Omni Calculator asks a few questions about your internet usage and tells you what else you might consider doing instead. And yet, for some reason, I find myself wary of… Read the rest of the article: How many books could you read if you quit social media?

Bloomberg reports that Facebook retains recordings of users' voice chats and paid contractors to transcribe them. Now that this has been exposed, the social media giant says it has "paused"… Read the rest of the article: Facebook paid contractors to transcribe audio chats

George Sink Sr. is well-known to South Carolina couch potatoes thanks to the endless rotation of ads pitching his personal injury firm. George Sink Jr. is his son, also a… Read the rest of the article: Lawyer son loses trademark fight with lawyer dad, can't use own name for firm

It lived some 60m years ago, but the giant penguins are still with us. Standing about 5ft 3in and weighing up to 176 pounds, the monster penguin roamed New Zealand's… Read the rest of the article: Fossilized remains of human-sized "monster" penguin unearthed

Dylan Sheridan circuit-bent some smoke alarms and posted the results of his sonorous experiments to Bandcamp. [via Metafilter] Circuit Bent Smoke Alarms – Ringtone Collection by Dylan Sheridan Unprocessed sounds… Read the rest of the article: Music of the circuit-bent smoke alarms

I wrote a while back about why typing on old keyboards feels better: it's because they were simple, low-latency devices interacting with your computer's bare metal. Nowadays, many device instructions… Read the rest of the article: How much keyboard latency can you take?

You can buy microcontrollers for as little as 3 cents, if you order a lot of them, a staggeringly cheap number even if you're so young you don't know a… Read the rest of the article: What are 3-cent microcontrollers good for?

This seems bad. Buzzfeed: Almost 40 minutes before ABC News first reported Epstein's death on Twitter, someone posted still-unverified details on 4chan, the anonymous message board popular with far-right trolls… Read the rest of the article: Epstein's death was posted to 4chan half an hour before officials announced it

From an unbylined, slapdash item at CBS News: CBS News has learned that the morning of Jeffrey Epstein's death there was shouting and shrieking from his jail cell. Guards attempted… Read the rest of the article: CBS News: "Shrieking" heard from Jeffrey Epstein's cell the morning he died

Fredo Corleone is the childish, easily-led brother from The Godfather whose weakness and insecurity lead him to betray his family. Chris Cuomo is the childish, easily-led CNN anchor whose weakness… Read the rest of the article: Watch CNN host Chris Cuomo threaten man who compared him to fictional mafia moron Fredo Corleone

Sarah Krouse reports that Automattic, the company behind WordPress, is buying Tumblr from Verizon. WordPress is the software reportedly powering a third of the world's websites, and was itself originally… Read the rest of the article: WordPress owners buy Tumblr (Update: for "less than $3m")

lacroix.glitch.me is a Glitch app that generates delicious new flavors of calorie-free sparkling water—or perhaps just honest names for the ones there already are.

Behold the AmazonBasics Alexa-Equipped Microwave, a $40 item whose low price is belied by the fact everything you say to it is held in contingent perpetuity in an Amazon datacenter.… Read the rest of the article: Extremely cheap microwave oven has Alexa, listening

I wrote earlier this year about Lorem Picsum, a site that provides random placeholder images for use in design projects in the spirit of Lorem Ipsum, the classic jumbled-up latin… Read the rest of the article: How to serve a billion images a month on a budget

I typed up the following partial transcription of the subtitles: SEAL: geaaaagh SEAL: ggeg SEAL: gigphph SEAL: d'egff SEAL: mibph SEAL: guh SEAL: miuhff SEAL: murph! SEAL: d'egg SEAL: egg!… Read the rest of the article: A seal, with subtitles

Even by the indifferent standards of licensed video games, the athletes' voice acting in NBA 2K15—unaccustomed as they are to public speaking—was something else. The train will be humming in… Read the rest of the article: When you're not a voice actor but have to do some voice acting

Congratulations, Dick Braine. The BBC: In a ballot of members, Mr Braine received 53% of the vote – more than double that of his closest rival. Mr Braine was the… Read the rest of the article: Dick Braine to lead Britain's far-right UKIP party

A man was arrested at a Missouri WalMart wearing body armor and carrying "tactical weapons" — legal carry in the state. They're holding him while they figure out what to… Read the rest of the article: Man in bulletproof vest and carrying "tactical" rifle arrested in WalMart

Here's Free Game Planet on PacM̬̦̩̹̌͢a̪͓̮̼͍̗͑̿ͫn̛̥͈ͅ, an interesting variation on the classic created (or perhaps unearthed) by Berick Cook: "The PacM̬̦̩̹̌͢a̪͓̮̼͍̗͑̿ͫn̛̥͈ͅ ROM is said to have been taken from a… Read the rest of the article: PacM̬̦̩̹̌͢a̪͓̮̼͍̗͑̿ͫn̛̥͈ͅ is the classic arcade game, but with extra horror