Baby, it’s positively frigid outside. Whether you’re snowed in by a humongous storm or just being lazy out of solidarity, we’ve got the week’s best tech reads to occupy your time and ward off cabin fever.
Kira Peikoff tested three consumer-market DNA tests using her own genes, with striking—and varying—results. [The New York Times]
Mat Honan spent the year 2013 wearing Google Glass. Turns out face-computing has some very big pluses, and some major caveats. [Wired]
Benjamin Bratton casts a critical eye at TED Talks, which despite massive pop-culture popularity, have a pretty lousy success rate when it comes to bringing about actual change. [The Guardian]
Alexis Madrigal painstakingly reverse-engineered Netflix’s genre-assignment system to figure out where all 76,897 micro-categories come from. [The Atlantic]
Craig Mod looks at his long love affair with cameras and wonders if he, and we, are over it. [The New Yorker]
Dan Rodney has an enormously helpful collection of all the Mac keyboard shortcuts you forgot, or probably never knew about in the first place. [Dan Rodney]
Mohsin Hamid and Anna Holmes discuss how the reading experience changes when people ditch print for e-books. [The New York Times]
Kashmir Hill looks at the other way people are making money from bitcoin: by building and selling bitcoin-mining machines. [Forbes]
Image: This Friday, Jan. 3, 2014 satellite image provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows the blanket of snow that stretches from the Midwest across to New England after a massive winter storm moved over the region. (AP Photo / National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
