Yet — I have always relied on having a RadioShack within reach.  Not that I actually enjoyed the experience of going there, on the contrary – I was always a tiny bit uncomfortable with the fact that I was often the only customer in the store.  I always felt like I was visiting THAT neighborhood garage sale;  after realizing the offerings were all pretty dismal, you wished you could just disappear without hurting the seller’s feeling.  No marimba playing frog taxidermy today, thanks.

On the other hand — that is precisely the reason I found myself there — if I needed an obscure wire, cord, plug, switch or battery — bulb, button, meter, bracket or antenna; they were my first stop.

I also must admit that as a well preserved technology time capsule — the Shack could be fun on certain levels.  I would amuse myself by playing the “who woulda guessed       ?     was still sold in a bricks & mortar store” game.  And if I was feeling competitive, I would include the Shack employee in a variation: the “what could this      ?      possibly be used for?” game.  A KO bell – when I could stump even him (faded, dusty packaging often being their obvious tell).

1973 RadioShack catalog says it all. See it here at WIRED

RadioShack had a knack for being way late to any trend party.  While I’m not sure they actually still sold CB radios — they recently still offered all the things needed to wire-up a CB — six different ways. They even sold 8-track player cleaning tapes — decades past the 8-track’s demise. I saw my last B&W tube television retailing as new product at the Shack.

Even the Shack seemed to be catching on, as you can see in their 2014 Super Bowl ad.  Ironically, it may have been their very attempt to get-up-to-date that killed them.  I will miss my RadioShack, but must admit to some relief as well. Rest in peace my friend.

Editor’s note: Possibly the Shack’s days were numbered when nerds started to emerge from the shadows and become the modern-day titians of all things cool and useful.  Back when nerd was still a pejorative reference — the quintessential place to find them was RadioShack.  Remarkably the very definition of nerd describes with great accuracy the RadioShack store experience.

“NERD: Overly intellectual, obsessive, or socially impaired. Spending inordinate amounts of time on unpopular, obscure, or non-mainstream activities, which are generally either highly technical or relating to topics of fiction or fantasy, to the exclusion of more mainstream activities… and may have difficulty participating in, or even following, sports.”

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We all love the Google we know.  Using the world’s most popular (and powerful) search engine is  like having direct access to Stephen Hawking’s brain, times a million, to the tenth power. Google’s  tentacles reach around the globe providing news, entertainment and information at our fingertips with the stroke of a key. One could argue that Google has literally changed the world.

And it has, in ways you may not have even imagined. Perhaps it’s time to take a moment to learn about Google, which organizations were behind it from the start and why the Google you may not yet know, has Orwell rolling in his grave.

by Nafeez Ahmed, Medium.com:

INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project, breaks the exclusive story of how the United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’

The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business, industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has allowed some of the most powerful special interests in corporate America to systematically circumvent democratic accountability and the rule of law to influence government policies, as well as public opinion in the US and around the world. The results have been catastrophic: NSA mass surveillance, a permanent state of global war, and a new initiative to transform the US military into Skynet.

Read More @ Medium.com

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Adobe’s Flash player has had more than its fair share of problems. Among them, performance issues for OSX users, endless security vulnerabilities requiring a multitude of patches, Apple refusing to implement Flash on the iPhone, and Google ceasing its support for Flash on Android. In short, the curtain has been slowly closing on the much maligned Flash in recent years. It looks like the coffin just received its final nail. The Guardian has the skinny.

by Alex Hern, The Guardian:

Flash is dead, long live Fl– actually, no, scratch that, Flash really is dead and it deserved to die. Flash is terrible.

The killer blows to Adobe’s multimedia browser plugin were delivered this week in a one-two punch. Firstly, users of Flash were left open to not one but two “zero-day” vulnerabilities in the same week, affecting users of Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox. Almost immediately, hackers were able to abuse these flaws to dump malware on Windows PCs, which led Mozilla to disable the plugin entirely until users had updated to a secure version.

Then on Tuesday, YouTube – the biggest provider of Flash video ever – announced that it would stop serving its videos using the plugin for anyone visiting the site in a modern browser.

Read More @ The Guardian.com

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1. During the first Super Bowl in 1967, NBC was still in commercial when the second half kicked off. Officials asked the Packers to kick off again.

 2. Before Google launched Gmail, “G-Mail” was the name of a free email service offered by Garfield’s website.

 3. The final speech by Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird was done in one take.

 4. The “Where’s the Beef?” lady (Clara Peller) lost her job in 1985 after doing a Prego ad in which she “found the beef at somewhere other than Wendy’s.”

 5. Just before the Nazis invaded Paris, H.A. and Margret Rey fled on bicycles. They were carrying the manuscript for Curious George.

 6. In Super Mario Bros., the bushes are just clouds colored green.

 7. Crayola means “oily chalk.” The name combines “craie” (French for “chalk”) and “ola” (short for “oleaginous,” or “oily”).

 8. The Pittsburgh Penguins made Mister Rogers an honorary captain in 1991

 9. Liz Sheridan, who played Jerry’s mom on Seinfeld, wrote a book about her love affair with James Dean.

 10. In a 1917 letter to Winston Churchill, Admiral John Fisher used the phrase “O.M.G.”

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Oda admits: “People used to guess DiCaprio a lot, in the past. But the truth is that Sanji has a much more unusual model. I might not go as far as to say “model”, but I hoped to have a bit of this person’s vibes come through. It’s Steve Buscemi, as he appeared in the movie “Reservoir Dogs”

One Piece, the best-selling manga series in history has over 345 million volumes in circulation worldwide and several volumes have broken publishing records, including the highest initial print run of any book in Japan.

Want to know more?

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