Us. (Photo: Girls Wikia)

If you’ve recently moved to New York City solely to live out your Girls-themed fantasies (hi!), your apartment hunt is now over. There's a distressing post on Craigslist looking for one lucky person to pay $1,500 a month for a room in Williamsburg. It already comes furnished with a Hannah (who probably becomes more aggravating as your lease progresses), and a gay roommate "with a penchant for backhanded compliments." Shut up.

The pair, who moved here two years ago to “follow our careers,” are promising a volatile and harrowing living experience that will slowly drain the life from you like water circling a rusty shower drain. The post explains that their ideal prospective roomie will fit into their obnoxiously quirky outlook, which apparently revolves around questions such as "Is it appropriate to sleep with [person X], and would you judge me if I did?" and "And how does one install a coat rack onto an electrical panel? (But really if you know the answer to that last one, please drop us a line.)"

It continues:

Do you watch Girls and think "they're living the life of my generation; I need to get back to the people and live more like them"? If yes, then you're probably in the right place. Basically we just want to keep living our lives and we need someone for that room, because we can't afford to keep the place otherwise and will be forced to move to Bushwick. Typologies of roommates we would accept include "Shoshanna"s or "Marnies." Bonus points if you're related to Brian Williams.

Nevermind, we're moving to Queens.

Gone. (Photo: Flickr)

Leaving iPads, iPhones, and other expensive iDevices in unattended vehicles is like presenting robbers with a big bow and note exclaiming “Please have me!” So, in an effort to crack down on a rash of car burglaries plaguing parts of Brooklyn, the police are going to shame you.

Officers are canvassing the yuppie enclaves like Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens to search for exposed electronics in parked vehicles, then taking pictures to send to their aloof owners. The police will then send drivers a stern warning regarding their dim-witted actions by using the car’s license plate to locate their address.

Captain Jeffrey Schiff told the New York Post that the automobile creepshots are intended to thwart thieves from ruining your Angry Birds high score. Also, it will make the neighborhoods safer.

"We're trying to think outside the box," said Mr. Schiff, who announced the educational operation at a community council meeting last night. "The whole idea is to prevent the crime from happening in the first place."

No word on whether the creepshots will apply to non-smartphones, since thieves don't really want those anyway.

Bon voyage and happy trails. (Photo: Screencap)

Today Mayor Michael Bloomberg delivered his final State of the City address. Amid wisecracks about the Knowles-Carter family (you might know Barclays Center part owner Shawn Carter "by what he's been called since the Super Bowl: Beyoncé's husband"), Hizzoner had plenty to say about the city's tech sector. Hey, he can't let President Obama totally blow up his spot.

Below, a few of the big shout-outs:

King of Numbers, Defender of the Data

It's finally happened: New York City has merged wholly with Startupland. The evidence? In his speech, Mayor Bloomberg announced that our fair metropolis (which already has a Chief Digital Officer, Ms. Rachel Haot) will now have a Chief Analytics Officer, as well:

Using data to tackle problems has helped us to improve services across city government. This year, the data analytics team we created at City Hall will launch a new platform that will improve the way all agencies share information. To lead this effort, I'll appoint the city's first ever Chief Analytics Officer, Michael Flowers. And he'll make as much of this data as possible public, so that the tech community can hold us accountable.

Please, please tell us we're all getting real-time, MTA-wide countdown clocks on our phones sometime before the 2nd Avenue Subway opens.

E-National Guard 

All that community spirit that flowered in the wake of Hurricane Sandy finally has an outlet:

We'll also ask the tech community to join us in tackling data projects that can improve public services, by creating something we call Code Corps.

More details here; founding partners include familiar names like 10Gen, Etsy, General Assembly, New York Tech Meetup, Seamless and...Rent the Runway?

FREE WI-FI! 

There's no date you can put on your calendar just yet, but there's at least some signs of life:

"And to further expand New York's role as a global tech hub, we'll launch a competition to install Wi-Fi in more of our Business Improvement Districts.

Until then, we'll always have Chelsea.

School Days, Fool Days

It won't solve anyone's immediate tech talent supply problems, but it ought to make parents worrying about high schools feel a little better: The city will be opening a second Academy for Software Engineering, and "with private support" 20 more schools will be getting comp sci classes, as well.

Mayor Bloomberg also highlighted the idea of private-public partnerships in education that got love in the President's SOTU earlier this week:

To prepare our students for success, we'll also create new schools that connect students directly to college and work. In his State of the Union address, President Obama highlighted our partnership with IBM and CUNY to create a high school that includes two years of college which we call grades 13 and 14. When students graduate, they receive an associate's degree — and an interview at IBM.

Don't give up hope if your senior prom is long behind you, either:

Today, I've directed Deputy Mayor Bob Steel and Small Business Services Commissioner Rob Walsh to work with the tech industry, universities, and the nonprofit sector to develop an intensive computer science training program for our adults who want to learn IT skills. And why not do it right here in Downtown Brooklyn? There are now 500 tech companies just between here and the NAVY Yard. We'll work to connect more New Yorkers to the jobs they're creating.

More Converted Industrial Space

Tired of searching in vain for new office space? We hear Brooklyn's nice:

We'll move forward with a plan to turn the old Domino Sugar Plant into new housing and we'll create the commercial space that Brooklyn's growing tech community needs.

At the Brooklyn Navy Yard, we'll work with the State to help Steiner Studios begin creating a 50-acre new media campus. The campus will eventually provide 2,500 good jobs in film, television and tech — two of the fastest-growing industries in our city.

Here Come the Electric Cars

Hey, technology isn’t just consumer Internet and 3-D printing:

We'll make New York City a national leader in another new technology: electric vehicles. This year we'll pilot curbside vehicle chargers that will allow drivers to fill up their battery in as little as 30 minutes as opposed to the normal 8 hours.

"We'll work with the City Council to amend the Building Code so that up to 20 percent of all new public parking spaces in private developments will be wired and ready for electric vehicles, creating up to 10,000 parking spots for electric vehicles over the next seven years.

Good news for New York's ailing media industry. Think of all the pageviews when the fights break out over mileage and how long it takes to really charge these cars!

Paulo Coehlo, the highly-acclaimed Brazilian novelist behind The Alchemist, has more than 10 million "likes" on his Facebook page and almost 7 million followers on Twitter. A few hours ago, all those social media fans saw Mr. Coehlo share a manifesto on Facebook and Twitter. He also made it the background of his Twitter profile.

Since Mr. Coehlo included his name in big, red font at the bottom of the post, his followers could be forgiven for assuming he had written it. However, the manifesto is actually the copyrighted work of Holstee, a New York City-based lifestyle goods company that describes itself as "pursuing our dream for a sustainable & united planet." 

In prints of the manifesto, the copyright and names of the Holstee founders--David Radparvar, Michael Radparvar and Fabian Pfortmüller--appear at the end original text, in the same spot where Mr. Coehlo, or whoever manages his online presence, inserted his name. The text, which was written in 2009, is an odd choice for copycats considering that it has been viewed more than 80 million times, according to the online shop where you can buy a poster of the manifesto. As Andy Ellwood noted, back in 2011, the Washington Post even called Holstee's work "the New 'Just Do It.'"

After complaints on Twitter, Mr. Coehlo has since deleted the Facebook post--removing his big red name from the bottom and reposting it as "the Holstee manifesto," up top. He also deleted his original tweet and then tweeted it out again as "The HOLSTEE manifesto." Neither of the reposted images include Holstee's copyright.

Mr. Coehlo, who has spoken out against plagiarism in the past, apologized on Twitter to the company, but without an explanation. We've reached out to Holstee and will update the post when we hear back:

@holstee for a period of 3 hr your manifesto was here and in Facebook as it were mine. Already deleted, posted again -and I apologize.

— Paulo Coelho (@paulocoelho) February 11, 2013

Here are the tweets accusing Mr. Coehlo of plagiarism before the mistake was fixed:

Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that Holstee was based in Brooklyn. The company moved its headquarters from Brooklyn to Manhattan in March 2012. Holstee cofounder Michael Radparvar was also listed as Michael Rad. We regret the errors.

The photos coming out of the bus line are reminiscent of World War II-era bread lines. According to a developer at the New York Times, "Manhattan bus line at Barclay Center nearly wraps around entire arena, along Flatbush, down and around back to Atlantic." Click through the slideshow to see for yourself.

Behold the behemoth! (Photo: flickr.com/mtaphotos

It might look like an oil carrier abandoned on a forgotten shore, but the Verge reports that the recently opened Barclays Center is actually something of a technological showcase. The Internet: It's not just for Manhattan anymore!

According to the Verge, you won't just be able to get 3G and LTE reception, which is already an improvement over many massive structures. There's also free Wifi available throughout the stadium. That's good news for all you music buffs out there, because it means there'll be a ton of footage from the concerts later this month--Jay-Z, Justin Bieber, the Who, Barbra Steisand--available on YouTube for approximately two hours before the copyright bots start playing whack-a-mole.

That invisible river of Wifi will flow around the building's exterior as well.Which of course prompts the question of whether such beneficence will extend to the Atlantic Avenue Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center subway station underneath.

Another advancement in entertainment technology: an app will allow you to order and pay for concessions from your seat. Of course, you'll probably still have to wait in a pickup line and, more importantly, this does not solve the serious problem faced by those of us a mild terror of heights, namely that you must get up from your stadium seats and brave the vertigo-inducing view to retrieve your Nathan's Famous.

But the crowning touch is a "360-degree LED marquee that encircles the outer pavilion." The improbable name? The "Oculus."

What, did they let Marvel name things as part of some undisclosed cosponsorship?

Yum. (Photo: flickr.com/straight-nochaser)

Rejoice! Voicemail is on its way out. Don't let the door hit you on the way out, voicemail. [USA Today]

Leave it to a bunch of Brooklynites to rig a way for their tomato crop to wirelessly transmit soil information. [Wired]

Brace for incoming gadget announcements. [L.A. Times]

Whither Twitter? [PandoDaily]

"Known I was a dragon since 1996. Happily married and happy in my identity: it's made sense of a lot of things for me." You're welcome. [@TumblrTXT]

(Photo: Park Slope Patrick Stewart)

Dear readers, have you heard the good news? The devilishly handsome Patrick Stewart--Shakespearean scholar and he of Star Trek: The Next Generation glory--has nestled himself between the hip young parents and NYU students in a new apartment in Park Slope.

Naturally, the neighborhood worked itself into a tizzy awaiting the arrival (via transporter, we assume) of the Captain Picard. And now that he's there, one Park Sloper has chosen to immortalize his new residency the only way Brooklynites know how: with a single-serving Tumblr, of course.

Park Slope Patrick Stewart is just a bunch of pictures of Patrick Stewart with insidery jokes about Park Slope superimposed over them, but it's bound to make you giggle. Besides, as the Tumblr's tagline notes, "Laurence Olivier couldn't handle Brooklyn."

Mr. Noël (Photo: SoundCloud)

SoundCloud, the agreed-upon poster child for Berlin's burgeoning startup scene, has been making aggressive moves here in the New World over the last year. So it came as no surprise when the company reached out to let us know that three users from "The city of Brooklyn/NYC" (so it's come to this!) had fared well in the second annual Community Fellowship competition.

The local winners are a motley crew: Amy Costello of Brooklyn won support for her new investigative podcast, TinySpark, which focuses on "the business of doing good." Nadia Wilson, also of Brooklyn, submitted a project called "From Hear to There," about travels across the city. The third winner, Jonathan Mitchell (not a Brooklynite, but a Manhattan-dweller) wants to reinvent the radio play with his show The Truth.

We reached out to David Noël, SoundCloud's head of community and the man behind the program, for a bit more detail about what went into the selection process.

The whole idea, he explained, is to "showcase the breadth of how sound can be used in many different ways." In other words, it's a goodwill-fostering way to model the type of content the SoundCloud team would like to see on the platform, and perhaps inspire users to new heights of creativity. (No mean goal, that.)

So, for example, they wanted to be sure to include an instance of storytelling, and an instance of investigative reporting, and so forth. Even better: replicable concepts. Mr. Noël pointed to one fellow, who proposed to create audio tours of Detroit, which might in turn inspire SoundCloud users in other cities to create their own versions.

SoundCloud's aim, he told us, was to select "a broad variety of ways sound can be used for many different objectives. And hopefully then, through that, trigger ideas and trigger creativity from other people to really start thinking about sound as a powerful way, an emotional way, to express themselves."

This is actually the second year the company has handed out the fellowships, but the first year there's been an open call for applications. Last year the process was a bit more haphazard, Mr. Noël admitted to Betabeat. The team spotted several SoundCloud users doing interesting projects, so rather than dole out piecemeal support, the team figured, "Why not just create a fellowship around it and really formalize it?"

SoundCloud has now grown to 20 million users, and has around 50,000 people joining every day. Consequently, Mr. Noël told Betabeat, "we've seen many more use cases emerging, and we wanted to really scale it out." Hence the call for entries, which garnered 184 submissions. A panel of judges then helped whittle the list down to the 15 finalists.

"Originally we wanted to select 10, but we had so many great ones that we added five more."

The U.S. is one of the company's largest markets, and it's growing--hence the strong showing by applicants based in the States. "If you combine all major European countries, it's almost on par. But the U.S. is really a strong growth market."

Well, they've clearly got a headstart on Brooklyn.

(Photo: Brooklyn Tech Triangle)

The Brooklyn Tech Triangle already thinks it's bigger and better than Manhattan, and now they're getting a transportation upgrade to help them prove it.

The triangle--which includes Downtown Brooklyn, DUMBO and the Brooklyn Navy Yard--is getting its very own dedicated bus route, according to a press release issued today by New York state senator Daniel Squadron.

Senator Squadron and MTA stakeholders will plan the new route, which is set to roll out in 2013. "Brooklyn's tech industry is changing the face of New York -- and now, we'll have a bus route that will allow the booming Tech Triangle to continue to grow and innovate," Senator Squadron stated in the release.

And here we thought most startup kids were fiercely loyal to the ice cream-wielding Uber team.