Well, there is Gereja Ayam, the Abandoned Chicken Church for you. Or maybe you’re more interested in music? Here are some young Indonesian ladies who like to rock: Teenage metal hijabi girl band slays stereotypes, melts faces with funktastic music in Indonesia.

Australia

Just read it all the way through: Australian rapper skips dinner bill by swimming off, court told It’s a short as it is amusing.

Toodles!

Handsome Pod People

April 10, 2017

Hello internet friends!

Spring arrived here in full force so here I am, all doped up on antihistamines and hiding behind my sunglasses.
Onwards!

London Pod People

Self-driving cars might be the future but maybe they future has been around all along: The future of driverless cars is a bus
Mostly it looks like they took the PRTs from Heathrow (wait – weren’t those supposed to be a joke?) and put them on the public roads. Something that’s honestly a pretty good idea. Especially as driverless technology gets better and better.

Handsome Youths

I’ll be the first to admit – I did not know what a chinese Husband Exhibition might be. Now I know: apparently it’s some kind of festival where the chinese music industry markets their pop stars to a mostly female crowd – as charming enough to be their husband. Some of those pop stars might even be young ladies, who just happen to be very androgynous and (have to) play football: China’s hottest new boy band is actually made up of five androgynous girls.

Give me a ping, Vasili.

Space news! So, mysterious bursts of energy do come from outer space. It is probably just some stupid physics thing but who knows – maybe someone out there is scanning our planet.

Worldwide

Quick, name one of the big artists of our time. You’ll probably not name Pitbull, but that might be a mistake. Because Pitbull Will Live Forever.
Fascinating.

Helter Skelter

Not a headline I expected to read in 2017: The Hippies Have Won. Now before we all cheer and strip naked and run around circles around our VW vans in a cloud of marijuana smoke, let’s be clear: it’s not that the age of aquarius has finally come. It’s just that capitalism managed to co-opt the superficialities of the lifestyle and now granola, kombucha and Birkenstocks have taken over the world.
Well, what a bum trip.

Well, be safe out there. Make sure there are no shards of glass around when you do decide to dance naked around your camper van.
Toodles!

Human Interaction

April 3, 2017

Hello internet friends!

It’s April 3rd and, wow, luckily it’s not April 1st anymore and the jokes are over. Who likes these things anyway and why are they still around? The Verge is on it. (tl;dr: because brands)

Brands!

Big Duck News

Last october we learned that big dinosaurs quacked. Now we actually know (for variable values of “know”) how at least one of them looks like: For the first time, we know what Tyrannosaur faces really looked like. Go ahead, click that link. Just for that last paragraph.

Egg News

Twitter got rid of the eggs. Now before you rejoice, let’s take a break. They didn’t actually get rid of the egg people, they just got them a new icon. Now how clever is that?

Robot News

On some days interacting with fellow human beings is just so hard. Sometimes these days coincide with days when there is no more food in the kitchen. Ugh. So basically at this point there are two options: actually do grocery shopping or order some food. Both of them require a tiny bit of human interaction.
Well, at least until now – Domino’s and Starship Technologies will deliver pizza by robot in Europe this summer. Honestly the first time I read something that might make me want to move to Hamburg.

Uh-oh

As you can imagine, just from that previous section, any article that starts with “Talking to other humans, GOOD or BAD? It’s hard to say for sure.” speaks to me on a deep level. And since I’m a big fan of talking to people by typing (hi!) here we go: Messaging Apps, Ranked
I’m not sure I 100% agree on their results, but it’s a fun read anyway.

Well… toodles!

Like Nobody Is Watching

March 27, 2017

Hello internet friends!

It’s the first Monday after switching to daylight savings time here where I am and ugh that switch is not being gentle to me. Oh well.

Reality

Something tells me that a behind-the-scenes documentary would be a lot more interesting than the real show could ever be: TV show contestants spend year in wilderness – with no one watching. The decision to just keep the contestants doing their thing while the show went off the air, the fact that someone still paid the people involved, the slow unraveling where contestants sneaked out to buy alcohol and get haircuts in a nearby village. That would make one hell of a miniseries.

Cities

Cities are pretty neat – there’s a whole bunch of people and things tend to be a bit more interesting. But how exactly did these things start? Who decided that living close to strangers would be a good idea? Turns out nobody, really – but people arranged themselves around the idea because they all happened to hang out at the same place of worship.

Voices

Usually the voices in my head are from podcasters but who knows – at some point some voice without a body might tell me their opinion on the latest tech news without me putting on headphones. If that ever happens, I know now who to contact. The Hearing Voices Network.

Dishwasher

I’m not sure how important it is that a dishwasher has a web server. Or that it is even connected to the internet. But if you’re a company that builds internet-connected dishwashers with a web server component you might want to make sure there are updates when someone finds a bug. Instead we now have a hackable Miele dishwasher.

Gambling

So… what exactly is the difference between gambling and insurance? The line is very blurry indeed.

Well, let’s put a chip in it and call it smart.
Toodles!

Puppy Culture

March 20, 2017

Hello internet friends!

Let’s get right to the links, how about that?

Buy! Buy! Buy!

The trend du jour that doesn’t seem to go away are the people (well, let’s be honest – ladies) in a tube that you can yell at to play some music. There’s the Amazon one, I think Microsoft has something as well and for people who like to talk to their phone, there’s Siri. And obviously there’s something from Google. And Google being an advertising company and not being able to stop themselves from being, well, Google, it seems like their person in a tube helpfully pointed out to people that they might want to watch the new Disney movie.

Puppies!

People like to look at baby animals on the internet. Not a very new idea. People like to argue politics on the internet. Also not a very new idea. But combining baby animals and puppies? A new idea. Here is why that is happening and the psychology behind it.

Buy! Buy! Buy! (again)

Most city centers these days feel like mall already – it’s not terribly hard to find the same couple of chain stores in most cities and it can be a bit samey-samey. But actually merging the two concepts – a city center, open to the public, and a mall, a centrally owned retail space – seems like something new. I’m not too sure I approve of that, I’m quite in favour of the public owning at least the walking areas between stores.

Internet Culture

Don’t worry. For a change this is actually something positive. People are happily(?) paying for online content. Not only via subscription services like Netflix and Spotify, but also for small, independent creators. At the heart of it is Patreon, a platform I really do like – I’m able to support people who do good stuff online, yay. (I’d have absolutely no moral problems with setting up a Patreon account for this newsletter, but… eh.)

Long Live The Queen

But what if she doesn’t? There’s a (not so) secret plan for what happens next. At least they won’t have to expire her in time for the press like one of her predecessors:

“The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close,” was the final notice issued by George V’s doctor, Lord Dawson, at 9.30pm on the night of 20 January 1936. Not long afterwards, Dawson injected the king with 750mg of morphine and a gram of cocaine – enough to kill him twice over – in order to ease the monarch’s suffering, and to have him expire in time for the printing presses of the Times, which rolled at midnight.

Well, that’s it for today. Comment, like and subscribe!

Toodles.