Social networking

Facebook makes break-ups harder to take, study says

It hurts when your lover casts you aside.

Especially when you know that he or she is acting out of self-loathing, personal inadequacy, or a complete lack of appreciation for your hidden joys.

And yet, in this world where everything is recorded by a social network (and/or a government), there are parameters that makes the pain more acute.

As a University of California, Santa Cruz study has discovered, Facebook can make a break-up even worse.

It seems that even when we have been kicked to the curb with more unfairness than a Turkmeni election we find it hard to … Read more

Gingrich to world: Rename the cell phone

It's time this country addressed the real issues.

Things cannot go on the way they are and cometh the hour, cometh the man. That man is Newt Gingrich.

No, the great Republican doesn't want to impeach the President, repeal Obamacare and institute conscription for everyone aged 15 and older.

Well, those aren't his current priorities. Instead, he believes that for America to progress we need to call the cell phone something else.

Please, this is serious.

In a video posted to YouTube on Friday, Gingrich made his case, while waggling his encased cell phone.

"If it'… Read more

'Pinterest stress' not just for moms?

I don't know exactly when it happened, but I can now say for sure that I live in a Pinterest household. The influence of the digital pinboard has infiltrated numerous aspects of life in the Mack family palace, from our wardrobe to nightly dinners to the bling I've been instructed to install on the door of the oven those dinners are cooked in.

That's right, I'm going to bling out my oven because my wife told me to, because it looked cool to her in a thumbnail on a punnily named social network.

This is not quite the future the Jetsons promised us, but we're living it.

So I was very interested to read the findings of a recent survey about what stresses out American moms. The online survey of more than 7,000 women in the U.S. was conducted by Insight Express/NBC News for TodayMoms.com and revealed one particularly fascinating nugget:

Measuring up to all the cool crafts they see on Pinterest causes stress for 42 percent of moms.

Suspected ID thief exposed by food porn on Instagram

Those who steal your identity digitally are not nice people.

On the other hand, they are still people. Which often means that -- somewhere -- they have online enthusiasms which still take them over and reveal their own identities to the outside world.

IRS investigators say that a predilection for food porn created a digital footprint for a suspect whom they were trying to trace.

As Florida's Sun-Sentinel reports, the investigators were in pursuit of a man who was said to have 700,000 stolen IDs available for sale.

It seems that he was quite good at keeping his … Read more

Twitter: Don't you dare tweet your mom for Mother's Day

You know how you love tweeting? You know how Twitter is the epicenter of your universe, the medium of your message?

Well, Sunday is Mother's Day and Twitter has a message for you: Don't tweet.

At least, don't even think of tweeting your mom to wish her Happy Mother's Day.

How do I know this? Well, Twitter released a PSA (yes, crises such as this need a PSA) to explain to you (boys) that momma deserves more than a tweeted hug and kiss.

To use Twitter's own words, if you are thinking of tweeting your … Read more

Jimmy Kimmel gets celebrities to humiliate Twitter trolls

Few are immune from feeling envy.

Some, though, just can't help expressing it.

In our socially networked world, there are several choices of medium on which to vent one's inadequacies, but none seems so immediate as Twitter.

You can go there and post all sorts of deeply offensive things and actually direct them at the famous people who have turned you green in more places than merely your gills.

For example: "I just saw @JessicaAlba. If this was 2007, I'd be really excited."… Read more

J.J. Abrams to talk up 'Star Trek: Into Darkness' via Facebook Live

Beam -- er, stream -- me up, Scotty. And do it via Facebook.

The social network is powering up its Facebook Live site Friday evening to give Trekkies, Trekkers, and Trekyamacallits of all stripes the chance to transport the original Mr. Sulu into their living room -- along with J.J. Abrams, director of the soon-to-be-released Trek flick, "Star Trek: Into Darkness."… Read more

Star Apps: Counting Crows

For some audiophiles, Counting Crows and The Wallflowers will forever be associated with the mid-1990s--along with Netscape Navigator, Hotmail, and of course, Windows 95. But don't call their joint summer outing a nostalgia trip. Velvet-tongued Counting Crows vocalist Adam Duritz, hot off the heels of The Outlaw Roadshow (alongside a slew of new indie bands), prefers to view his comparatively intimate Wallflowers double bill as a much-needed respite.

Other than sharing a decade, the comradely combos have shared previous tours, a track (Duritz sang on The Wallflowers' "6th Avenue Heartache"), and even a producer (T-Bone Burnett, back … Read more

Principal suspends teen for Instagramming her mug shot

I'm thinking of renaming this blog Technically HighSchoolWrecked.

No sooner does one odd controversy erupt in our teen education centers than another appears like a tardy bus.

The latest is a tale from Georgia. Please sit back. You may enjoy this.

An enterprising young man named Keandre Varner thought he'd discover whether his high school principal was, or ever had been, a criminal.

What joy, perhaps, for him to discover that there existed a mugshot of Jamille Miller Brown, principal of Riverdale High School, in Georgia.

If you were a mere teen and discovered your school principal's … Read more

Share pics quickly on Imgur with a Chrome extension

Imgur is one of those sites that becomes a huge time sink if you let it. For some reason, browsing the random photos that people upload is really addictive, and so is reading the comments on said photos.

If you like to share your own images, you probably already know there are four ways to do so: uploading from your computer, putting in a URL, dragging and dropping, or with the paste command. But if you notice that you're often sharing pictures you find online, whether they're in your Facebook Timeline or just random spots on the Web, … Read more