Did everybody successfully re-synchronise with the Earth's rotation this past weekend? Jolly good 
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- A story about Jessica. - "I want you to imagine someone for me. Her name is Jessica and she is 17 years old. She lives in a two bedroom apartment with her mother and uses an old laptop she got from one of her mom’s ex boyfriends. With it, she browses the portals that serve as her connection to the community constructed around attending the same high school… She heard on CNN you’re supposed to have a complex password with something special in it, like a dollar sign, so she does. At least on her Facebook account…” The author of Twitter account @SwiftOnSecurity (who is purportedly “Taylor Swift, an internationally recognized star and Information Security professional”) explains why normal people are bad at IT security, and how it’s our fault.
- Xerox Alto Source Code - "It’s hard to explain just how advanced the Alto seemed at the time. It had a full-page graphics display with 606 by 808 black & white pixels, a keyboard, a mouse, a fairly powerful processor with 128 KBytes of main memory, a hard drive with a 2.5 MByte removable cartridge, and a 2.94 Mbit/sec Ethernet interface. The Ethernet connected Altos together into a local network that included a high-performance laser printer, an Alto-based file server with hundreds of megabytes of capacity, and gateways to local networks at other Xerox offices and to the ARPANET." And now its software archive is available at the Computer Museum site
- At Home With the Dalai Lama (September 2013) - Victor Chan, who has written two books with the Dalai Lama, was invited to accompany him for his morning meditation, and describes the experience in this letter to his two daughters: ”It was a deeply meaningful experience for me. Those few hours I was with him gave me a clear snapshot of how he spends his time in private, away from the limelight. He hardly spoke to me at the time. But what he did that morning spoke volumes and has relevance for all of us.”
- The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed - ”As social media connects more people more intimately than ever before, companies have been confronted with the Grandma Problem: Now that grandparents routinely use services like Facebook to connect with their kids and grandkids, they are potentially exposed to the Internet’s panoply of jerks, racists, creeps, criminals, and bullies. They won’t continue to log on if they find their family photos sandwiched between a gruesome Russian highway accident and a hardcore porn video.” Adrian Chen visits the workers in the Philippines who see terrible things online so you don’t have to.
- Moving Through Life - "What’s it like to be mad? What’s it like to be admitted to a mental health hospital? What sort of reality do mad people experience? Do you want me to answer? Well, I can’t…sort of… I can tell you how it is for me, but that’s that."
- Argos Catalogues - "I love retro ephemera in general (posters, adverts, leaflets etc) and I’ve been collecting old Argos catalogues for a few years now. I initially wanted to just get all the ones from the 80s but then I thought I would extended that to 1975 – 1995. Given that Argos started in 1973 I’ll probably try to get the earlier ones too. I’ve now got nearly all of them as PDF and I currently have 16 hard copies." Excellent!
- Paper cuts: small but mighty! - Christina Duffy from the British Library explains what makes paper cuts especially excruciating: ”Paper cuts cause a seemingly out of proportion amount of pain due to the anatomy of our skin and the structure of paper. When very thin and held in place, a sheet of paper becomes inflexible and can exert very high levels of pressure – enough to slice through flesh! Yikes! Let’s go under the microscope to see what's happening… ”
- My Day Interviewing For The Service Economy Startup From Hell - Amanda Tomas was distinctly unimpressed by her experience: ”A new start-up company called Handybook called me quickly after I hit submit on their online application. I breezed through a phone interview and was invited to interview in person for a Customer Experience Associate position the very next day… Everyone was wearing T-shirts and jeans, typing away on laptops and iMacs. The space was cramped and smelled vaguely like pod coffee, cleaning solution, and sweat.”
- Abandoned and Rusty Soviet Turbo Jet Train - Photos of an abandoned experiment in transportation: ”The projected speed for this out-of-the-sixties monster was planned to be up to 360 km/h, and it set a record of 250 km/h on the Soviet standard railway. The project was discarded afterwards, partly due to the very high fuel consumption of the jet engines compared to the engines of jet planes, and we thought the only train built was lost, but recently these guys discovered it rusting on the back ways of some railroad.”
- Drunk J. Crew - It seems the models advertising the clothes of American retailer J. Crew tend to look as if they’ve been overindulging in booze, if not in food:
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