—T.S. Elliot

Intel’s $150 HDMI Stick Turns Any TV Into a Windows Desktop

Got an HDMI port handy? Sure, you could plug in a Chromecast, Fire TV Stick or Roku Streaming Stick to get your Netflix fix. Or you could pay $150 to get a full Windows 8.1 PC in the same form factor.
Why would anyone want to do this to their TV?
It’s like saying, “I’d like to turn my TV into a piece of shit.”

Re/code: This Is the Unofficial Brothel of CES:

When new women arrive to work at Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel about 65 miles west of Las Vegas, they have to be taught a lot of new techniques. Social media is one of the most important of them.

During this week’s sprawling International CES gadget show, which ends tomorrow and draws more than 150,000 people each year to the Las Vegas Convention Center, the sharing-savvy brothel sees some of its busiest nights. Sheri’s Ranch calls itself “the unofficial brothel of CES” — and says that business is up about 70 percent this week.

Brothel matron Dena, who uses humorously bawdy social media to attract CES attendees, also trains the ranch’s rotating roster of 75 to 100 on-site sex workers to create online personas and unique voices, which Dena says makes the women feel more empowered, and helps skirt the legal ban against advertising their services.

Andrew Watts, a 19-year-old at the University of Texas, posted an interesting piece on Medium titled, A Teenager’s View on Social Media.
He breaks down the popularity of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat, Tumblr and YikYak in the “highly coveted” demographic of which he is a part.
Most interesting to me are his views on Facebook:

In short, many have nailed this on the head. It’s dead to us. Facebook is something we all got in middle school because it was cool but now is seen as an awkward family dinner party we can’t really leave.
This makes total sense. Mom, Dad and all your and all your aunts and uncles are on Facebook. LAME-O. But, wait:
Facebook is often used by us mainly for its group functionality. I know plenty of classmates who only go on Facebook to check the groups they are part of and then quickly log off.
And:
Messaging on Facebook is also extremely popular among our age group, mainly because they provide the means to talk to those people who you weren’t really comfortable with asking for their number but comfortable enough to send them a friend request.
So, despite being “dead” to the kids, they continue to use Facebook a lot. I’m willing to bet they use it potentially as much as other, more cool social networks like Instagram. What’s interesting is Andrew seems to define “using” a website/app as posting content to it. Simply “checking in” on it—like teens do on Facebook—doesn’t count. Server logs and analytics tools would beg to differ.
It also seems Facebook’s move to decouple messaging from the core Facebook product was a smart move. Facebook is perceived as a crazy, loud, public zoo (because it is), but Facebook Messenger is a discreet way to talk to someone.

From the Editorial Board of The New York Times:

Mayor Bill de Blasio has been in office barely a year, and already forces of entropy are roaming the streets, turning their backs on the law, defying civil authority and trying to unravel the social fabric.

No, not squeegee-men or turnstile-jumpers. We’re talking about the cops.

For the second straight week, police officers across the city have all but stopped writing tickets and severely cut down the number of arrests. The Times reported that in the week ending Sunday, only 347 criminal summonses were issued citywide, down from 4,077 over the same period last year. Parking and traffic tickets were down by more than 90 percent. In Coney Island, ticketing and summonses fell to zero.
Perhaps doctors should stop attending to injured police officers and their families when they have problems with something their bosses say. That’s fair, right?

Headline on Flavorwire:
Moviegoing Hit a 20-Year Low in 2014. Is the Death of the Movie Theater Inevitable?
Will theatres die? No.
Seriously reduce in number? Very possible. I say we start closing the disgusting ones, where you’re afraid you might catch bed bugs.
One a related note: Vinyl record sales in 2014 were the highest they’ve been since 1993

Kickstarter is ditching Amazon Payments and moving to Stripe:

The move should help Kickstarter in a few ways. Its project creators should be able to get up and running more quickly — they previously had to set up a business account with Amazon, which could take up to seven days for approval, before launching a Kickstarter campaign. Kickstarter campaign backers can also now make their pledges in fewer steps, since they won’t have to leave Kickstarter to pay on Amazon (Kickstarter was using a legacy Amazon Payments product that didn’t allow this; Amazon’s new payments product does). Lastly, Kickstarter can use Stripe to process all the transactions on its platform, both in the U.S. and abroad. Amazon Payments’ lack of international support forced Kickstarter to use another payments processor for overseas campaigns.
I’ve successfully funded two Kickstarter projects (here and here) so anything to make things easier for backers sounds good to me.

via Twitter

Tero Kuittinen at BGR on the irrelevance of CES:

I’ll be heading for CES again tomorrow, but mainly to meet people. As a device showcase, CES has demonstrated an uncanny ability to highlight trends that will never be. Perhaps the most legendary example was the year 2006, one year before the iPhone arrived. The highlights of CES 2006 pretty much represented every trend that was going to fizzle out far before anyone expected.
All I want to know is where is my 9K resolution television?!

This week Michael and Bryan are joined by special guest Chris Papa. The three discuss the east coast, the west coast, the Brooklyn-Queens address system, being too old for clubs, domestic house stuff, the Serial podcast, accents in different countries and succeeding after bad high school experiences.
Listen to Weekly Exhaust (and subscribe on iTunes)

—Jerry Seinfeld in Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee
[Really? You didn’t understand the title? Fuck you, then]

I’d always found great satisfaction in taking something older that was crafted using superb materials and technique and bringing it back to life–like the three-story Queen Anne Victorian my wife and I bought in 1979. When I started working on the house, I couldn’t find the hardware, moldings, and fittings I needed. You couldn’t get things like brass cabinet knobs in hardware stores. I eventually found obscure sources, but I had a “duh” moment when I realized I didn’t have the money to buy those things even if I had found them.
—Stephen Gordon, founder of Restoration Hardware in a Fortune interview
via ParisLemon