I read somewhere before that a good blog is like a good meal: it’s a good balance of appetizers, a main course, and desert. With the weekly roundups, I’ve been serving mostly appetizers. The last main course that I served was a post explaining the historical significance of SpaceX Falcon 9’s vertical takeoff and landing. And the last desert was my 2015 holiday gift guide. As I mentioned, writing the weekly roundups has been a way for me to get back to blogging in general – no big goals as of yet but let’s just get back to building up habits.

Recently, I watched a TED talk by Wait but Why’s Tim Urban.

Despite the fact that we all end up being okay meeting deadlines despite procrastinating, it’s the long-term procrastination, the one without deadlines, that become a source of unhappiness. I share this because in a way, I have been procrastinating on a lot of posts here. Such as, a post on virtual reality which I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. I’ve always wanted to explain password management (as suggested by a friend who’s getting increasingly frustrated with them). I have a draft on why I am an Android convert. Of course, there’s a ton of other things that I’ve been procrastinating on but let’s start with this fairly doable list. And I thought that if I mention it here and by announcing it, perhaps I can rouse my Panic Monster to kick my Instant Gratification Monkey out of the way.

Here are this week’s most relevant news in tech and retail

In tech:

1. Alphabet: Boston dynamics: Google puts Boston Dynamics up for sale in robotics retreat; Google just scored a huge win against Amazon by landing Apple as a customer (in a deal valued around $400M)
2. Blast off for Europe Russia Mars mission
3. Autonomous cars: Baidu will soon test its self-driving cars in the US; A Month After Google’s Car Hit a Bus, Google Filed a Patent for Robot Cars to Detect Buses
4. Nokia returns to hardware with $60,000 virtual reality camera
5. Kickstarter buys crowd-funded music community Drip

In retail:

1. Amazon Is Trying to Patent Paying With a Selfie
2. Alibaba is working to bring virtual reality into its e-commerce services
3. Urban Outfitters going bigger with Anthropologie
4. Nike just unveiled the first real power-lacing sneaker, the HyperAdapt 1.0
5. Zalando aims for $11B in sales by seeking technology edge