David Lidsky's Blog, page 3255
May 22, 2014
Once Upon a Time, There Was a Hedgehog
Blake Harris on Sonic, hustling, and his new book, Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation
If you ask Blake Harris what he does for a living, he'll tell you he's a writer. But he's also a salesman, one practiced in the art of the soft sell. Just ask his doorman.
Watch This Insanely Terrifying Supercell Thunderstorm
It looks like a flying saucer made of angry clouds is about to devour Missouri.
Of the four different categories of thunderstorm, supercell is the worst. A rare confluence of warm air and precipitation creates a mesocyclone vortex, a swirling juggernaut of a storm that produces huge quantities of hail and roars by at over 100 miles per hour, affecting the land for miles and miles. And this timelapse video shows one taking shape and letting loose its fury.
This Backpack Vaporizes Your Data And Puts You Behind A Smokescreen
Designer Ji Won Jun designed a wearables prototype that nods to privacy concerns.
One unintended consequence of wearable tech is that our data gets a lot more vulnerable. Physical contact and a swipe of a Google Glass may become an opportunity to steal everything from social media logins to credit card information. To defend against this possibility, MFA candidate Ji Won Jun, designed a system to vaporize data while you're on the go, with your backpack.
Facebook Switches Default Share Setting From "Everyone" To "Friends," Aims To Save You From Yourself
Score one for privacy.
Posting something dumb and embarrassing for the whole world to gawk at is basically a rite of passage on Facebook. Since 2009, the social network made public tomfoolery extraordinarily easy by defaulting its share settings to "everyone," despite evidence that its users wanted otherwise.
Fab To Lay Off Around 90 Employees
The troubled e-store's latest round of layoffs cuts a third of the staff.
Fab has gone through some tough times lately--multiple rounds of layoffs in the past year, the departure of both its COO and its founding design chief, and a total realignment of its business strategy--and the troubles aren't over yet. The e-commerce site has confirmed to us that it will "in weeks ahead" lay off 80 to 90 employees from its New York office, about a third of its global staff.
Fab will be reducing its staff to about 200, much decreased from not very many months ago when it employed 700 people.
Going On Vacation? Find A Pet-Sitter With DoggyBnB
It taps into your social network and eases the stressful process of finding someone to care for your pets.
L.A.-based software developer Adam Pokornicky's friends all love his pet cavapoo, Maggie. They often ask him to come over--and to bring Maggie. But whenever Pokornicky had to leave town, and he actually needed help with Maggie, suddenly those friends became unavailable.
May 21, 2014
NYC's Last Great Secret: This Abandoned Island
Christopher Payne explores the uninhabited North Brother Island, which is falling into ruin.
In the past 50 years, North Brother Island has almost been entirely removed from the city's collective memory map. Located in the East River between the Bronx and Rikers Island, it has a history of housing people New York City couldn't or wouldn't accommodate: In the late 19th century, it was used to quarantine Typhoid Mary. Then it became a temporary home for World War II veterans. In the 1950s, it was a juvenile drug treatment center. It closed in 1963.
California Greenlights Testing Of Driverless Cars
This could open the road to more adoption of autonomous vehicles.
In Mountain View, California, home of Google and all its quirky tech, it's not uncommon to see moving cars without anyone commanding the steering wheel. Come this fall, residents in the state might notice more autonomous vehicles on the road.
LinkedIn Will Now Rank Your Profile Based On Popularity
Are you a star or a nobody on LinkedIn? A new tool called How You Rank will tell you.
LinkedIn has just debuted a feature that will show users how they rank among their connections, which means LinkedIn vanity can now be quantified.
This Baby Goat Taking His First Steps With A Mini Wheelchair Will Melt Your Insides
Turn up the volume to hear Frostie's bleats of joy.
Frostie the snow goat, the cutest kid with the cutest name, suffers from a debilitating condition called "joint navel ill" that has rendered his hind legs unusable. It's very sad; Frostie is only a few days old. But things are looking up for our friend: The kind people of Edgar's Mission, an Australian nonprofit for rescue animals, have provided him with a Frostie-size wheelchair to help him get around--and also to kill us with cuteness.
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