The New York Times has just published a blistering review of BuzzFeed. Yes, BuzzFeed is maddening and crazy and frenetic and vaguely unnerving, but the NYT nails it:

The site knows that successful diversion depends on continually toggling its joystick between micronostalgia for the past ("55 Things Only '90s Teenage Girls Can Understand") and microexaminations of the latest microtrend ("The 'Gingers Have Souls' Kid Just Released a Hip-Hop Music Video"). BuzzFeed will simultaneously pretend that joy is an ever-renewable resource ("13 Cute Kid Vines You'll Watch Over and Over Again") while also hinting that our stores of happiness are dangerously low and dwindling ("13 Holidays You've Been Celebrating Totally Wrong"). ...

In fact, the more time you spend on BuzzFeed, the more the boundaries between "win" and "fail" seem to blur. After a while, it's impossible not to slip into a disassociative trance, in which you surrender to the allure of some perpetual, trivial nowhereland, nestled somewhere between "15 Cats That You Don't Want to Mess With" and the "44 Hong Kong Movie Subtitles Gone Wrong."

Have a look at the Onion parody they reference, too: it's awesome. But that brings up an interesting question: we've got Facebook's Timeline (which we now know is manipulated), Reddit, various sites like this one, and dozens of big and small sites trying to be the first and fastest to spot or create trends, broach news subjects, or get people talking (and viewing advertisements). Is this as far as we're going to go? What's the next step? Are sites like Slashdot old news? Is the BuzzFeed frenzy ultimately unsustainable? Is it "32 news sites you should be reading daily"?

Probably time to admit I'm addicted to these awesome little gadget boards and devices. And I just discovered this one: the HummingBoard.

Get ready to fall in love with new HummingBoard - a small and powerful, low-cost ARM computer that ignites the imagination. Whatever your dream, the HummingBoard will help make it happen - the possibilities for creating the next great IoT innovation are truly limitless. The HummingBoard allows you to run many open source operating systems - such as Ubuntu, Debian and Arch - as well as Android and XBMC. With its core technology based on SolidRun's state-of-the-art Micro System on a Module (MicroSOM), it has ready-to-use OS images, and its open hardware comes with full schematics and layout. Best of all, as a Linux single board computer, the HummingBoard is backed by the global digital maker community, which means you can alter the product in any way you like and get full kernel upstreaming support and all the assistance you need.

The big, obvious advantage is that the USB hub is powered, which would allow you to connect it to an external hard drive full of your data, something that's kind of a hassle with the Raspberry Pi (well, not a huge hassle, but an extra step).

Samsung has announced they'll be discontinuing production of Plasma televisions, citing lack of demand. Panasonic has already quit, and it seems LG is about to do the same. Samsung has declared:

"We plan to continue our PDP TV business until the end of this year, due to changes in market demands. We remain committed to providing consumers with products that meet their needs, and will increase our focus on growth opportunities in UHD TV's and Curved TV's."

But wait, what about me? How am I supposed to watch all those great shows now?

Like it or hate it, Google's Streetview map interface exists and is used every day by all sorts of people. Getting to the point of a usable map interface wasn't easy. Here are some war stories from the trenches by Iain McClatchie, who participated in the effort.

We didn't know it at the time, but the problems we were having were essentially due to the high resolution we were trying to shoot. High resolution from a moving platform leads to short exposure times. Short exposure times require large relative apertures to get enough sensitivity. Compared to small format cameras, our focal lengths were fairly long (28 mm, IIRC), so that meant much larger apertures, much larger photocurrents, and thus the problems we were fighting. In hindsight, the two real solutions were lower resolution or CMOS sensors. Rather than try those, I tried to make the high resolution CCD work with shutters (the R3 camera) and choppers (R4).

It's a pretty amazing project and must have been an awesome time to be in on the fun.