Hello internet friends,

all things considered I’m quite happy that you’re such a self-selected exklusive group of people. At least this way I don’t get into a position where someone wants me to sell his yacht to you. After all: that’s not fun. The Lonely Life of a Yacht Influencer
(I’m even more glad I don’t get asked to sell pharma stuff to you. That would feel really icky: Health Care Sponcon: Where Big Pharma Meets Instagram Influencer I mean – I’d still do it for the right price, but I wouldn’t feel good about it. At least until the money is in my account.)

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These Are the 24 Sounds Humans Use to Communicate Without Words
The next time you’re on a phone call, why not play with the interactive portion of this article in the background?

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It’s a bit annoying and rather embarrassing that I actually really liked the last season of Survivor US. And since I always like a look behind the scenes, this way too long article about the first episode was quite in my wheelhouse: All hands on deck: Behind the scenes of a Survivor marooning
Good god, it’s such a dumb, dumb show.

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Internet of Things news!
Nike’s self-lacing sneakers turn into bricks after faulty firmware update – I nominate “My left shoe won’t even reboot.” for the sentence of the year. It won’t win, but it can still be proud.
A software glitch is throwing riders off of Lime scooters – ouch.
Now let me get one thing straight: I’m not Mr-IoT-is-stupid. Or wait, let me rephrase this: Yes, most IoT-stuff is pretty stupid, but that’s what is so fun about it. I’m not a big fan of things being tied to some company’s server (and their subscription service) but when things can connect to the internet, that’s fun, right?

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Dinosaur news!
(Oh boy, this week I have a lot of links. Don’t get used to it.)
Look at this magnificent killer chicken: Meet Tiny Rex, the diminutive T. rex paleontologists just found in Utah. And when you’re done with this, let’s turn the Dino-awesome-meter to eleven and look at this: Badass Dinosaur With a ‘Mohawk’ of Spikes Uncovered in Patagonia.

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And as a last thing: look at this huge map of 11-century trade routes. I could spend hours with the zoomable version.

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Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

are you all feeling well? No? Hmm. Yeah… I don’t know what I can do about that, either. I’m trying to think of something. Maybe we can all make fun of these predictions what the jobs of the future will be? Let’s especially enjoy the buoy.
Ah. Much better.

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Meetup

WeWork, which is a VC-funded company from the Silicon Valley (read into that what you want. But we are in 2018) bought Meetup, which isn’t any of those and immediately everything went wrong: The Mess at Meetup

Snapchat

Meanwhile, at another VC-funded company: In One Tweet, Kylie Jenner Wiped Out $1.3 Billion of Snap’s Market Value
I don’t really have anything to add to that.

Bunny

This is… ehm. You still need to watch this: Waking up a bunny with an air horn
You might want to turn down the volume.

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Be good.
Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

I woke up this morning and instead of “Wah, end of the world!” my whole twitter feed was “Wah, Oscars!” – so I checked what happened and eh, this happened.[1]
Honestly, why do I even mention it? It’s been on every single news channel today. Just like I don’t quite see how it helps when I mention the TRAPPIST–1 planets. You all know it. It’s pretty exciting, but… eh. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maps! Apparently I was not the only child who was super happy when a book included a map and a whole bunch of additional material and addenda. My personal favorite has always been the pretty sparse map of Inner Mongolia from Fritz Mühlenweg’s Großer-Tiger und Christian.

FRUiTS is closing down and of course the reason is that Japanese street style is dead now. DEAD I tell you. Or maybe it just moved to some other place where it isn’t being turned into a commodity for a fashion magazine?

Fun fact! Self-driving cars are not humans. At least they don’t act human in any given traffic situation. While this is not entirely unexpected it is also something that will need to be addressed on mixed-used roads.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

seems like Mr DiCaprio finally got his pity oscar.
Congratulations.

Most people don’t know this, but this newsletter is now a well-funded startup in a swanky loft office with exposed brick walls. “Dominik, how is this possible?” you might wonder and I am not above sharing my path to success: Motivational posters.

Did that make you laugh? I have bad news for you.

Back in the days when we had to walk uphill through the snow both ways and all we had was crappy shareware games, I used to play some sort of fighting game with robots. The Japanese decided to make it real – and honestly a lot more awesome.
Just look at that chicken robot. A lot less scary than that Boston Dynamics robot.

There is a new Raspberry Pi in town, this one with WiFi and Bluetooth on board. By now the specs look good enough to replace most office computers – for a fraction of the price. I’m not sure what happened to the idea of running Windows on these things, though.

Or well, we could just put these things into animals and create cyborgs. (This one might actually be more scary than the Boston Dynamics robot.)

Sleep well.