Andy Baio:

I love games, and I genuinely wanted Eliot to love and appreciate them too. So, here was my experiment:

What happens when a 21st-century kid plays through video game history in chronological order?

Start with the arcade classics and Atari 2600, from Asteroids to Zaxxon. After a year, move on to the 8-bit era with the NES and Sega classics. The next year, the SNES, Game Boy, and classic PC adventure games. Then the PlayStation and N64, Xbox and GBA, and so on until we’re caught up with the modern era of gaming.

BEST. DAD. EVER.

Ole C. Salomonsen:

SOARING is a shortfilm showing what is keeping many photographers sleepless through the winter nights in the arctic landscapes and rural areas of northern Norway; the northern lights. The film was shot this autumn from late august to mid november in and around the areas of the city of Tromsø, as well as on the beautiful island of Senja.

All sequences are realtime video, no timelapse used.

Via Laughing Squid.

Rich McCormick, The Verge:

Infamous torrent site The Pirate Bay was taken offline on Tuesday after a raid by Swedish police. Officers investigating the decade-old file-sharing portal’s alleged copyright infringements targeted a server room in Stockholm, seizing “several servers and computers,” according to veteran file-sharing case prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad. The site only reappeared hours later, at a new address hosted in Costa Rica, and with regular 500 internal server error codes. At present, searching or browsing for torrents on the new site is impossible.

(…)

TorrentFreak says The Pirate Bay might not be the only casualty of this most recent crackdown on the sharing of copyrighted material. The torrent portal’s forum, Suprbay, and a number of other torrent-related sites have also gone down, including EZTV, Zoink, and Torrage.

It always amazes me how sites like The Pirate Bay manage to keep going after being raided by the police. It’s impressive.

UPDATE: According to TorrentFreak, reports of TPB’s resurrection may have been greatly exaggerated:

Only adding to the excitement (or perhaps causing it), plenty of posts appeared on Reddit trumpeting this domain as the site’s new home. Sadly, however, these reports are wide of [sic] the mark.

ThePirateBay.cr is a Pirate Bay proxy/mirror service (it’s listed by Proxybay) and as such relies entirely on The Pirate Bay for its torrent content. Currently it has none. The site appears to be operating out of the Netherlands and only became widely available in October.

The precautionary measure was taken by the judge without hearing the arguments of Uber, given that the company is based in the US tax haven of Delaware. The judge’s writ also instructs telecommunications and electronic-payment firms to stop processing transactions for Uber in Spain, as well as no longer hosting its software and applications.

Ouch. This could be the beginning of the end for Uber in Europe. If the rest of European courts follow suit — and they often do — they’re going to have a hard time turning this around.

Personally, I’m conflicted. On one hand, I’m not a fan of countries using legal measures to hamper innovation and limit competition, and I feel tech companies face more than their share’s worth of legal troubles. On the other hand though, Uber is a particularly sleazy company: no insurance of any kind for their drivers, no respect for their users’ privacy, you name it. It’s hard to feel sympathetic towards them.

Of course, this may be news today, but disruption always wins in the end. Even if it takes a while, it’s simply inevitable. A service mostly like Uber will probably exist sometime soon and become the new normal. But it won’t be Uber, at least not in its current incarnation. And I may be wrong, but I believe that’s a good thing.

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with journaling, as in, I love the idea of it, but I just can’t bring myself to actually do it.

In this article, Chris Gonzales shares some great tips on how to get into the habit — not to mention why — as well as a thoughtful review of one of the most popular digital journaling apps out there: Day One.

I really enjoyed this piece, and I think it’s a fantastic aid for those of us who can never seem to get enough traction for it to stick.

Well, it’s decidedly a mixed bag:

In other words, the 850 EVO falls into the infamous middle-class. It doesn’t have an obvious niche in the market because it’s too expensive for the value-oriented buyer and it’s not fast enough to be considered as a competitive high-end SSD. If Samsung shaved $30 to $50 off the price, the 850 EVO would be competitive against the other value drives because the five-year warranty and Samsung’s top-of-the-class software suite add some value, but with the current pricing there are just better options on the market.

That’s unfortunate, because Samsung SSDs have all been pretty good lately. Looking at the bright side, this may be a great opportunity to pick up one of last year’s excellent 840 EVOs instead, which have dropped quite a bit in price by now.

I own two 840 EVOs myself (both the 250GB model), which I used to upgrade my iMac and my MacBook Pro a few months ago, and I couldn’t be happier with them. I can recommend them without hesitation if you don’t want to wait for the 850 EVO, or if you don’t feel like paying the $30-$50 premium it currently commands.

Solid recommendations all around from Jason:

I spend a lot of time at my Mac. I love my iPad and iPhone, but my Mac is still where I spend most of my time. Between writing and making podcasts, this is the place where my tools of choice reside. Since it’s the end of the year, I figured, why not mention a bunch of Mac apps that I use every day? If there were a gift-giving holiday coming up, you could even use that as an excuse to buy them.

Chris Rovzar, Vanity Fair:

Suddenly, in the late 1930s and the 1940s, the American viewing audience went from thinking of Hollywood in black and white to experiencing it in stunning, rich color. Kodachrome was the vessel that brought hyper-real, hyper-beautiful stars into movie houses, magazines, and homes. In a new book, Hollywood in Kodachrome, David Wills collects some of the most brilliant images from 1940s Hollywood, including stills of Fred Astaire, Lucille Ball, Marlene Dietrich, and Frank Sinatra.

It’s not Sinatra’s best picture, but I’ll take it anyway.

Susannah Breslin:

Inspired by a 30-day yoga challenge at my yoga studio, I’m writing 30 flash fictions in 30 days. One a day. 100 words or less. Time limit: 15 minutes. You can read all of them here.

These are amazing.

Via Coudal.

From the Panic Blog:

Transmit iOS 1.1.1 is out, fixing a few bugs in our surprisingly powerful file management app for your iPhone or iPad.

Also, at Apple’s request, we had to remove the ability to “Send” files to other services, including iCloud Drive.

In short, we’re told that while Transmit iOS can download content from iCloud Drive, we cannot upload content to iCloud Drive unless the content was created in the app itself. Apple says this use would violate 2.23 — “Apps must follow the iOS Data Storage Guidelines or they will be rejected” — but oddly that page says nothing about iCloud Drive or appropriate uses for iCloud Drive.

This is getting ridiculous. Marco Arment has a good theory on why these seemingly arbitrary rejections keep happening all the time:

One hand isn’t talking to the other: engineering makes great features available to developers that could be used to build amazingly useful and powerful applications, then the App Store bans anything beyond their most trivial uses.

This sure feels like the ramifications of an internal turf war. I hope the higher-ups at Apple realize how important it is to resolve this quickly, because their devices, users, and developers are all suffering unnecessarily.

Apple needs to get their act together on this, and soon.