Issue 119
Bizarro Devs is a monthly newsletter with the weird and wonderful tech news, tools, and websites.
🌲 AMAZON PICKS UP A PODCASTING NETWORK. PLUS, HOW PEOPLE SPEND THEIR TIME & PSILOCYBIN
Heya,
This week, Vish will be handling the writing duties. She found a great collection of news, tools, and numbers to entertain you.
🌐 How people around the world spend time.
🐟 How the most reviled hosting company in the world managed to make things worse.
🕸️ A few takes on web design trends for 2021.
Enjoy,
Vish and Chris.
📰 From the Newsroom
A global look at how people spent their time ⏱️
Let's face it, most of our time is spent doing the same things everyone else is doing. However, there's some difference in how this time is distributed depending on where you live. This Our World in Data chart shows how much time people spend on work, sleep, leisure, and more per day.
The numbers don't just show time but hint at cultural aspects also. The stereotypical southern European treatment of meals as a social activity means France, Italy, and Spain average over 2 hours a day eating and drinking.
Men enjoy more leisure time compared to women in most countries (but only a trillion or so hours). The only exception to the rule is Norway where the genders enjoy similar amounts of leisure time. Shout out for runners up New Zealand and Denmark.
My favorite stats are in gray, “Sleep”. I’m happy to learn that most of us sleep for 8 hours. That means, “mostly we are sleeping”.
visualcapitalist.com
Amazon will buy Wondery to further its expansion into the podcast market 🎙️
Another big podcasting deal. Another day of kicking myself. Amazon has decided to put its marker down against Spotify in the podcast wars. Wondery put together both the Dirty John and Joe Exotic podcasts which have both been dramatized.
With around 20 million unique monthly listeners and 50 shows, Wondery was one of the few big independent podcast producers left in the game.
Amazon will pay around $300 million to bring Wondery into the Amazon Music stable, but the free shows will remain available on other platforms.
theverge.com
GoDaddy employees were told they were getting a holiday bonus. It was actually a phishing test 🎣
Because being hated by website owners all over the world isn't enough, GoDaddy messed with their employees over the holidays. Each employee received an email titled “GoDaddy Holiday Party”, which turned out to be a phishing test.
The email came on Dec 16 with a nice banner promising $650 as a bonus, “Though we cannot celebrate together during our annual Holiday Party, we want to show our appreciation and share a $650 one-time Holiday bonus! To ensure that you receive your one-time bonus in time for the Holidays, please select your location and fill in the details by Friday, December 18th.”
For those who clicked the link, received another email two days later from chief security officer Demetrius Comes.
The email read, “You’re getting this email because you failed our recent phishing test. You will need to retake the Security Awareness Social Engineering training.” The bonus was training for failed students, but I don’t know what the others received after passing the test.
engadget.com
⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month
How many of your great shower ideas are dismissed because you lack certain skills? Findnlink has like-minded, highly skilled people who’d love to be part of your idea.
50% of people make New Year's resolutions, but only 10% keep them. Open Habits makes the job easy. Hmm! Suddenly, my three-day exercise challenge looks doable.
Speaking of sweating through 2021, Physique AI is a 1-on-1 posture trainer with AI technology for correcting poor posture.
I was looking for a [gift for a friend]https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/best-gifts-for-a-designer/) and I ended up buying one for myself too. Somebody said, “self gift is self-care”.
Wake up the sleepy browser is a fun game to wake up a sleepy browser, just like my friend, Chris!
If you are doing work around websites, you’ve probably heard of a small project called “WordPress” once. But you’re not sure if it is for you. Find out if WordPress is easy or not.
I was just thinking of having a tool that can mix sounds when I stumbled upon Noisli! You can mix sounds of your choice to make a perfect fit for you to relax, concentrate, and work.
What is meaningful design? The biggest web design trend of 2021 may be less about visual trends and more about bigger picture elements like accessibility.
Are you a customer-centric person? If yes, you’d love to be a part of the Support Driven community and meet like-minded folks.
🎤 It’s How They Said It
🧮 The numbers game
25 million and 40 million: Devices tracked in the US and globally by location data broker X-Mode.
86% of adults agree that the post-Covid world should be more sustainable and equitable.
20 seconds at 100 million degrees: Korea's artificial sun sets a world record.
71% of participants had a clinically significant response to Psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy treatment.
Outro
That's it for the week. If you have links to share, then my emails are always open. Simply reply to this email to land in my inbox.
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Have a great month,
Chris & Vish
