http://youtu.be/SVW6SH2bjYQ
“No B and C? It’s a trap!” (Devour)
Each week I come across a lot of videos, articles, and random things that I’d like to share, but sometimes they aren’t well-suited to a full post. Afterthoughts are weekly posts that collect all this extra stuff for your weekend reading/watching/listening/laughing pleasure.
For some reason there was a just a whole bunch of interesting stuff posted this past week. The list may look a little daunting, but I assure you, there’s a lot of good stuff in here to explore. Enjoy!
Videos:
- An ocean of birds, they look like an Aurora: Gizmodo
- If you have trouble with procrastination, watch this video a few times, you know, so it really sinks in: Devour
- The next generation of Beyblades, those weird “battle top” things kids play with, except with more lights, and magnets: Gizmodo
- Paul Miller from The Verge takes a tour of the giant Windows Phone that was set up in Manhattan: The Verge
- An RC helicopter fly-through and tour of a GE plant: Devour
- Bridges constructed entirely of living tree shoots, and each one takes over a lifetime to build, fascinating: Devour
- A visual explanation of why the electoral college is messed up: Devour
- A truly “Green City” being built in Abu Dhabi: Devour
- A psychedelic polygon sculpture that’ll make your brain melt: Gizmodo
- Light-up blinds for your underground man cave, good to fake people out: Gizmodo
- A cool “3D” museum piece using a whole bunch of LEDs floating in midair: Gizmodo
- A guy had too much time one weekend, so he decided to stack a bunch of coins on a dime: Gizmodo
News:
- Adobe announced that it’s giving up on Flash for mobile devices, HTML5 is better: The Verge
- Dippin’ Dots filed for bankruptcy, which means the little stand at the mall that’s 20 miles away from you might be closing down. They could recover from this, but it’s still kind of a bummer, those little dots were real chill…: Gizmodo
- Honda showed off the newest version of its ASIMO humanoid robot. I swear, sometimes it looks like a monkey with a suit on: Engadget
- And here’s another (uglier) humanoid robot with an actual human controlling it from afar. Pretty precise: The Verge
- An iOS developer showed off a loophole in iOS 5 that lets an app download and execute code to tap into a bunch of the user’s sensitive information. He was kicked from the developer program and tweeted, “That’s so rude!”, but I’m sure he expected it to happen posting it on YouTube, he just wanted attention: Gizmodo
- Khan Academy is growing. It now has $5 million in funding to grow and is considering building a school (which doesn’t make much sense to me, but whatever). They sound pretty ambitious, but time will tell if the US is ready to start learning outside of the traditional classroom: Hack Education
- Andy Rooney passed away this week only a short while after officially retiring. Here’s a collection of his best tech-related talks: Gizmodo
- Some more info about C3 Technologies (the 3D mapping firm Apple bought) trickled out, and it seems like they do a lot of the same things Google does with Maps. Whenever this comes to the iPhone I hope they implement some sort of iPhone crowd-sourced traffic data. Navigon and other GPS apps, for whatever reason, don’t seem to detect traffic very well, and that kind of information is really, really useful when you have it. Sure you could check the news before heading out, but, bleh: MacRumors
- A “definitive” flu vaccine that makes it “impossible” to become infected is currently being tested. Supposedly you’ll never get the flu again if get it, but for some reason I doubt that’s true: Gizmodo
- The new Apple Store iOS app lets you buy things with your iTunes account and walk out of the store without ever talking to anyone. Pretty cool: Engadget
Other:
- Lifehacker recently put up an article touting the benefits of having an online backup of your computers, but that’s not a great solution if you’re the “Computer Guy” of the family who’s responsible for keeping everybody up and running. Online backups get expensive, and it’s also a bit less private. Instead, I’d check out Tinkertry’s tips for using LogMeIn’s Hamachi client with Windows Home Server to back up your computers (Macs too!) from just about anywhere with an internet connection. Multiple offsite backups become a breeze, and your whole family can be backed up nightly without any driving whatsoever: Tinkertry
- Marco Arment notes that with the recent floods in Thailand making HDDs scarce, the new demand for SSDs will probably drive down their cost: Marco.org