Search torrents on dozens of torrent sites and torrent trackers. Unblock torrent sites by proxy. PirateBay proxy, Kickass unblocked and more torrent proxies. Get the latest Rolling Stone new music news, song and album reviews, free music downloads, artist videos pictures, playlists and more. Watch Postcards of Mid Century Resorts Transform Into Their Abandoned Ruins. In idyllic places like the Catskills and the Poconos, the 5. America. This was where newly suburban denizens went on vacation, flocking to lakeside resorts straight out of Dirty Dancing. But over the years, the people stopped coming, and the resorts closed. Now, their moss covered ruins look like a tomb of the American dream. Itunes Movies For Ipod Saw Rebirth Comic BookItunes Movies For Ipod Saw Rebirth MovieYou probably think you know how to keep your internet habits secret. Clearing browser history is too obvious, you say. I just do all my sketchy stuff in an. Photographer Pablo Maurer stumbled upon a few of these resorts while exploring the abandoned Penn Hills Resort. Once a honeymooners destination, the so called Paradise of Pocono Pleasure closed in 2. During his visit to the deserted resort, Maurer found an old matchbook adorned with an illustration of the Penn Hills pool at the height of its popularity. He looked at the illustration and then at the ruins of the pool and came up with the idea to photograph the current state of similar abandoned spaces that were once depicted in old postcards. For the next couple years, Maurer traveled around the Poconos and the Catskills, searching for resorts hed seen in postcards bought at antique shops and on e. Bay. His journey not only became a treasure hunt, seeking out the most dramatic ruin porn, but it also became a time traveling adventure. Maurer went looking for the spaces where a vibrant dining room or fun filled bowling alley once existed. Instead, he found moss covered caverns and graffiti coated ruins. The Catskills in particular are a truly stunning, beautiful place with this overarching melancholy thats hard to put your finger on, Maurer told Gizmodo. But like so many other formerly grand places, you see glimmers of hope and rebirth along with the blight. Thats one way of putting it. By superimposing his photographs of the ruins onto the postcard images, however, Maurer does help highlight the grandeur that once existed at these resorts. You dont need to imagine the lounge chairs by a now empty and polluted pool. You can see them in the postcard, lined up next to bright blue water and a diving board. As one image dissolves into another, you can almost feel yourself transported back to the 6. Maurer explains that these resorts failed for various but sometimes related reasons. Airfare became more affordable allowing the general public to be a bit less local with their vacation time, he said. Tastes changed, and many of them did not evolve with the times. So they decayed. But there are still those glimmers of hope. Some resorts, like Grossingers and the Penn Hills Resort, have new owners who might decide to revive them. After all, the Catskills and the Poconos are becoming revitalized as young people rediscover the humble wonders near cities like New York and Philadelphia, places their parents might have gone or something they saw in a Patrick Swayze movie. Theres a chance the decrepit state of these once fantastic places is only temporary. You can see more of Maurers photographs, coupled with the postcards that inspired them, over at DCist. And you really should check them out. The time traveling effect is mesmerizing, contemplative, and just plain neat. DCist. Alexa and Cortana Teamed Up, But Consumer Tech Is Still Stuck in an Ecosystem War. The voice interfaces Cortana and Alexa will soon be able to activate each other for functions that one does better than the other, Amazon and Microsoft announced today. Its the kind of cooperation that we dont see enough between the Big Five, or really any company thats grown out of its desperately cobble together partnerships so we look relevant phase and into its abandon all cooperation that doesnt lock customers into our shitty ecosystem phase. Cortana and Alexas competitors, Google Assistant and Siri, wont be integrating any time soon. As Gizmodo notes, Google and Apple have far more users locked into their ecosystems, so they have far less incentive to cooperate with competing systems. By combining forces, Microsoft and Amazon are admitting theyve lost the war for mobile, the dominant user interface now, and holding onto their own core competencies Microsoft for business communication, Amazon for consumption. Meanwhile, though Google Assistant runs on i. OS, its very limited and cant be activated without opening an app. Siri wont run at all on Android. And even on its native platform, Siri wont control best in class apps like Spotify, Gmail, or Google Maps. Google Assistant is more flexible, but it cant order things on Amazon the way Alexa can. You can run Alexa on Android, but only through Amazons app, and again with limitations. Your device also wont play well with a competing desktop OS Apples Handoff and i. Cloud make i. Phones and Macs work together seamlessly, whereas coordinating an Android phone with a Mac is clunky, and plugging an i. Phone into a Windows machine is eye twitchingly uncomfortable, thanks to Apples lousy Windows port of i. Tunes. The TV ecosystem is just as bad, largely thanks to Amazons own selfish decisions. Amazon still hasnt released its promised Apple TV app, so Prime customers have to stream Transparent and Curb Your Enthusiasm from their phones. There are no plans for an Amazon app on the Chromecast, or for Spotify on Apple TV. You can retreat to a third party media player like Roku, but then you cant play videos purchased through i. Tunes without a wonky file conversion. Starting at the end of this month, Amazon will no longer sell the Chromecast or Apple TV. AndRead more Read. Meanwhile, Facebook runs around kind of integrating with all these other services while trying to push its own messaging and sharing platforms, and burying every post that dares link to You. Tube or Twitter. As a customer choosing a phone, computer, and media player, youre stuck with three choices Buy into an ecosystem that inevitably has some crappy elements. You could choose Google, and miss out on Apples slick interface and seamless desktop to mobile integration. Or choose Apple, lose a lot of third party functionality, and get locked into increasingly bizarre design choices your Lightning headphones wont work on your laptop and inferior software like Apple Maps, Mail, and Calendar. On desktop, choose Windows and miss out on that same integration, or choose Apple, pay more for the same computing power, and get your computer games a year late. Straddle ecosystems, running the Google Suite instead of MS Office and hooking your i. Santa`S Apprentice Review more. Phone up to your PC or your Android to your Mac. Run Spotify, buy an Echo, and live with their limited capabilities. Maybe even run Excel on OS X. All but the most basic users reach outside their main ecosystem at some point. Install Linux on your Chromebook, jailbreak your i. Phone, run Cortana on your Fit. Bit, hack your Echo to play Tidal, and write a viral Medium post encouraging people to unplug. In the short term, all these companies have good reasons to lock up their platforms wherever they still think they can steal market share from the others, and wherever they would rather focus resources on improving their own service instead of handing millions of customers to their competitors through a partnership. But in the long term, this lock in keeps the Big Five from innovating, their products leaning on the crutch of the ecosystem, alienating customers who will then abandon the ecosystem for third party services like Spotify, Dropbox, Whats. App, 1. Password, and Overcast. OS has a bunch of great podcast managers these days, but after testing all of them, our favoriteRead more Read. Historically, these ecosystems tend to open up, making way for the next battle. Macs and PCs didnt always run so many of the same apps. Internet Explorer and Netscape were much more mutually exclusive than Chrome and Safari. And for a while, your Internet came in flavors of AOL, Prodigy, or Compu. Serve. Even Android and i. OS used to have zero apps in common. But each time, interoperability won out, bringing most of each platforms strengths to everyone. But things could get worse before they get better. The Big Five are all racing to win at online payments, wearables, AI, AR, VR, smart homes, smart cars, and the growing Internet of Things. And as long as each company thinks it can win, it will try to push out the others instead of playing nice. Eventually there will be winners and losers, or decentralized cooperation. Every now and then, a new protocol will open up thats as decentralized as email or HTTP. And the giants of the day will move onto a new fight. In the meantime, theres nearly always some way to force the ecosystems to play together, at the expense of simplicity and not having your shit constantly break. Theres always some third option to jimmy into the gap and outperform all the defaults. And thats what Lifehackers all about.