"Like many Apple stalwarts, I have long regarded the Windows world as a foreign land — an intriguing, exotic destination suitable for a bit of sightseeing, but the sort of place that suffers from too many problems for me to want to live there. Surface, Microsoft’s line of hybrid computers that are part tablet and part Windows PC, has me rethinking this position."
I'm not sure USB port design is the detail I care most about, but I'm glad that Razer spent $380k sweating it. Fast Co Design's Dan Nosowitz sees, in a very expensive gaming laptop, the hand of Jobs:
That attention to detail isn't just for show; Razer really has accomplished something pretty impressive with the Blade. It's thinner than the MacBook Pro with Retina Display, much more powerful, with a display that's not only 20% more pixel-dense than the Retina but a touch screen as well. Though it's very similar to the MacBook in some of its design cues--its hinges, its trackpad, and its matte finish are all very Apple-y--it's undeniably an exciting machine. But as any Jobsian acolyte knows, it's obsession with detail that makes a piece of technology truly seem special, and for Min, that included the USB ports.
If you’re an average reader, I’ve got your attention for 15 seconds, so here goes: We are getting a lot wrong about the web these days. We confuse what people have clicked on for what they’ve read. We mistake sharing for reading. We race towards new trends like native advertising without fixing what was wrong with the old ones and make the same mistakes all over again.
Mini Metro is a video-game from New Zealand's Dinosaur Polo Club in which you create public transit systems in order to improve the lives of virtual citizens of an imaginary town. It does a really clever job of simulating the efficacy of your trains and the way that influences commuter behaviors. The game is in early alpha and is a free download for GNU/Linux, Mac OS and Windows.
I doubt that the "Bacon Scent Alarm Clock" is a real thing, but this marketing photo carries a certain perverse wonder about it; one day, this will clearly be an artifact of the age of reaching irony. 11 p.m.: not too early for breakfast!
The good news is that Getty is to allow free-of-charge use of many images. The bad news is that you have to use official embed code, inserting an iframe whose contents they maintain control over. The EFF's Parket Higgins points out that, just as with YouTube, Facebook, Google, and other third-party embedded services, the image is watching you, too:
These concerns might be mitigated by a strong privacy policy or some indication of what Getty intends to log and how it's going to use it. Unfortunately, we've gotten the opposite. A business development executive at Getty Images told The Verge that the company has "certainly thought about" monetizing user data, but has no specific plans. We spoke to a representative of Getty Images who said that at this time it does not collect information beyond what's necessary to store aggregate viewing numbers for individual images. That's commendable, but since that practice is significantly more privacy-protective than what the company claims in its general privacy policy—last updated in May 2012—it could change at any time. Best practices are to minimize the amount of data collected and held to meet a site's needs, but that's at odds with an incentive to collect-it-all and sort out what's needed later.
A.J. Jacobs, a writer, a human guinea pig, and the author of four New York Times Bestsellers, including the Year of Living Biblically, for which he followed the hundreds of rules of the Bible as literally as possible, from the 10 commandments to growing a huge beard.
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Prisoner art & inventions. I used to receive a lot of unwanted mail from prisoners in the 90s. An exhibit of prisoner inventions assembled by the Chicago artist collective Temporary Services collaborating with an incarcerated artist named Angelo changed my outlook and, in time, the quality of my prisoner mail. From bedsheet murals to paper mache chess sets, I’m fascinated with the ways that artists adapt with limited resources and compromised humanity while incarcerated.
"This Moment in Last Gasp History" is a video series I’m launching next week. Ron Turner regularly stops by my desk at Last Gasp and tells me crazy stories about Last Gasp history (smuggling comics into the Hanoi Hilton, smuggling comics to Fidel Castro, Last Gasp sponsoring a Formula 1 race car, goats in taxi cabs, weird 70s sex parties, you name it). I don’t have the means to write Ron’s biography so I’m turning some of these stories into short videos. Read The Origins of Last Gasp.
A.J.'s picks
There's lots of new stuff to report about the Global Family Reunion
The crowdsourced genealogy movement is fascinating. I wrote a piece about it for the NYT. I'm a big fan of the World Family Tree (which is now up to 75 MILLION people) but it's very controversial, because of invasion of privacy concerns and also accuracy concerns.
The Horrors of Ancient Medicine. I'm writing a piece for Mental Floss about the horrors of ancient doctors. My favorite: the smoke enema. Where you literally blow smoke up the ass. That's where the phrase comes from. It was supposed to cure all sorts of things, like stomach ailments.
Mark's picks:
Wink is a new website from Kevin Kelly, Carla Sinclair (my wife), and me. It’s about remarkable books that belong on paper and wouldn’t be good as an ebook. We review one new paper book each weekday.
Devo: Hardcore: 4-track Demo tapes made in Akron from 1974 to 1977. Fantastic early work. The members of Devo were peaceful hippies until the Kent State massacre (Amazing interview with Jerry Casale).
Nothing is a supercut of scenes from Seinfeld in which no humans appear, creating a show that's not only about nothing, but also about no one. It's pretty great, especially once you get into the interior shots around 4:40.
BTW, I just checked and the Seinfeld box-set is still $59 on Amazon -- all 33 discs' worth.
The Web is 25 today, and its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, has called for a "Magna Carta" for the Web, through which the people of the world will articulate how they want to curtail their governments' adversarial attacks on Internet freedom. Berners-Lee is particularly concerned with the Edward Snowden revelations about mass surveillance and systematic government sabotage of Internet security.
I'm delighted to see Berners-Lee tackling this. Everything we do today involves the Web and everything we do tomorrow will require it; getting Web policy right is the first step to getting everything else right.
I hope that this also signals a re-think of Berners-Lee's endorsement of the idea of standardizing "digital rights management" technology for Web browsers through the W3C. The majority of the Web's users live in a country in which it is illegal to report on vulnerabilities in DRM, because doing so might help to defeat the DRM's locks. The standardization of DRM in the deep structures of the Web means that our browsers will become reservoirs of long-lived, critical bugs that can be used to attack Web users -- just as Web users are massively expanding the activities that are mediated through their browsers.
If we are to have a Web that is fit for a free and fair world, it must be a Web where researchers are free to warn users about defects in their tools. We wouldn't countenance a rule that banned engineers from telling you if your house was structurally unsound. By standardizing DRM in browsers, the W3C is setting in place rules that will make it virtually impossible to know if your digital infrastructure is stable and secure.
Etsy seller Matthew Cummings of Kentucky's Pretentious Beer Glass Company created a set of four cylindrical, dual-chambered beer glasses, which allows you to mix any two beers without regard to their specific gravities and without a lot of mucking around with jigs. He also takes custom orders. A set of four is $125.
Head over to the BBS and win nothing but the approbation of your peers! The true caption will be posted at 6 p.m. today. [Photo: Umit Bektas/REUTERS] 
I'm not sure USB port design is the detail I care most about, but I'm glad that 
I doubt that the "
Prisoner art & inventions
"This Moment in Last Gasp History" is a video series I’m launching next week. Ron Turner regularly stops by my desk at Last Gasp and tells me crazy stories about Last Gasp history (smuggling comics into the Hanoi Hilton, smuggling comics to Fidel Castro, Last Gasp sponsoring a Formula 1 race car, goats in taxi cabs, weird 70s sex parties, you name it). I don’t have the means to write Ron’s biography so I’m turning some of these stories into short videos. Read 
Wink
Devo: Hardcore
What child wouldn't want to be surprised by this adorable wax-headed baby doll crawling out from under their bed at 2am?
