Internet

Kids post Facebook pics of themselves burglarizing house

It's hard to know where to hold a party these days. Big venues are expensive. Small ones might even have a cover charge. And then there's all the legal responsibility.

Perhaps that's why some kids in Tega Cay, S.C., decided that it might be more, um, cost-effective to break into someone else's house and have the party there.

According to NBC Charlotte, the owners of the house were none the wiser. For they were out of town when the party allegedly happened. And when they returned they noticed nothing especially amiss.

That was, until their eyes were directed to some pictures on Facebook. Gosh, that house looked familiar. For indeed, it appears that pictures from the break-in party had been posted by the alleged miscreants. … Read more

Create a 3D cardboard avatar mini-me for 12 bucks

The same people who brought you Olly the smelly robot have taken the next logical step into creating miniature 3D cardboard avatars. Yep, I said "huh?" when I heard that, too.

But "huh?" isn't a bad thing. Mint Digital's Foldable.Me is an online design tool that lets you customize your blocky little avatar. Next, you pay $11.99 and your little friend shows up in the mail a few days later. The avatar comes flat for you to fold into shape.… Read more

Hashtag 'scalpel': Hospital to live-tweet ear surgery

If you're on Twitter, you've probably followed a live-tweeted gadget reveal or political convention or Olympics event or Mars rover landing in your day. You probably have not, however, followed a live-tweeted surgery. That could change tomorrow.

As Dr. Douglas Backous performs a cochlear implant operation at Seattle's Swedish Medical Center, his moves will be tweeted live, with still photos from inside the operating room posted to Instagram (presumably not by Backous himself). … Read more

Wear a whole year of tweets around your neck

Designer, software developer, and hacker Stef Lewandowski has pulled tweets out of the digital ether and formed them into wearable works of art. His Data Necklace is a combination of your Twitter account, a year-in-review archive, and a data visualization of your tweeting activities.

Here's the breakdown. Each bead is cut from acrylic. The 12 pairs of beads each represent one month of data. One bead represents the number of tweets by its length and a series of notches cut into the sides. The second bead carries a laser-etched tweet from that time period containing a particular keyword such as "love."… Read more

Sweet LOLcats! Puppies and kittens can boost productivity?

It turns out my obsessive daily viewing of eye-searingly adorable animal pictures online is actually an integral part of of my work productivity plan. I am indebted to some Japanese scientists for this revelation.

Researchers from Hiroshima University conducted a study to examine the effects of viewing cute images on task performance. Guess what? Looking at images of baby animals boosted performance, I'm thrilled to report.… Read more

'Street Ghosts' posts Street View specters in real life

Imagine turning a street corner and coming face-to-face with... yourself?

It could happen, if you've ever been captured by the Google Street View cameras. For his Street Ghosts project, artist Paolo Cirio prints human-scale pictures of people found on Street View and posts them where the shots were originally taken, thus placing the digital imagery firmly in the physical world.

"In this project, I exposed the specters of Google's eternal realm of private, misappropriated data: the bodies of people captured by Google's Street View cameras, whose ghostly, virtual presence I marked in Street Art fashion at … Read more

Kickfollower tracks the second life of successful Kickstarter projects

Sometimes we kick ourselves for missing out on a good Kickstarter. There's that moment of sorrow when we see something awesome is already funded and done without us. Then we eventually forget about it.

Kickfollower is a combination of a gentle reminder and a discovery tool for crowdfunded projects. It aggregates successful projects that are now reality and available for purchase from online stores.… Read more

Do RFID socks tell us we're pathetic?

Today I bought some Calvin Klein socks that seemed pretty fancy: they're antibacterial and made of "rayon from bamboo."

But leave it to the Swiss to make a mockery of such humdrum foot coverings. Smarter Socks are high-tech socks with RFID buttons that can help you find a sock's mate, figure out how worn it is, and manage your sock inventory via an iPhone app.

Yes, you can manage your socks by logging on to your account and messing around with their RFID numbers. It's supposed to make your life simpler compared to messing around in your sock drawer. … Read more

Can we please stop crowdsourcing the English language?

According to the Collins Dictionary, every word of the following paragraph qualifies as legitimate English:

"That oojamaflip zhooshing up the bang tidy K-pop on the banjolele is amazeballs! It's totally fandabidozi, but I'm just a fanboy who can't play squadoosh myself."

Nine of the words and phrases in the above two sentences come from the list of 86 new words, phrases, and senses (sort of like an additional definition for an existing word) that Collins added to its online dictionary as a result of an exhaustive crowdsourcing effort.

Now here's the mind-blowing part: those 86 new English words were chosen from a massive digital pile of more than 4,000 submissions sent in from the public.… Read more

Emoticon celebrates 30 years :-)

Simple typography that started out as a colon, dash, and parenthesis has now grown up and blossomed into a massive array of features, moods, and gestures. Who would have thought that a happy face :-) could ever lead to rock horns \m/, or tongue-tied :-&, or just a simple heart <3?

Today, the emoticon turns 30.… Read more