Bing's New Streetside View is now live and going (in some places).
It's nifty, though a bit odd to use interface. Nice to see some different ideas about street view. The challenge (as always) will be achieving the mindshare that google has, and their (IMHO) still far superior integration of search data results and their own sub-search types.
The Apple press release leaves nothing much to the imagination about what's coming up next Monday:
CUPERTINO, California--May 31, 2011--Apple® CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software - Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS® X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple's advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®; and iCloud®, Apple's upcoming cloud services offering.
Nothing to see here, just Linux Kernel 3.0, that's all. Sadly (I guess) it is nothing all that special, just a "we should go to 3.x from 2.x" from Linus, with a few fairly minor changes.
Pretty amazing look at What the TARDIS Really Looks Like.
Geeks of Doom has a sweet 'Gears of War 3′ World Premiere Trailer. Looks awesome, sadly the game won't look like that, but still, pretty nice. Wonder if/when the GoW movie will come out?
Really cool article on reverse engineering the firmware for the Linksys WAG120N.
Shared by my buddy Rob is this Very Large Telescope HD Timelapse Footage.
The video here is so full of win I don't know what to say. In 3 minutes 36 seconds Leonard Nimoy has completely re-invigorated his career. At least in my eyes.
My god it's awesome.
Good look at the new features in Windows Phone Mango. Thanks Gruber.
Wow, sometimes Dilbert just hits them out of the park. Mental note: Do not share this with my boss.
io9 has an Insanely Detailed Synopsis of Transformers 3. Major spoilers, avoid if you want to be surprised in July.
Fantastic Quora question and answer: Superheroes: Given our current technology and with the proper training, would it be possible for someone to become Batman?
The genius of Batman is that it pretends to be realistic, it lets us convince ourselves that with enough money and training, we could become Batman, too. But it's still fantasy, it's just a fantasy that is more compelling and convincing and thus more fun.
Hat tip to Shawn Blanc.
Tell me you wouldn't kill to have one of these 6 Killer Star Wars Beds. Thanks ForeverGeek.
After the kerfuffle a while back about flickr accounts being deleted without warning or chance of retrieval, the flickr blog has responded with their new policies and procedures.
The website says it's the Official Portal 2 Website, so I assume it is. It has the full portal 2 soundtrack and ringtones available for download. Sweet!
Very cool set of 6 Unusual City Maps. Locals vs Tourists based on flickr. Red is a tourist area, blue are the locals.
My boss at work passed on this Top Gear interview with Ranulph Fiennes. Amazing stories and this guy makes tough guys and superstars go "whoah, this guy is tough". Just a few notes:
Not sure what else you can do to be defined as "all around tough ass adventurer".
Wow, the trailer for Modern Warfare 3 makes it look epic. Can't wait.
Ironic that a site with an article 20 Reasons Why Your Website Design Sucks is the same site that pops up one of the "web 2.0 popups" (overlay asking if you want to sign up for a newsletter or some crap). Factor that in when you read the article. Via Forgetfoo.
Great list of The 100 Greatest Movie Insults of All Time. Thanks to my buddy Jim for passing it on. NSFW language obviously :)
Good job! Webupd8 points out that just today Fedora 15 was Released, GNOME3 integration, Firefox 4, Evolution 3.0, and a bunch of other nice (and up to date) bits.
... so says this tweet from gearbox. As with all things duke though, I'll believe it when I see it.
Just discovered loc.alize.us, a cool site that combines Flickr images and their geotagging, all wrapped up in a nice web 2.0 frontend. Very sexy.
Nike is celebrating the 5th birthday of their Nike+ app, and is making the Nike+ GPS Running App is Free for Download. Nice get. Not as nice (IMHO) as the RunKeeper app, but as I'm oft to say, "free is free". I of course, paid the $1.99 or whatever for this a while back when it first came out.
Trading fear for photos on a stricken plane is the story of a photographer on a plane that had an engine die and shot what he thought were his last shots ever. Dude is hardcore. Check out the reddit discussion on the link.
Sometimes the most simple uses of technology are the most awesome. Case in point, the .NET Micro Framework thnat enables a breathalyzer to tweet. View it live at @drunkduino.
When they say that this is possibly the most useful video you'll ever watch in terms of saving you time in your life, they're not kidding. The shirt removal video alone is worth the price of admission.
The 'bonus' video of the greatest proposal ever though, don't let your girlfriend, wife or fiance watch that lest they be very jealous and ask "why didn't you do something like that for me? Don't you love me as much as he does her?" (might be just me projecting though).
I've always been fascinated by people who are skilled in art, and this "how I drew it" video over on myextralife.com is pretty awesome (though the video quality for the first half or so isn't the best resolution). Well worth the 7 minutes for sure.
Cool look from the guys at IO9 about the 15 minutes of 3D Transformers footage seen with Michael Bay and James Cameron. No new visuals or video sadly, but good discussion and description.
DPReview has their in-depth Fujifilm X100 review posted. You'll remember the x100 as the gorgeous rangefinder style digital camera that was announced last year and had the camera nerds frothing at the mouth.
Anyone spare a thousand dollars to help me get one? Anyone?
I'm happy to hear that one of my favorite companies, Evernote, has introduced the Evernote Tech Blog with very geeky tech stuff (duh) about their (excellent) product. They only have one post up so far (outside of the intro post), but it's definitely going to be worth subscribing to.
Only 1:12 long, but you can check out the teaser for the (well, 'my' anyway) much beloved childrens book series "Tintin": First Teaser Trailer For Steven Spielberg's 'The Adventures Of Tintin'.
I'm not 100% sure if this list of games to be free from PSN is for any PSN registered user, or the ones that are paying money. Either way I'm good with free things. Hopefully the discussion on reddit will clear things up.
Good news for gamers and bad news for anyone wanting to keep money in their pocket as Steam Announces Daily Deals. The first deal, to give you a taste, is 75% off Operation Flashpoint. This of course was a few days ago (yea, I'm getting behind with things), so you should subscribe to the @steam_games twitter feed to keep up.
elliotth's blog has his review of the new Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal.
If Mac OS is the continuing evolution of Steve Jobs' vision of how we should use our computers, it's becoming increasingly clear that Ubuntu is Mark Shuttleworth's indirect request that we all just fuck off and get ourselves an OS from someone who actually gives a shit.
As you can tell he doesn't pull any punches :)
Another great comic: His Dark Thesis. Not sure if this is a statement on the internet or PC gaming, or a bit of both :)
Ars Technica has a nice wrapup of a decade of Mac OS X reviews, complete with all the hits and misses.
That's one of the videos that was posted on Vincent Laforet's Blog related to how small and easy high quality video is getting. Completely recommend watch that first video in high quality on a big screen. Not for the faint of heart though!
Interesting story of a Man using Prey to track his stolen MacBook Pro hundreds of miles.
The Day The Routers Died.... Funny song :)
Another great clip from the Daily Show where Jon Stewart lambastes Fox News. Always fun stuff.
Free download, no ads, only requires Google Chrome. Good stuff.
You probably heard this morning that Microsoft bought Skype for over 8 Billion (with a b B-B-Billion) dollars. Some might wonder why, after it was bought by eBay a few years ago for $4 Billion (and most considered that an insane cost even then). Well now we get some explanation.
Ballmer And Bates Sell The Skype Deal: We Think We "Can Reach Everyone On The Planet"
The mac fans have interpreted this to mean that MS is going to try to fight back against Apple's FaceTime (though to be honest, I don't think I've seen anyone using facetime "in the wild" ever). A universal video calling client built into the OS is something I can get behind though, the more common and easy it is to video call anyone from anywhere, the better for us all (except those who like to work from home naked of course).
My buddy cthulhu pointed me to a couple of interesting bits from the big Google keynote this morning.
First is news on
Ice Cream Sandwich, which is basically a "one OS to rule them all" upgrade that will run on handsets and tablets alike, and is there to put an end to the OS version fragmentation out there. Hopefully this will help with the bigger issue, which is the carriers.
Speaking of the carriers, the next bit of news is that Google and OEMs and carriers have agreed to provide timely updates to Android devices for up to 18 months after a new OS release. To me this addresses one of the biggest issues that Android has compared to the iPhone, and it's awesome to hear. Assuming of course they actually do it and don't start re-defining "timely" or "update" or "hardware compatible" of course.
If you're big into this stuff hit the live blog from Google I/O.
Update: Andy I has his liveblog as well, complete with the smarmyness we love.
Today Google Launched 'Music Beta' Cloud Service. I'd comment further, but it's only available in the states. Thanks Google (and copyright stupidity).
Cool concept video explaining the movie Inception with nothing but the OS/X Finder: INCEPTION_FOLDER.
LastPass : The last password you'll have to remember: LastPass Security Notification in case you hadn't heard already. The guys on the TnT podcast do a good job talking about this as well (the 5/5 episode).
So if you're worried about Dropbox not being as private as you were led to believe, you might want to check out SecretSync - Client-side encryption for Dropbox. Basically it creates a folder that will be encrypted on the client side before it's synced up to dropbox, and only accessible to you. Windows only, but mac and linux clients coming soon.
Note: I have no idea if this has been tested or verified by anyone, for all I know installing this program could sell your secrets to the Russians and talk to your mother dirty. Just sayin'. Thanks Bryan for the link.
Robert Scoble does a nice interview and First look at Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5.
Nifty new ad campaign from Microsoft where Microsoft wants buyers to 'do the math' and select a netbook over a MacBook Air.
[...]you'll see Microsoft's pairing of the 11" MacBook Air with three US$300-ish netbooks. While the price comparison is stark, the fact is that these netbooks are not even close to the MacBook Air where it counts, and to put them in the same category is silly at best and deliberately deceptive at worst.
As someone who was at an Apple store recently fondling lovingly checking out a MacBook air with a friend, the comparison of a MacBook air to a netbook is stupid. Of course, this is a company's ad campaign trying consumers to buy their products over someone else's products, so just like Apple will emphasize quality and user experience over HP/Dell/MS/etc, this isn't shocking. It's definitely interesting to see what's included and what's left out of all these ad campaigns, regardless of what "side" you're on.
WebGL Globe is a nifty visualization of google web searches around the net. Via the google blog.
Amateur Photographer Shoots Largest Ever Photo of the Night Sky. Amazing (and zoomable). Via reddit. Remember you can zoom out and rotate around the inside of the "sphere" in the image. Again, mindblowing.
Jeff has a nice look at SSD drives and in particular, how much they fail. Interesting stuff, especially for someone who is looking to buy a new computer at some point soon and it seems that having an SSD as the boot drive would make the most sense.
Dammit, I know Lucus is milking this thing to death, but I'm sure I'll keep on buying it...
The greatest RL troll of all time. Great video, keep on watching past the time you think "this guy is just an ass" though, it's pretty cool to see just how often and in what awesome ways he was a complete and total ass :) Thanks cthulhu for the link.
I'm still working to catch up with a lot of un-read RSS and just tonight saw the now 3 week old news that uTorrent has released a beta version 3.0 which has among other things reports Torrentfreak, Ratings, Comments and Streaming. Questions were raised recently about where the comments and ratings were stored with, IMHO, fairly satisfactory answers. Looking forward to the release, though a lot of the more private trackers have fairly strict restrictions on the clients you can use and I don't see them allowing uTorrent 3 beta for users any time soon.
RIM Unveils BlackBerry OS 7.0 as well as 2 new handsets, the Bold 9900 and 9930.
BlackBerry OS 7.0 comes as part of two new phones announced by Research In Motion, namely the BlackBerry 9900 and 9930, which are classic-style BlackBerry devices (complete with keyboard), but this time with a touch screen. They also sport a 1.2Ghz processor, support for NFC, and something RIM calls a Liquid Graphics touch screen. This screen has a 640×480 resolution on a 2.8" diagonal - so an impressive 287ppi. It also does HD video.
Doesn't sound like a huge improvement over BB OS7, but good to hear things are moving forward, and that they are focusing on the handsets that they are good at and not the (less than well recieved) touchscreen handsets.
From the horses mouth, the Amazon team goes into just what led to the Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS Service Disruption not that long ago.