It's just metadata, who cares?

I do.
Metadata are hints and details at what you have been doing or where you have gone. Many say they don't care but those people don't understand what metadata is. Think of letting someone know where you make every call and whom it went to makes me rather nervous. The counter argument to this is, people give away their info freely all the time, but these companies, do not have the ability to imprison me or to take away my rights. The NSA says they only do two hops, meaning If a friend called a terrorist then the NSA could call me because it is just TWO data points away from me. The issue is that most people have called a major business like Fedex or AT&T. This means that a "terrorist" could call FedEx and now everyone who has called Fedex is a hop away from being investigated, even though there is no real connection. This opens the possibility of huge swaths of people to be spied on or have their details kept. I recommend reading this article off of Boing Boing and to watch the interview below from PBS News Hour to understand a bit more about what metadata is and how is can be used. Remember, there may not be a use for your data now, but there may be one coming up soon.

I just happen to have some magnets

Really cool easy project for anyone needing to clean.
Link to the original post

The future is small

VR is back!

From the Oculus to Sony's Playstation to the Xbox, all are going Virtual reality. In 1993, I attended a VR conference in Boston. These were the barest rudimentary setup for  "Virtual Reality". They had games like Dactyl Nightmare and some shaky first person perspective roller coaster rides. The nineties promised VR but it just could never make it off the ground with the general public.The VR future promised we could do almost anything, go anywhere and interact everywhere.  Now that technology, in general, is so pervasive and normalized, this and other types of wearable tech just seem like the natural progression. Below is a video from Oculus that shows off how the goggles work. Also, check here to read about the PS4 and XBox's new VR stuff coming out eventually. I think gaming is the perfect venue to get people used to this concept. And speaking of other wearables. Google announced yesterday, their version of the smart watch. As for me, I can't freakin wait!


 
Below is Google's video for their new smartwatch. Although, I love the idea and the toe tapping song, I did see one more thing were people think they are the only ones around. We will eventually have to come up with what having good manners means with our tech in public.

Read this and think before you use Google docs

Here's a snippet from the story.
A very tricky phishing scam that takes advantage of Google Docs is making its way around the web. And since it uses a google.com URL and even makes use of Google's SSL encryption, it's almost impossible to tell that it's a hack. Your best safeguard, as always, is a little bit of common sense.

Watch the Snowden speech

TDLR has the link for the Edward Snowden's speech at the SXSW festival. The video is choppy but the audio is fine but echoey. Edward Snowden is the whistleblower who let everyone in on what was happening with the NSA.

Bored and have some extra time?

Try some surveys. NPR just did a decent story on Mechanical Turk. Very cool way of getting surveys for all sorts of things filled out. From stores wanting info to PHD students finishing their work. You get a small amount for the surveys. If you do use it, let me know how it works.
https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

NPR story

Pure Jurassic Park nerdery

Try out the computer from Jurassic park, along with an old system 6 from Apple.
Also, remember the magic word