Ashton’s an engineer and your friends are giraffes: #StuffToKnow this week

You will soon break your phone into pieces on purpose. Kelso just became an engineer at Lenovo. The KitKat will no longer just give you a break. All your Facebook friends have an identity crisis and suddenly think their necks are not long enough. Oh yeah and some lucky guy in Norway just made R8 534 000 in four years without even trying… he nearly forgot about it!

TECH

Project Ara: Motorola wants to make your smartphone modular

This is that rare case where the little guy (insert Phonebloks here) gets his idea not stolen, but supported and actually bumped up into the big leagues by the bigger guy (insert Motorola here). See this idea of a modular tech device where you take only the parts of the smartphone you need that day and leave the rest was PhoneBloks’ idea and they have quite the following for their concept. But in what is arguably the most competitive high stakes industry in the world (that of mobile technology), as a small practically unknown idea they would have less than a Twinkie’s chance at a fat camp of making it mainstream. So the guys who made the first cellphone (being Motorola) who recently were bought by the guys who within reason own the modern tech world (Google) came to the rescue.

Google Nexus 5 Android smartphone unveiled
Google finally released the delicious and very well promoted version of Android (4.4) yep, “KitKat”, on Thursday, and now we know why: it was so it could come with the announcement of Google’s latest phone the Nexus 5.

Let me just jump to the good stuff:

• 4.95-inch full HD (1080×1920) display
• 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 system-on-chip
• 2GB of RAM
• 2 300mAh battery

Ticket issued to driver wearing Google Glass

Those cops have to make their quota and it seems the annoying part of life is not going away any decade soon. Even though Google Glass is about as hands free as possible, a pig decided to make a new law all by himself and give Cecilia Abadie a ticket for wearing them while driving. You wanna take a guess what law the cop based it on? I bet you a billion Zimbabwean dollars it wasn’t “watching TV while driving”.

Ashton Kutcher joins Lenovo as product engineer, no seriously
From fiction comes reality: the actor Ashton Kutcher who played the renowned Apple CEO Steve Jobs is now hired as a product engineer as well as a brand ambassador at Lenovo. But in all honesty this is one time where the hiring of a celebrity by a tech company is not a terrible idea (talking to the BlackBerry guys who hired a the singer Alicia Keys as “Creative Director”). Ashton actually knows his stuff and has quite a bit of tech cred of his own.

Here he is testing (read: showing off) Lenovo’s new Yoga tablet:

INTERNET

Man finds forgotten $25 Bitcoin investment now worth $850 000
NoW that is what I call ROI! In just four years he received a 35417% return on his investment. Excuse me while I go cry in the corner with my 0.0002 Bitcoin.

Why Facebook is full of giraffes
The riddle goes like this: “3:00 am, the doorbell rings and you wake up. Unexpected visitors. It’s your parents and they are there for breakfast. You have strawberry jam, honey, wine, bread and cheese. What is the first thing you open?”

Your eyes or the door.

ENTERTAINMENT

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST – Official Trailer (2014)

Meet the sheer awesomeness that awaits us.

Nice find

To This Day Project – Shane Koyczan

The more I listen to this amazing artist the more I am impressed by his gift of story telling.

Let me know if I missed anything this week in the comments. They’re also a good place to leave any big things I should mention next week.

Giraffe image: Adam Foster via Flickr.