Happy Pi Day!
It’s completely rational to be a fan of Pi Day. Pi, an irrational number but also the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter (3.14), is celebrated today with both actual pie and pizza pie. If pie is not your thing, go ahead and get a cake—just tell everyone you’re celebrating Einstein’s birthday, which is also today.
Speaking of pi, how about listening to your Raspberry Pi?
This week the makers of the Raspberry Pi single-board mini computer announced a $33 sound card for the Pi. This means you can now have a sound card that matches your computer, rather than using an external USB one.
Happy 25th birthday World Wide Web!
In honor of this auspicious day, Mashable wrote up a brief history of the Domain Name which is quite interesting (no really, it is). In 1985 there were only six registered domain names (compare that to the 265 million registered names today), but registering for one was free up until 1995. In 2007 the most expensive domain name was sold—VacationRentals.com for $35 million. And did you know that by 1997 all three-letter domain names were used up? By 2013 the Internet ran out of four-letter .com domain names too (seriously, all 456,976 permutations!). Here’s the full piece if you’d like a few more Internet fun facts.
Five of the best Wi-Fi routers according to lifehacker.com
Lifehacker asked readers which routers they thought were the best and highlighted the ones that came out on top. The top pics were:
• ASUS RT-AC66U Dual-Band Wireless-AC1750 Gigabit Router
• Netgear AC1900 Nighthawk Smart WiFi Router (R7000)
• Apple Airport Extreme
• Buffalo Technology AirStation N600 Gigabit Dual Band DD-WRT Wireless Router
• ASUS RT-N56U Dual-Band Wireless-N600 Gigabit Router
They declared the ASUS RT-66U the winner. I’m not sure exactly how scientific this survey is, but these routers might be worth checking out if you’re in the market for one.
Vivofit fitness tracker hits the market
The Vivofit by Garmin is the latest (or should I say “this week’s?”) addition to the increasingly crowded fitness tracker market. If you’re curious, I spotted two reviews of the Vivofit in the media already. One on Gizmodo, and another by Engadget. Both agree it’s nothing spectacular, but Engadget feels it’s a solid competitor.
Flappy Bird may be coming back
Were you a fan of the now-defunct Flappy Bird? The creator, Dong Nguyen, pulled the game just when the game was at its peek of popularity. Rolling Stone interviewed Nguyen, to find out why he walked away (and there is a teeny hint that he may bring it back).
Google drops the link underline
Google updated the look of their search results this week. One of the biggest changes is that links are no longer underlined (TheVerge said, “Google removes underlined links, says goodbye to 1996”). They’ve also removed the pink shading that used to appear behind sponsored ads in the search results, so now look for the little yellow box labeled “ad” before the link. Other changes are tad more subtle, but overall they are going for a cleaner look.
Amazon Prime is going up $20 a year
A Prime membership is going from $79 a year to $99 a year. This might have some people second-guessing their memberships, but there may be a way to delay the price hike for a year. Slickdeals.net has published a technique to lock in the cheaper rate for another 12 months and save yourself $20 (and possibly delay the “should I, or shouldn’t I” decision as well).
UPDATE: I do have an update about the Amazon Prime work-around. My friend Alex tried it and said the following: “I just did it and there’s one kink – there’s no way to “turn off auto-renew”. You have to contact customer service and have them turn it off – otherwise, on the day you’re Prime membership expires, Amazon just ticks through every possible payment method you have on file with them until one goes through. However, I had no problem using their customer service chat function. I asked to have my Prime auto-renew turned off. It took the rep about 2 minutes to do it and it was done.
UPDATE 2: And, in follow up to the above, a friend of a friend says: “To turn off your auto renewal you choose end your membership (or something close to they) on the left nav in manage your prime membership. It gives you the option to end now or end when your membership lapses.”
Chain emails you might remember
Remember, less than 25 years ago, when email was still kind of new? If you’re a millennial you might not, but those of us 40 or older likely received quite a few chain emails, back in the day. Mashable pulled together a list of 10 you might remember. Those were the days…
