geekosystem

There's no shortage of apps that let you easily share pictures, and apps like Vine make sharing short video clips just as easy. What about voice? That's where Matthew Murphy and his company Appsurdity saw a hole in the market. He created Dubbler, an app that lets you share short audio clips through social media. I wasn't sure who would want to do that, so I asked him during a brief phone interview.

July 1st is coming up fast, and those of you out there that still rely on Google Reader are running out of time to find a new RSS reader. A lot of people have already jumped on the Feedly bandwagon, myself included, but it's not the only game in town. Besides the readers that already exist, Digg is coming out with their own RSS reader, and it will be public for everyone by June 26th.

It's come out recently that the NSA is keeping records of America's phone calls, which has led some people to conclude that they're also listening to and recording those phone calls as well. There's no evidence to that at the moment, but it hasn't stopped Brewster Kahle from estimating the cost of storing all that data in the cloud. So what's the Government shelling out to hold on to all that data? Let's take a look at Brewster's (estimated) Millions.

Thanks to Edward Snowden's leaked documents, everyone in the world can learn a lot about what the NSA was up to with the PRISM data mining program. Except the people who should have been overseeing it in the first place, as it turns out. Both Congressional staffers and Department of Defense employees have been instructed to not look at the documents and basically pretend they were never leaked in the first place.

For no doubt the first time ever, a bad decision was made a pool party sponsored by Jagermeister. I know, I'm as shocked as you are. This bad call, though, went beyond the standard ill-starred hookup or barf-inducing round of Jager Bombs as organizers poured liquid nitrogen into the swimming pool. While this produced the desired 'smoke on the water' effect organizers were seeking, it also had an unintended consequence, creating a cloud of nitrogen gas that asphyxiated party goers and left several hospitalized, including a 21-year-old man who remains in a coma.

I know the human dating game can seem rough at times, but the fact of the matter is, we have it pretty good. Don't believe me? Consider if you will the sorry state of Dolomedes tenebrosus, the dark fishing spider. A recent study of the spiders, common around the American midwest, found that males of the species get a grand total of one shot at breeding -- immediately after copulation, their work on this Earth done, the creatures promptly curl up and die.

I caught just enough of the Miss USA pageant this weekend to be weirded out by Nick Jonas and Mo Rocca existing in the same space, but not enough to see the unfortunate answer that Miss Utah contestant Marissa Powell gave to NeNe Leake's question about gender and income equality. The Internet has been tearing into Ms. Powell since, but I firmly believe that we should cut her a little slack. Yes, her response was cringeworthy, confusing, and nonsensical, but a lot of that can be chalked up to an intense case of stage fright. After all, how are you supposed to keep cool in front of millions of people and a Jonas Brother?

Anyone with siblings -- any number, younger or older, take your pick -- has thought at some point that the person with whom they share parents (and toys and meals and sometimes, God forbid, a bedroom) is out to do nothing on this planet but drive you mad. It turns out, that might be closer to the truth than anyone is comfortable with. A recent study at the University of New Hampshire suggests that sibling-on-sibling violence can have the same detrimental effects on mental health as every day bullying. 

Geekosystem's office is in New York City, and while I wouldn't want to be anywhere else, I've got to admit that we have terrible pop culture-centic statues compared to some other cities. Philadelphia has Rocky, Milwaukee has The Fonz, Palm Springs had that enormous Marilyn Monroe -- heck, Detroit's getting a RoboCop! And what do we have? A statue of Ralph Kramden from The Honeymooners hanging out next to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It's practically a slap in the face. So the news that the Chinatown district of Los Angeles recently erected a seven foot tall statue of Bruce Lee, in all his shirtless nunchuck-slinging glory, has me a bit miffed. We have a loudmouth bus driver and they have Bruce Lee? Man, screw New York.

Amazon is diving into the original streaming content pool with its political comedy Alpha House sometime late 2013 or early 2014, but when it does come out it's not going to be coming out all at once, according to executive producer Jonathan Alter. There go your plans for a 10-episode John Goodman marathon. So what is their plan exactly?

DreamWorks has made a deal with Netflix to provide the streaming service with 300 hours of original TV series. A spin-off series to the upcoming animated movie Turbo has been confirmed, and other Netflix-original shows based on DreamWorks characters are to follow. Yeah, this is real life.

I've been thinking about getting the critically acclaimed post-apocalyptic game The Last of Us for a couple of days now, but now I know I'm getting it. Apparently all I need to be interested enough to buy a thing is for someone to explain it to me in Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World references. Luckily Reddit user philtomato is looking out for the Pilgrim-obsessed people like me and put out this spectacular "Joel and Ellie vs. The World" mashup poster. Yes. Yes, this pleases me.

In need of new dungeon crawler time sink? Don't like spending money? Then GOG.com has something to scratch your itch. From now until Thursday, you can download the action-RPG Torchlight for free. The best part about this is that there's absolutely no catch -- all you have to do is sign up for a free account on GOG.com. There's no DRM to keep you from playing, either. That's because the whole point of the download is to promote the site's 2013 #noDRM Summer Sale.

If there's anyone better at mashing things together than Butcher Billy, I'm almost afraid to hear about them, because this is about as much awesome as I can stand. In his latest round of mashups, Billy pulled from a lot of different sources. Each one is centered on a video game, but some include actors while others include musicians, movies, or albums. They're all tremendous.

I was walking through the Phillipsburg Mall in Phillipsburg, New Jersey the other day with my family and stumbled across the single greatest doghouse ever to exist in history. I present you with "Bow Wowser's Castle" by artist Sam Boglioli. There were a bunch of dog houses around the mall, but none of the others were geek-themed, so I didn't bother taking pictures of them.

If the overwhelmingly negative critical reception of Duke Nukem Forever wasn't punishment enough for developer Gearbox Software, they are now being taken to court over the game. 3D Realms was the first company to work on DNF in the game's sordid 14-year development cycle. During the development of DNF, in addition to not making a remotely good game, Gearbox did not pay 3D Realms the over $2 million in royalties that they had agreed to upon picking up the license. Naturally, 3DR sued them in response.

A 33-year-old British man has been arrested after leaving a severed deer head at the checkout counter of a Tesco grocery store in England earlier this month. He also left the innards of a deer -- presumably the same one, though we can't be positive -- in one of the store's aisles, prompting what was likely the store's least pleasant page for a cleanup.

Storied New York mayor Ed Koch had his funeral planned down to the last detail when he passed away this February at the age of 88, even going so far as to visit his own grave site and pen his own epitaph. Unfortunately, it seems he didn't leave anyone in charge of proofreading the final inscription on his tombstone. NBC New York reports that the tombstone marking the three-term mayor's plot in Manhattan's Trinity cemetery contains one minor error -- it lists Koch's date of birth as December 12, 1942, when Koch was actually born on December 12, 1924. So close...

Ready for the cutest Good Deed For The Day you'll see all week? This fox in Russia presumably found something tasty at the bottom of a mason jar and went in for a closer look...only to have that brilliant plan backfire on it in pretty grand fashion. With its head firmly tucked within the jar, the fox then took the rather unusual step of seemingly coming to humans for help, and was lucky to find a pair of gentlemen willing to remove the jar from its head...and with a minimum of laughter at the situation, no less.

The picture above shows Socks, the Internet famous Shetland pony known for his sweet dance moves like moonwalking. He's in the middle of a paternity battle at the moment with a claim that he sired little Scamp. It turns out Socks isn't Scamp's father, but this all-pony Jerry Springer episode doesn't end there. Further testing found out who the father was, and Socks is reportedly not happy about it -- even though he's a pony.

Great news for gender and race equality! The new class of NASA astronauts is 50% female for the first time in history. The class of eight astronauts are an equal mix of men and women, but is also made up of a variety of racial backgrounds making it the most diverse astronaut class in history. Let's take a look at the new astronauts.

Space flares are so friggin' cool. Well, not literally, because they are giant eruptions of heat and light, but you get my meaning. Case in point? Astrophysicists at the University of Santiago do Compostela in Spain, along with the Byurakan Observatory in Amernia, detected a low-intensity star letting out a flare so strong it became almost 15 times brighter in a matter of minutes. You know that feeling you get when you wake up in the middle of the night and almost blind yourself with your phone while checking the time? Imagine that, but, like, times a billion. In space.

Big Bang aside, most of us non-scientists tend to not to think for very long about how exactly it is that planets are formed nowadays. Well, I certainly don't, at least, because most of the time I'm too busy deciding what food I want to eat at any given moment. But thank God for the Hubble Telescope, through which astronomers have found compelling evidence of a planet forming billions of miles away from its star. Even cooler, this might serve to completely change all of the current theories about planet reformation. 

Why didn't Yogurt see the merchandising potential of Spaceballs, the robotics competition? Students from the U.S. and Europe can sign up to be challenged in what is described as "the ultimate robot game" to navigate floating spheres through the International Space Station in culmination of the Zero Robotics programming competition. I'm not even allowed to compete, and I'm excited about this.