The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is “selfie”

The decision was unanimous this year, with little if any argument. This is a little unusual. Normally there will be some good-natured debate as one person might champion their particular choice over someone else’s. But this time, everyone seemed to be in agreement almost from the start.

The shortlist of other candidates can be found here.

Paul Richardson has made a breathtaking time-lapse video of London

During October I spent 8 days cycling 200 miles around London whilst carrying 22kg of camera gear. That week consisted of 3 main tasks. Lots of shooting, transferring photos onto the laptop, and a little bit of sleep. By the end of it I was physically drained – to the point where I thought I’d collapse on the final cycle back. Thankfully I didn’t and managed to make it back in one piece. The raw result was 18,000 photos spanning 364 GB of harddrive space. Cue a few weeks of editing, and I managed to produce the final video.

Can’t we all just agree that London is the best city on Earth?

cmder

Cmder is a software package created out of pure frustration over the absence of nice console emulators on Windows. It is based on amazing software, and spiced up with the Monokai color scheme and a custom prompt layout. Looking sexy from the start.

(via the venerable One Thing Well)

Winamp closing down on December 20

Initially released in 1997 as a media player by two college students, Winamp gained popularity with the rising trend of MP3 file sharing, but increased competition from newer rivals including online music streaming services — could have ultimately rendered it defunct for today’s Internet and computer users.

End of an era.

Facebook’s Open Academy Program

Facebook Open Academy kicked off in spring 2013 with an ambitious goal to improve the curriculum at a meaningful number of top university computer science departments around the world. Specifically, the aim is to provide a practical, applied software engineering experience as part of a university student’s CS education. This is accomplished through a partnership with open source projects that allows the students to receive academic credit for work pertaining to the open source code base. Mentors and faculty engage with the students on a weekly basis to support progress and positive learning outcomes.

The new version of Facebook Messenger now allows you to chat via people’s phone numbers, even if your contact isn’t on Facebook. This feature could be really devastating to WhatsApp and the like, but how many people are willing to switch from what they’re used to remains to be seen.

The Math Trick Behind MP3s, JPEGs, and Homer Simpson’s Face

This is also how the smartphone app Shazam can recognize a song. It splits the music into chunks, then uses Fourier’s trick to figure out the ingredient notes that make up each chunk. It then searches a database to see if this “fingerprint” of notes matches that of a song they have on file. Speech recognition uses the same Fourier-fingerprinting idea to compare the notes in your speech to that of a known list of words.