Homes made from wacky materials

Humble materials get recycled to create outlandish homes, such as this dumpster house.  Bedtime stories say the evil witch from Hansel and Gretel lived in a gingerbread cottage with window panes of sugar and a candy studded roof. And an old lady with so many children she didn’t know what to do lived in a shoe. In real life, the possibilities are just as wacky, from paper houses to converted grain bins to homes made from a muddy mixture called “cob.” These architectural oddities — homes built out of recycled junk, gussied up dumpsters, or grounded airplanes — provide fodder for future fairy tales, or at least late-night shows on HGTV. In the Hamptons, a resort area usually associated with oceanfront mega mansions, abandoned...

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Twitter’s logo is named after NBA Legend

Twitter’s logo is named after Larry Bird Larry Bird sets up his Twitter account, @HickFromFrenchLick (Jennifer Pottheiser/ Getty). The NBA and Twitter have proved to be a natural fit for each other. Basketball players took to the service before their counterparts in any other sport, shows like TNT's "Inside the NBA" have willfully incorporated tweets into their broadcasts, and the league maintains a steady tweet presence. It turns out that Twitter itself also takes some inspiration from the league. If you've spent any time on the site, you've almost certainly seen some variation on their bird logo. Any domesticated animal needs a name, and so the company's braintrust named their bird "Larry" — in honor, of course, of Celtics legend...

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Microsoft Unveils Windows 8

You already knew from the early "developer preview" of Windows 8 that Microsoft released in September just how radically different this version of the company's ubiquitous operating system is from its predecessors. But now that Microsoft on Wednesday unleashed a more complete preview version of Windows 8 — which consumers can get their hands on — we really are on the threshold of a whole new era of personal computing. Steven Sinofsky, president of Windows and Windows Live, at the Windows 8 Consumer Preview presentation at the Mobile World Congress. The stakes for Microsoft and the entire computing ecosystem are enormous. This new era is built around tablets as much as traditional laptops and desktops, and multi-touch as much as the...

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