Internet's Earliest Cat Video Revealed

We don't do a lot of cat stuff here on the blog, because experience has taught me that the internet is perfectly capable of filling the aggregated Cat Video Needs without my help. But no one seems to be coming up with vintage cat videos. So:

This was filmed in the mid-40s, and has been languishing in the databanks of the Prelinger Archive. It was discovered anew by Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic, who was testing out a new Prelinger app that lets you plumb the bottomless expanse of the archives on your iPad. Three bucks: cheap.

TUMBLR DU JOUR Controversial: Minneapolis summed up in one judgmental map, with every neighborhood described through the perceptions of people who don't live there. Come for the satire, stay for the humorless attacks in the comments. Contains a jot of profanity and broad stereotypes employed to indicate nonresident misperceptions, so if either annoys or troubles, click not.

ARCHITORTURE Once again, I have to wonder what I'm missing. Whether new shapes and forms are so brilliant my archaic sense of aesthetics cannot comprehend them. Architizer notes:

Okay. Here's the building.

The Ningbo History Museum was built out of 66,000 reclaimed tiles that were dumped in landfills. Shu's buildings prove that contemporaneity does not have to mean extravagance.I'll agree with that.

TECH This piece at Giz by a new parent speaks for everyone who remembers the tech of the 90s.

WEB The technical term is scroogled:

There's a moral to this story, I'm sure, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Let me think. I'l get back to you.

One of the comments introduces a word we must stop:

No one should ever say "thinky" unless they are seven. Please make a note of it.

So what's the alternative to trusting the cloud? Local storage, of course. But we're told that hard drives fail, so you'd better back up into the cloud. But if you use those free services, you're limited to 5GB in most cases, and that hardly covers 2 eps of your pirated Game of Thrones HD files, to say nothing of all that music with which you cannot part.

Sorry. Babbling. The project is simple: if I had to fill 1 TB with the most important things, what would go on the disk? One TB will be cheap and portable soon - it's about eighty bucks now in an external drive, but eventually a TB drive will be thumb-sized and cheap. Once you start to winnow you realize how much digital junk you have that you don't need - and how the ease of storing allllll those pictures means you're less likely to ever look at them.

When I was a kid we had a few photo albums of family trips and holidays, with the occasional candid shot. My contributions were few, because film came in cartridges of 12, and the costs involved made you choose every shot with care. Those days are gone and that's good for most of us, because we can fire away, and select later. But I'd bet no one does. You end up with four versions of every moment, and you can't decide which is the best; one has a certain detail you like but someone's scowling, and in the next one the dog is funny but that detail is missing, and so on.

However: I've found that if I select, say, 150 pictures per year I have a clearer idea of things than if I had a folder with 1,3,42 shots. Just a suggestion.

Different rules apply when you're shooting the sun, though.