You want links? We got 'em

It's a whole new year full of stuff to read!

• Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

  When I powered it off and on again, the power light lit, but I got no boot chime and the screen alternated between glitchy and black—it all screamed that something on the logic board was busted. Probably the water-boiling temperatures had caused the board to flex, knocking solder loose from its ball grid arrays. The likely fix? Reflow it: Heat it up until the balls of solder melt back into their assigned spots.

• Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace.

  These new floor plans are ideal for maximizing a company’s space while minimizing costs. Bosses love the ability to keep a closer eye on their employees, ensuring clandestine porn-watching, constant social media-browsing and unlimited personal cellphone use isn’t occupying billing hours. But employers are getting a false sense of improved productivity.

• City Link, co-determination, and destiny

  What about, simply, inventing a proper word for this "worker community" and making a code of conduct that companies can sign up for, to make it clear that this genuinely is a community of Worker Owners who share in the risk and upside both, not virtual residents of a virtual company town, buying goods from the company store with company scrip.

• Uber

  To recover our privacy and make democracy safe, we need to redesign digital systems so that they do not collect information about people in general. First step, don't help any new ones gain a foothold.

• On Nerd Entitlement

  What can I say? This is a strange and difficult age, one of fast-paced change and misunderstandings. Nerd culture is changing, technology is changing, and our frameworks for gender and power are changing - for the better. And the backlash to that change is painful as good, smart people try to rationalise their own failure to be better, to be cleverer, to see the other side for the human beings they are.

• Ants Go Marching

  Eliminating fire ants seemed a bit like making cornbread; every Southerner had his own favorite recipe. By this time, my welts were long gone and I began to feel bad for the little ants. Especially since I understood that their inexorable spread was, in large part, our own fault.

• GeoGig: A Tool For Geospatial Data Management

  Users are able to import raw geospatial data (currently from Shapefiles, PostGIS or SpatiaLite) in to a repository where every change to the data is tracked. These changes can be viewed in a history, reverted to older versions, branched in to sandboxed areas, merged back in, and pushed to remote repositories.

• Saving a Project and a Company

  Work incremental, release frequently

  Try to stay away from big bang releases as if your company depends on it (it does). Releasing bit-by-bit whilst monitoring those kpis like a hawk is what will save your business from disaster, it will also make it much easier to troubleshoot any problems because the search space is so much smaller.

• Google’s Philosopher

  Although difficult to summarize, Floridi’s program comes down to this: For anyone who wants to address the problems raised by digital technologies, the best way to understand the world is to look at everything that exists—a country, a corporation, a billboard—as constituted fundamentally by information. By viewing reality in these terms, Floridi believes, one can simultaneously shed light on age-old debates and provide useful answers to contemporary problems.

• Fundamentals of Compression

  One of the most important steps in designing a compression scheme is to create a probability model for the data. This model allows us to examine the characteristics of the data in order to efficiently fit a compression algorithm to it.

• Designing The Best Board Game On The Planet

  The game is called Twilight Struggle, and it’s the top-ranked board game in the world. It occupies the No. 1 spot on the authoritative gaming-world website BoardGameGeek.

  Gupta, 38, of Columbia, Maryland, is the game’s co-designer. A video-game designer at Firaxis Games by day, he recreated a post-World War II universe out of cardboard. In Twilight Struggle, players peddle influence and alter history with playing cards in an effort to win the Cold War. And, ideally, avoid nuclear apocalypse.

• Meet the Flat White, the Coffee Drink Taking the U.S. by Storm

  It’s the flat white, the Australian answer to the latte, and it’s a name you should know the next time your local barista asks, “What’s your poison?” Over the past few years in the U.S., it’s gone from being a complete unknown coffee drink to being the next big thing in caffeine.