Last November CheapAir became the first airline to accept Bitcoin and then later, the first to let travelers book hotel rooms and Amtrak train seats with the digital currency. Since then its Bitcoin sales have topped $1.5 million, an amount that exceeded the company's initial expectations, Jeff Klee, CEO of CheapAir, tells Forbes.com.

CheapAir decided to expand its array of digital currencies that it supports after receiving requests from the developers, Klee says. He is less sure of their momentum, given their smaller user base, but Klee is willing to take a flyer.

"In general I am very supportive of alternative currencies and the technology is very promising." Like many company executive Klee is delighted with the cost savings digital currencies offer companies like CheapAir.

Philips has beaten the competition to market with the first batch of Android-based televisions. Philips and kind are all hoping to sell you a television to which you have no need to attach any other devices, but that's no guarantee.

Previous Philips TVs lagged behind the competition in terms of streaming services, but that won't be an issue with the Android sets. You should be able to download all your favourite on demand and catch up services directly from the Google Play store, including BBC iPlayer, 4OD, Demand 5 and Netflix. 4K streaming content is supported, as the Android TVs all have HEVC codec support.

With access to Google Play, there are other possibilities too. One enterprising journalist installed a torrent downloader, found a 4K film trailer online and downloaded it to the TV, without having to jump on a computer or transfer the file from another device first.

Spotify Connect and OnLive Gaming are also on board the Philips 4K package. How the market reacts to this latest round of "innovation" will determine the future for more than one gadget-maker out there.

Emily Oster covers an old topic that's still controversial:

Many medical studies show positive health effects from higher vitamin levels. The only problem? These studies often can't tease out the effect of the vitamins from the effect of other factors, such as generally healthy living. Studies that attempt to do this typically show no impact from vitamin use - or only a very tiny one on a small subset of people. The truth is that for most people, vitamin supplementation is simply a waste of time.

[Author note: The article avoids what I'd consider the main question: since these studies are not exactly new, why does my doctor still recommend a multivitamin every time I visit? And what other things does our society universally accept that might be pointless?]

I haven't posted a progress report in a while, and I wouldn't expect everyone to follow the mailing list, so here's a short list of the latest features of the site.

Journals
Journals are now enabled for all user accounts! Similar to the venerable Slashcode journal, the Pipedot version allows you to write your extended thoughts and post them in the familiar story-like form - complete with comments and community moderation. An example journal story can be found here.

Feed Page
If you where previously using the root of your user page (e.g. http://bryan.pipedot.org/) to display your feed page, you will need to instead append "/feed/" to the end of your shortcuts (i.e. http://bryan.pipedot.org/feed/) Sorry for the inconvenience.

Message ID
Originally, I adopted a similar system as Slashcode, where each object gets an auto-incrementing integer. However, this global increment is just not usable in terms of a distributed system. And so, after rewriting a large chunk of the site, objects are now given a unique ID that looks more like a Message-ID from Email and Usenet messages.

This change had an unintended side effect of making some links a bit long and kinda ugly. For example, a link to a comment can be 55 characters long (e.g. http://pipedot.org/comment/1392545397_bryan_pipedot_org) Which leads me to the next item...

Short Codes
All items (stories, comments, polls, etc...) on this site are now assigned a short code similar to those seen on Twitter (t.co), Google (goo.gl), bit.ly, and others - except that it's built into the site and automatic.

For example, the full URL of a poll could be rather long:
http://pipedot.org/poll/2014-05-19/when-dystopia-comes-it-will-look-like

But it can be shortened to:
http://pipedot.org/3XC

These links are useful for character limited services, such as Twitter posts, as well as any other scenario where a shorter link would be appreciated. Also, like other link shortener services, you can tack a "+" on to the end of the short link to get statistics on who has clicked it.

After a few people mentioned the ugliness of the Message ID style links, I realized that short codes could also work in place of the long Message ID. Therefore, even the unshortened links are again shorter. (e.g. http://pipedot.org/comment/2S4B)

SoylentNews Federation
I thought the SoylentNews federation would be a cool mini-project. Combine the efforts of two nearly identical sites while improving the resiliency of both. If you missed it (the feature was online for less than a day) the idea was to combine all stories and posts from both sites into one feed. However, I seem to have greatly underestimated the disdain for such a function. Because I'm not overly fond of receiving that many threats and hate mails in a single day, I've simply turned it off and removed all references to SoylentNews in the code.

Gravatars
Pipecode has long supported a profile picture. This feature allows you to show off your mugshot on your user page and various other places. Of course, thus far, only 4 people had managed to find and update their picture. To help prevent a missing image when viewing a profile, I've added Gravatar support to automatically populate profile images. If you do not have a Gravatar, you can still manually update your profile image with the old method. You can also disable Gravatar updates to your picture by unchecking the Gravatar option on your profile settings page.

Retina Images
Nearly all images, icons, and logos on the site now support "retina" displays. So if you are blessed by a device with an incredibly high DPI screen, the graphics here should all look especially crisp.