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Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes. If you like this newsletter, please invite others to sign up.
Apologies for NN’s absence last week. I was busy with travel, work, turkey, and — best of all — family. I hope you had an excellent Thanksgiving, if you celebrated it.
What I Wrote at Newley.com
- Proof of the Commodification of Fidget Spinners — True story: I saw, here in Delhi, a bag of chips that comes with one of the gadgets, for free. Click through for a pic.
5 Cool Tech-ish Reads This Week
- 1. Cars as we know them will be gone within two decades. So says Bob Lutz, a former General Motors executive, who describes a future in which only the elite will know how to drive, and the masses will be ferried about by self-driving Ubers and Lyfts.
- 2. Airports, photographed from above, are full of beautiful symmetry, as demonstrated in a new series of images from Mike Kelley, the photographer who created that cool composite pic of planes taking off from LAX.
- 3. “How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You’ve Ever Met.” In a revealing piece at Gizmodo, Kashmir Hill describes how the platform seems to use “shadow profiles” and its “People You May Know” algorithm to connect individuals — sometimes with unintended consequences.
- 4. Protip: if you buy Bitcoin, don’t lose your storage PIN. In Wired, writer Mark Frauenfelder tells the story of losing $30,000 worth of the crypto-currency.
- 5. Here’s a mammoth list of Cyber Monday deals, courtesy of The Wirecutter, covering everything from steaming media sticks to electric toothbrushes, Bluetooth speakers and dog beds.
1 Silly Thing
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- 1. “People Matching Artworks” is Stefan Draschan’s blog displaying…yes, images of museum-goers matching the art they’re viewing.
Quote of the week
“More and more often one feels the urge to check their phone, even if you are not expecting a specific message or call. These observations inspired the idea of making a tool that would help stop this ‘checking’ behaviour.”
That’s from designer Klemens Schillinger, who created the Substitute Phone, a plastic “device” with stone beads for smartphone addicts.
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Fist bump from New Delhi,
Newley