Tyler Alcorn

Friday, November 28, 2014

The Co.Design Guide To Black Friday 2014

Two-sided colanders, digital notebooks, inexpensive standing desks: our favorite multifunctional goodies from 2014.

Products with just one function are so passe. In 2014, phones are also cameras and bracelets are also sleep trackers. Multifunctional products can save users space and money—why have three bulky things when you could lump them into one sleek thing? What follows is a guide to ten highly original multifunctional products we came across in 2014—a bicycle saddle that doubles as a bike lock, a colander that doubles as a bowl, and more. Their transformational abilities make us feel like stunned little kids watching magic tricks.

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Future Elevators Will Use Maglev to Go Up, Down—and Sideways

Is only going up in the elevator getting you down? Not for much longer: ThyssenKrupp, the German steel and engineering company, has announced that it's building the next generation of elevators that will use magnetic levitation to travel up, down and side-to-side at speed in the buildings of the future.

This is Mars's Hellas Chaos, an area covered in wind-blown dunes and flat-topped mesas.

This is Mars's Hellas Chaos, an area covered in wind-blown dunes and flat-topped mesas. The dusting of white is in fact carbon dioxide frost—so, pretty chilly then! [ESA]

Thursday, November 27, 2014

Almost 30 of Your Favorite Logitech Peripherals Discounted

We love Logitech, you love Logitech, here are an insane amount of discounted Logitech peripherals.

Seth MacFarlane Made a Christmas Album And It's Actually Very Good

Technically, right now is the exact moment when the few of us who genuinely love Christmas music can flip the switch on the carols, firing up the jingle jangle jingle with reckless abandon. Should you be one of those people, I have an album all ready for you to blast at top volume. And the dude who made it? Also brought us Family Guy.

Internet Dads: On Having "The Talk" In The Digital Age

The birds and the bees and...the Internet.

No one knows for sure where the phrase "the birds and the bees" came from, or when exactly it became the foremost euphemism for the sex talk. (There are theories.) Consensus, though, dates the phrase to February 21, 1825, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge composed his famous poem Work Without Hope. An excerpt:

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
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Planes, Trains, and Automobiles Is the Ultimate Thanksgiving Flick

If you are going to sit down tonight and watch a post-turkey movie with the assemblage of humans who share your genetic matter, I highly recommend Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. The 1987 John Hughes flick is funny and touching. Watching John Candy play a well-meaning but obnoxious slob is like watching Michael Jordan play basketball or Maria Callas sing opera. You are watching the master at the top of his game.