Managed over 24 hours without touching either laptop or iPad this Easter. Now, back to the fray:
Happy invoicing!
- I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blouson - "The most famous people do live differently in 2014. I suppose the brutal murder of John Lennon was the final blow for those in the very highest reaches of celebrity who wanted to try and lead anything approaching a normal lifestyle... However… in 1972… life was simpler." Terence Dackombe reminisces about collecting for a charity shop in Surrey.
- Brilliant Ways to Hack Your Ikea Furniture - "Bored with your regular everyday Ikea furniture? Try turning it into something else with these brilliant Ikea furniture hacks. Because Ikea products are mostly self-assembly, they're perfect for hacking!" Back in 2010 I linked to a video showing how to make fire using only Ikea products; here are a few more durable things you can also make.
- Demo of Beat It composed using only Michael Jackson’s voice - "As Jackson couldn’t fluently play any instruments, he would sing and beatbox out how he wanted his songs to sound by himself on tape, layering the vocals, harmonies and rhythm before having instrumentalists come in to complete the songs." Weird he may have been, but this recording reveals astonishing vocal abilities.
- How Superman singlehandedly thwarted the Ku Klux Klan - "Our story begins with an intrepid young folklorist and activist from Florida named Stetson Kennedy. He noticed that the Klan was experiencing a resurgence... In the 1940s, Superman was a radio sensation—children all over the country were following his exploits ravenously. Kennedy decided to approach the makers of the radio serial to see if they would be interested in an epic “Superman vs. the Klan” plotline. He learned that they were interested in such a thing." The Superman serial is credited with greatly weakening the Klan's popular support; the article links to the original episodes, which can be found on YouTube, complete with many sponsorship messages from Kellog's
- The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates - Spoiler alert: this blatant manipulation of crime stats for political ends seems to have been copied wholesale from season 3 of The Wire: "We identified 10 people, including Groves, who were beaten, burned, suffocated, or shot to death in 2013 and whose cases were reclassified as death investigations, downgraded to more minor crimes, or even closed as noncriminal incidents—all for illogical or, at best, unclear reasons... [and] dozens of other crimes, including serious felonies such as robberies, burglaries, and assaults, that were misclassified, downgraded to wrist-slap offenses, or made to vanish altogether."
- The (Unintentional) Amazon Guide to Dealing Drugs - "One day, some drug dealer bought a particular digital scale—the AWS-100— on the retail site, Amazon.com. And then another drug dealer bought the same scale. Then another. Then another. Amazon's data-tracking software watched what else these people purchased, and now, if you buy the AWS-100 scale, Amazon serves up a quickstart kit for selling drugs." Plan B, anyone?
- Reflections on the Counting of Sneezes - The creator of Sneezecount has been recording every one of his sneezes on this site since July 2007, and here reflects on his endeavours: "Once I had been counting sneezes for a short time, I became disturbed when I saw someone sneeze, and then not look closely at their watch or mobile phone and take out and write something illegible in a notebook. Witnessing people sneeze and then not record it has come to feel unsettling and wrong, as if they are losing the sneeze, letting it go to waste."
- A 7-Step Guide for Rebooting Civilization After the Apocalypse - "The world as we know it has ended. A particularly virulent strain of avian flu finally breached the species barrier and hopped successfully to human hosts. Or tensions between India and Pakistan reached the breaking point, culminating in the use of nuclear weapons. Or a rocky asteroid, only around a mile across, slammed into the Earth and fatally changed atmospheric conditions. Now what?" What indeed?
- NoSQL Meets Bitcoin and Brings Down Two Exchanges: The Story of Flexcoin and Poloniex - "Flexcoin was a Bitcoin exchange that shut down on March 3rd, 2014, when someone allegedly hacked in and made off with 896 BTC in the hot wallet. Because the half-million dollar heist from the hot wallet was too large for the company to bear, it folded... It's not every day when one's professional interests in NoSQL databases collide with one's interest in cryptocurrencies, especially in such a monumental train wreck." I've always been a bit dubious about these "eventually consistent" data stores, or more accurately, about their use in contexts that seem inappropriate.
- This Is What The Internet Looked Like In 1996 - "Eighteen years ago, in 1995, the Internet only had 10 million active users... In February 1996, Morgan Stanley analysts Mary Meeker and Chris DePuy wrote a massive, 322-page report arguing that that would soon change..." They listed 110 of "...what we consider to be the most important, highly useful, and, simply put, coolest cool sites on the Internet." A nostalgic look back at the days when everything was in Times New Roman because Netscape had only just introduced the <font> tag and nobody knew how to use it yet:
Happy invoicing!
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