In today’s version of “completely pointless but epically awesome hacking news”: Google Devs Install Ubuntu on Google Glass | OMG! Ubuntu!
In a session at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, cheekily titled “Voiding your warranty”, developers shared how to root Google Glass and install an alternative operating system on it. OS of choice for the demo being Ubuntu.
That’s pretty damn cool :)
Celebrating the fact that the new Star Trek movie is out this weekend, here’s a list of Star Trek Science mistakes from Slate.com.
The problem is distance. Unless Delta Vega were a moon of Vulcan (and in the original series Spock says his planet has no moon), the planet would be way, way too far away to see as anything but a point of light in the sky. And that’s if it’s in the same star system; from another star, even Vulcan’s star might be too far away to see (also, Delta Vega is established in the original series as a remote planet, the location of a dilithium mining station).
The New Pacific Rim Trailer Is an Orgy of Everything You Love.
I think I just nerd-gasm’d again.
In their quest to be an app on every possible platform out there, Evernote today announced Evernote for Google Glass, allowing you to send notes to your Google Glass.
Jim pointed me to the Full-Length Trailer For ‘Riddick’ Now Online!
I think I just had a geek-gasm.
Possibly the coolest page you’ll read today: 3-D Scans Reveal Caterpillars Turning Into Butterflies.
Science!
Here’s the live stream for Google I/O 2013 if you want to watch as things go along.
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - Trailer 1 makes me think that maybe I’ll be checking out some new shows this fall…
Half-Life 2 Games Available For Linux (Steam) via Web Upd8:
Like the other two titles Valve has made available for Linux last week: Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal, the Half-Life 2 games are in beta for now and they don’t show up in the Linux section on Steam but if you didn’t purchase them already, you can simply search for them in the All Items section and they should install on Linux. Or you can click the links below[…]
Booya.
Very true, but all I can think of is that the Ubuntu blatant copying of the Mac OS interface has reached an all time high. This is basically a copy of the “Launchpad” app that came with Lion (and no mac user I know uses Launchpad anyway).
I missed that Yahoo! acquired Astrid, a popular cross platform todo list manager.
Of course, as things like this go, they’re sunsetting it. No more premium subscriptions, and the team is joining the Yahoo mobile team to work on their apps.
If you’re not happy about this, you can also check out the Wunderlist Astrid import to pull your todos into the Wunderlist app.
Not as bleeding edge anymore, the first RC for Ruby on Rails 4.0 is now available.
This Is the Most Detailed Picture of the Internet Ever (and Making it Was Very Illegal):
Why would you need a map of the Internet? The Internet is not like the Grand Canyon. It is not a destination in a voyage that requires so many right turns and so many left turns. The Internet, as the name suggests and many of you already know, is nothing but the sum of decentralized connections between various interconnected computers that are speaking roughly the same language. To map out those connections and visualize the place where I spend so much of my time may not have any clear use, but it intrigues the pants off me.
Google announced that for storage space, 15 GB is now shared between Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos.
Life gets a bit easier when your Google products work well together—whether that’s inserting a Drive file into an email or sharing a photo from Drive on Google+. As this experience becomes more seamless, separate storage doesn’t make as much sense anymore. So instead of having 10 GB for Gmail and another 5 GB for Drive and Google+ Photos, you’ll now get 15 GB of unified storage for free to use as you like between Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos.
I’m sure there are some downsides and people are going to complain about something, but this isn’t bad for a free service :)
I’m back! Seems appropriate the first post from me after a week away is not only from a Canadian, but something “global”. This is Commander Chris Hadfield’s “Space Oddity” cover from the ISS:
@cmdr_hadfield is scheduled to leave the international space station today after a long time of service and an amazingly human look at life aboard the ISS.
Here’s a storify link with the full details.
Sir we thank you for your service!
Veronica Mars Season 4: FBI Pilot
Veronica Mars Season 4: FBI Pilot is a great tease for what to expect for the now financed
Veronica Mars Movie project. This should be pretty cool.
Adobe talks about cloud only as it effects photographers
Catch the rest of the podcasts as well if you are into photography.
After nearly 10 years, Adobe abandons its Creative Suite entirely to focus on Creative Cloud
A post by Trey Radcliff
Ready to pay Adobe $29.99 a month for the rest of your life? hehe… Or wait, how about $49.99 a month for the complete package?
I think it’s pretty crazy… I like the good old days of buying software and owning it forever. For example, let’s say that I drop my Creative Cloud membership and I want to go back in a few months later and, say, CROP AN IMAGE using Photoshop, then I can’t without paying Adobe again? It just seems crazy!
Anyway, we’ll discuss this on the live show soon - see https://plus.google.com/events/c647hgj11keapdsnva92m5d6uao — we’ll bring this up almost straight away with +Thomas Hawk +Frederick Van Johnson and more!
To me, it seems like Adobe seems more interested in having predictable revenue than making customers happy. This tends to happen in organizations with a lot of bloat where eventually decisions are made by bean-counters and committees. Am I wrong? I don’t think so…
Fancy is the new Sharper Image, things you never imagined and have no need for but buy anyway.
Hong Kong giant inflatable rubber duck
Why do I feel like singing the rubber duckie song?
Adobe gives sneak peak of Lightroom-style app for tablets
A Nice story to make Alan Squee….
The Secret of Alan’s success with the ladies
Robotic Insects Make First Controlled Flight
Need to add a Science category.
To The Apocalypse In Daddy’s Sidecar - Abney Park Enjoy a fun Music video.
I have a wide and varied taste in music so enjoy
Android tablets overtake Apple for the first time.
Here is your Anti-Apple post Alan (:
Time travel in movies, a spoilerific chart for all permutations of time travel in movies.
Instacast for Mac is now available for download. Instacast began it’s life as an iPhone podcast management system, and a damn good one (if you don’t want/need to sync back to iTunes). A Mac companion app sounds like the logical next step. Looking forward to checking it out.
This will be nice for people (unlike myself) who can’t stand iTunes and want to get rid of every little bit of it.
Just a quick note to welcome my friend Cthulhu who will be keeping things up to date here on the site while I’m away for a week for a work trip. Make him feel welcome and ignore his anti-iPhone rants (which will no doubt be posted as soon as I leave :)
The Joss Whedon’s take on Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing UK Trailer
Limited release in June.
Sipping my Mocha I have to agree with The Doghouse Diaries about What Your Coffee Says About You. I am creative dammit!
Any FYI from njabl.org that they’re shutting down their DNSBL.
March 1, 2013: NJABL is in the process of being shut down. The DNSBL zones have been emptied. After “the Internet” has had some time to remove NJABL from server configs, the NS’s will be pointed off into unallocated space (192.0.2.0/24 TEST-NET-1) to hopefully make the shutdown obvious to those who were slower to notice.
So grep through your mailserver configs for “dnsbl.njabl.org” and comment it out lest any issues pop up.
You can uhm, now get, Google Now on your iPhone and iPad, with the Google Search app. Pretty impressive, but keep an eye on your battery, it keeps the GPS on all the time, causing faster than normal battery drain.
Great stuff, just wish that it was usable with non-gmail accounts (or could take advantage of them that is).
The team that creates the excellent iPad to Lightroom sync App PhotoSmith (app store link) blogged today that they are looking for beta testers for the next version of the app. This app is going to bring some huge changes which will make long time users happy and new users even happier.
So… we are asking you, dear readers, for 10 volunteers to help us really work the app over hard and smash it to bits to make sure it’s really as solid as we think it is.. To be clear, this isn’t a chance to play with new goodies for free like our Adobe brethren are able to do. No, we are asking for volunteers dedicated to helping make sure this app works no matter how crazy your workflow is.
There’s a beta signup link. If you are a lightroom user and looking for a great syncing setup for your iPad, and want to help out, give them a look.
A New Trailer For Pixar’s ‘Monsters University’ Released via Geeks of Doom.
Instapaper acquired by Betaworks, owner of Digg.
Whoah
Marco has the details over on his personal blog where the announcement went out.
Congrats to Marco and thanks for the awesome app, looking forward to more/better in the future!
Saw that Twitter for Mac goes Retina, gets design tweaks and 14 new languages. I honestly didn’t think this would ever happen, after the year (or more?) of complete inactivity on the official twitter app for the Mac.
Ubuntu released Ubuntu 13.04 today. There are a bunch of new updates you can find on the virtual tour or just check out the overview of the desktop or just download it now.
Congrats on the Ubuntu team.
How 99.9% of people judge the quality of their coffee. I’m a sucker for coffee comics.
Great set of images from a 100 year old time capsule. Most interesting I think was that they included a player for the gramophone recorded greetings, knowing that technology would have progressed past wax cylinders in 100 years. I wonder if our “current” time capsules include the power and adapters needed to play / use whatever “modern” tech we’re including in it. How far up the chain do you go? A hand crank in case power standards have changed in 100 years?
The Verge posted their Samsung Galaxy S4 review, with a final score of 8/10. Mostly good, though Gruber points out a few interesting bits in the review (ie: the display being horribly over-saturated but still getting a 10/10) as well as a snipe at the easy mode.
Still, if you’re ready to upgrade and in the Android camp, this sounds like the phone to get.
BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public:
BitTorrent Inc. has opened up its Sync app to the public today. The new application is free of charge and allows people to securely sync folders to multiple devices using the BitTorrent protocol. Complete control over the storage location of the files and the absence of limits is what sets BitTorrent’s solution apart from traditional cloud based synchronization services.
Trailer for Thor: The Dark World came out today. It looks good.
Related to the last post, check out FocusTwist which lets you focus photos after taking a picture. It’s a $1.99 iPhone app available here.
From this reddit thread comes this Hack: DOF-Changeable Photos with an SLR. It fakes out the any-DoF effect by using a short video manually focused through the entire depth of field and then some online magic to create the “clickable” image.
It’s definitely not the Lytro “take a picture” method, but it’s pretty neat if you find something that requires this particular style of tech.
Tweetbot, from TapBots released Tweetbot 2.8 (app store link) today, which introduces, among other things, the new “Media Timeline” view, which is basically a view where the standard Twitter timeline has any media already in it’s “expanded” state (Update: This view shows only tweets with media in them, not all tweets). Less tweets to read per page, but a very sexy look!
A reminder that the UFies.org site tweets at @ufies and I tweet at @alanbailward.
Hadouken Shoot - Take One is an awesome and professional take on the Hadouken meme. Really cool to see a real photographers take on this, with good lighting, setup, etc. Also Bill Wadman is an expert on making things fancy, so of course it’s awesome.
Remember the crazy sorority letter that was going around last week? This week brings two (that I’ve found so far) dramatic readings of it:
- Michael Shannon Reads the Insane Delta Gamma Sorority Letter over at Funny or Die
- Alison Haislip does a credible job as well at Break.com
Both are very NSFW (language) of course.
Jonathan Coulton’s new secret project is Code Monkey Save World:
About a week ago my friend Greg Pak and I announced a secret project we’ve been working on called Code Monkey Save World. It’s a graphic novel based on characters from a few JoCo songs, and we’re funding it through Kickstarter.
Just based on the title this looks fantastic. They’re already at $138,333 of the original $39,000 goal. $40 for a hardcover signed book plus digital download + soundtrack + other stuff? Sign me up!
