The perfect gift for your wife, husband or loved one is this picturetweeting bathroom scale, assuming of course, you want to be killed. Thanks boingboing.
The Team Fortress 2 blog has answered a bunch of questions about the just announced Steam-on-Mac which I've written about a couple of times. IE:
Q: Is it just some crappy emulated version of TF2? A: No! Also: How dare you! Mac users aren't getting a crappy emulated version of the game. TF2 will run natively on OSX, like an actual big boy game for adults.
Sadly it's not the full steam catalog, but the Source engine games. Still, that's a fair number of games and people like some people I know can worry less about their aging win-boxen's hardware.
Boing Boing has a great commentary on Real and how When RealNetworks Settled on DVD Copying, We All Lost, the RIAA and the death of fair use. Not that anyone would have used the RealNetworks software anyway, why bother when something like Handbrake is out there, but still, like the iTunes music store it's something legit for people who want to follow the law with their media.
LumberJAPH (awesome title btw) has a preview of github explorer, a visualizer for github projects using the github API. Very cool.
I read this story about how the Energizer battery charger contains a backdoor and I have a few issues with it. First, agree with Reddit in this is why the world needs open source. Second though, is WTF do you need your battery charger to plug into the computer, or have it do anything but pull power from the USB. Seriously, am I an old fogey when I say that back in my day you plugged your battery charger into the wall socket...
Google has enhanced their Street view to allow you to Edit places using Street View images, for example if an address doesn't show exactly where the location is supposed to be. Sadly the 'edit' for me is greyed out, but looking forward to being able to tweak google maps a bit. Good on google for crowd-sourcing.
Just met Ralph on IRC (freenode #fv.rb if you care) and found this great picture from the IE6 funeral. Glad there were at least some protesters :)
As promised the official Tron Legacy Trailer has been posted. The youtube embed goes to 1080p and it runs for a glorious 2:13.
Many thanks to grizzled for sending me this at the start of the morning.
Update: Official site link with 1080 downloadable goodness.
Photo Basement has a pretty accurate Chat Roulette analysis up on their site. If you don't know what Chat Roulette is, it basically turns on your camera and connects you to another random person. Hilarity ensues. And by hilarity, I mean "mostly you see a big picture of a penis".
Portal 2 Officially Announced. Not much more to say, other than "Dear Valve, when can I please give you my money?"
Main site seems to be down so here's the cover shot thanks to the reddit folks.
As usual, Jon Stewart takes on big media coverage and Use Chatroulette on The Daily Show. Hilarious and JS at his best.
The title this is under is: This is possibly the coolest thing I've seen one man and an iPhone do, and while I don't understand the french it's being done in, damn, that is pretty awesome.
IO9 has a gallery of pictures from 15-Year-Old Sven Junga who Creates Starships From LEGO. Wow, I miss being 15 :(
Kudos to Nicolesy for this great find: Judge Joe Brown & Cheap Wedding Photographers. I'm not sure if His Honor Brown really knows his camera gear or is just repeating what his staff has researched for him, but it's entertaining and surprisingly not dumbed down camera lingo. Well worth the 10 minutes to watch the segment, regardless of your opinion of stupid shows like the "Judge [name]" and it's ilk.
Yet another reason I'm terrified to become a wedding photographer :)
People seem to think that Microsoft will Double Down on HTML5 With Internet Explorer 9. If this is true, and they can deliver, then all the power to them.
But we should expect Microsoft to go on the offensive at its upcoming MIX 2010 developer conference in Las Vegas, where, it has been speculated, the company will demonstrate the first beta builds of Internet Explorer 9 and possibly offer a preview release of the browser to developers. Several clues point to the possibility that the next version of IE will include broad support for HTML5 elements, vector graphics and emerging CSS standards.
However, MS seems a bit big of a company to steer on such an altered course, and what about all that talk of people relying on HTML widgets (I know that a 2 year old accounting program I use has an IE widget in it that's broken on Windows 7)? Hey, if they can do it and make a clean break and not keep one foot in the IE6/7/8 world with some sort of funky backwards compatible engine, all the power to them. Course, if they're going to make a clean break, maybe why not just use the mozilla or webkit engines? I know it's NIMBY and all that, but why re-re-re-reinvent the wheel (again)?
Get your wallets ready for a new computer system (or a trip in a time machine to 2015 to get a system that'll play it) cause the First Crysis 2 Screenshots Released and they look gooooood.
The
Brand section of the Ubuntu Wiki has been updated with some of the nice and fresh look that they are teasing for the next LTS version 10.04.
The new style of Ubuntu is driven by the theme "Light". We've developed a comprehensive set of visual guidelines and treatments that reflect that style, and are updating key assets like the logo accordingly. The new theme takes effect in 10.04 LTS and will define our look and feel for several years.
I have to say that I like it. The brown isn't 100% gone, but it's mostly left, replaced by a clean look, with some sections (the menu bar and dark-grey on white icons) taking their cue from the Mac menubar (IMHO). More examples are here.
Someone on Digg has put together a nice list of what is known about the Portal updates. The biggest thing found here is either
- a) the internet is amazingly resourceful, able to brute force reverse MD5 values, and extract images from sound files or
- b) there are all sorts of Valve plants out on the internet "helping" push people in the right direction.
Either way, I'm excited to hear what's going on.