Title says it all, Ruby on Rails 3.1 Release Notes are here with all the details.
From the Chrome Blog: Be more productive with Gmail Offline.
Gmail Offline is a Chrome Web Store app that helps you read, respond to, organize and archive email when you don't have an internet connection.
This 5-Second Films on Planking should be required watching.
Flickr has rolled out a new feature called GeoFences, which basically allows you to define areas on a map where your geotagging of photos will not show up. You can set it up from the
Geo Preferences page in your account.
Note though, this feature isn't perfect yet, Thomas Hawk notes that it has a huge security flaw in that anyone can download the original image and view the geolocation data from the EXIF data.
In the Building Windows 8 Blog some Improvements in Windows Explorer are highlighted.
I think that Marco's commentary says it best.
My comments on google plus are here.
Buddy at work pointed me to Mari0, which is basically Super Mario Brothers with a portal gun. Great video to display how well it works.
Shrine Of Apple has an interesting goal, even outside the obvious "Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field infected zombie wave of rabid fanboy" application. It's goal is to create awesome archive images of every apple product ever. Currently they don't have everything, but a decent start. If you don't get a twinge of nostalgia from your high school (ish) days at the Disk II images, well, you're probably not around 35 and went to school where they had apple computers with those disk drives.
Pretty funny Live Blog of the MTV Video Music Awards from someone unfamiliar with the current music scene. I can only imagine that I'd be even worse.
Nicki Minaj is wearing a nice outfit. This is the future.Not sure who this rock band is. They look like douchebags, though.
[...]
Here's a Jersey Shore thing. In guess you forgot that MTV is responsible for Jersey Shore.
Joy of Tech has a great funny look at Steve Jobs' Calendar Now He's No Longer CEO.
Nice find on /Film - The Visual Effects of 'Game of Thrones'. Funnily enough a lot of the effects that I thought were practical (ie: snow on the bank in front of the horses) was all CGI. Amazing example of what you can do with computers these days....
Awesome essay on The Straight Dope about What would it be like walking around on a cube-shaped planet?
Aryk pointed me to the Razer Blade gaming laptop article on Gizmodo. All I can say is "wow" to the specs. Oh, and it has a built in adaptable touch screen on the right of the keyboard, in addition to the i7/8G/2G video card specs already. And under $3000.
Want!
Very cool collection of 15 Inspiring HTML5 Experiments showing off what the power of the new standard can do. Course, until IE6 can be killed dead, and all other users can be forced to upgrade to the latest and greatest of their respective browsers, it won't be as common as it should be for a while. Still, amazing to see what's possible in your browser!
Jonobacon has the Ubuntu 11.10 (So Far) Screenshot Tour. Looks like things are shaping up nicely for the October Ubuntu Linux release.
OMG Ubuntu has the latest in the Ubuntu 11.10 Update progress. Some (IMHO stupid) changes in regards to button behavior, but lots of other nice and slick updates for the upcoming release of Ubuntu's desktop OS. Also looks like they're adopting the alt-~ "alt-tab switch windows of the same app" feature from MacOS. Interesting.
Another live action Half Live video: Escape From City 17 - Part Two. On the heals of Portal: No Escape this is great news.
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot
Wow, a midst the other resignation news this was almost a shock. Thanks @dkubb for passing it along.
I remember back in the day working at the Fraser Valley Real Estate board and watching Malda's personal site change to "Chips & Dips", and then turn into slashdot.org, possibly the first high profile geek news site. Slashdot grew from a perl cgi-bin script to mod_perl to a far more sophisticated system, amidst the rest of the tech industry and techology exploding in the era of the original dot com boom. Hell, I recall myself and a coworker sent Rob a box including dead hard drives and ketchup packets at some point as well (no, I have no recollection of why). I remember hanging out in the "open source" area of at least 2 years of Linux World Expo in the '97-98 era and having great chats with Malda and the others in that world, back in the days when Userfriendly was at the height of success.
The link contains where you can follow Rob to cyber-stalk him in the future.
The Biggest History Mindf**ks. Collected from an ask reddit question.
Stocking Is the New Planking. Duplicating stock photography images.
Fantastic.
This morning Sony announced (officially) the SLT-A77 flagship APS-C DSLR. DPReview has the full press release.
The long-promised A77 makes use of Sony's translucent mirror technology to offer an impressive 12 frame-per-second shooting rate, despite its 24MP APS CMOS sensor
Portal: No Escape is a pretty awesome 6 minute long live action portal movie.
Laughing Squid links to a great video on The History of Copyright Law.
Looks like Lucas is at it again. Here's a link to the source story.
Very sweet Minimalist Business Card Design with URL, twitter and email all in one. Nice!
Evernote's developer conference is over and they have a nice list of their Developer Competition Winners, some of which are pretty awesome.
I laughed at this Extralife cartoon: Hoarders: Digital Storage Edition, but only to hide the growing fear that they were talking about me.
Minimal Mac has an awesome post called Disruptive, all about the "tablet effect", the iPad, and HP getting out of the PC market.
Oh, Google, sit down and shut the eff up because I'm talking to you too. You are the company that names your beta builds after candy, ice cream, and sugared cereals. Apple names their betas after things that will eat your things along with the tasty human wrapper that eats that crap. Do you honestly think anyone can take you seriously?
I'm not sure if this acquisition falls into the "more" or "less" exciting than the Google/Motorola deal, but it'll be interesting to see what happens now that Evernote has acquired Skitch.
I thought I was "ok" in photoshop for doing photography adjustments, but after watching this video of the adjustments to a Huntington Beach Panorama I realize I am but a worm.
If you know all about panorama blending you can maybe fast forward to about the halfway mark, for me I was pretty shocked at how easy/awesome you can make a shot look with the stuff he did in the second half, blending a silver efex pro black and white layer in luminosity mode to bring out subtle detail. Well worth the watch if you're moderately interested in photography and photoshop.
id Software fans and iPhone users, you'll be happy to know that RAGE HD for iPhone is free for a limited time. Download away!
So again the title pretty much says it all. watch the video where Anderson Cooper makes fun of french actor Gerad Depardieu for (allegedly) urinating in the isle of an aircraft after being told he wasn't allowed to get up to go to the bathroom while they were taxiing and (rightfully so) cracks himself up. Pretty damn funny.
'Jersey Shore' Audition Tapes For People You'd Actually Want To Watch!
Fans of the unwatchable abomination that is MTV's (inexplicably) hit show, Jersey Shore, might not know this, but there were plenty of others who sent in audition tapes to be part of the show.
Sorry about the stupid pre-roll ad in the video. Worth the wait though.
Title pretty much says it all... Notch said in his blog this morning Hey, Bethesda! Let's settle this!
[...] I challenge Bethesda to a game of Quake 3. Three of our best warriors against three of your best warriors. We select one level, you select the other, we randomize the order. 20 minute matches, highest total frag count per team across both levels wins.
If only world leaders would use this as an example of how to settle disputes.
Top 10 Ways to Improve Google Photos by the well known Thomas Hawk.
Awesome gameplay video of the Battlefield 3 Caspian Border multiplayer map. Features vehicle and on foot combat.
Wow.
LinkedIn announced today it's new Mobile Experience with an HTML5 mobile site and Android and new iOS apps.
Sadly for me the only time I really "use" LinkedIn is when I'm leaving a job and I go and add all my coworkers, then ignore it until the next job.
Today Notch and friends announced Minecraft - Pocket Edition, available today in early Alpha and playable on Android devices.
As an iPhone user, I must say I'm jealous.
It took me entirely too long to realize that this article was from The Onion.
Sure, of the 40 Unhealthiest Coffees there are a ton of >1000 calorie drinks, but I call it looking delicious!
The History Of Video Games In A Single Take. In a word: "awesome".
I think I'm already updated to a Firefox 6 beta, for those who aren't, you will be happy to know that Firefox 6 was released.
Incredible Photos that Capture Day Turning into Night. Nice, and completely doable without the gear that was used (4x5 camera with a 40 megapixel back and a cherry picker).
Nice set of pics on flickr of Team Fortress 2 done in Lego.
So it's been a slow monday, just something about Motorola being bought by Google. Way more important though is a series of super-cute images of an elephant who befriended a sheep.
Can't think of a better way to use my web browser than to Play DOS Games. Falcon 3.0 for the win!
Geeks of doom has a 12 minute compilation of Every Death Sequence From All Four 'Final Destination' Films.
Another H&K movie? 'A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas' Theatrical Trailer. Count me in.
Just for fun.... where would they be: Text Editors in The Lord of the Rings. Mostly just a dis against TextMate, but the vi and emacs ones are pretty funny too :)
Cool social experiment with a starbucks card online for you to use. It started off with $30 and more than $3000 has been charged to it, with people filling up the card as it gets low. There's even a twitter feed to show the current balance.
Nice find by Aryk - World War II: The American Home Front in Color, with some amazing shots in full color.
I'm pretty sure this is just part of the "demand media" generation we live in, but articles like How to Love the Taste of Water: 8 steps (with video) over at wikiHow just baffle me. What's next, "how to breath in 14 easy steps" or "walk or drive, a handy decision tree infographic for your iphone for those though decision making times."
When Bored At Work, Build A Camera:
Then the idea hit me like a ton of bricks. I WOULD MAKE THIS PIECE OF GARBAGE INTO A CAMERA. I told everybody that I would do so, and nobody believed me.
Via DIYPhotography.net
Awesome mashup of Game of Thrones as a buddy comedy. Pretty amazing the power of editing, a different musical score and a voiceover and the entire tone of the show changes 180 degrees.
Randal L. Schwartz linked on Google+ today to a post on the future of perl5. The post and slides has a lot of information, so it's a good read.
Awesome: Achieve Ultimate Butter Distribution in Your Movie Theater Popcorn with a Straw.
So doing this when I can afford to go to a movie again....
Speaking of id Software's "Rage", shacknews ran a Rage preview a couple of days ago.
Bethesda are suing us, here's the full story from Word of Notch (main developer for the awesome MineCraft. He has an upbeat attitude and assumes this is just lawyers being stupid.
First of all, I love Bethesda. I assume this nonsense is partly just their lawyers being lawyers, and a result of trademark law being the way it is.
Fingers crossed.
Continuing their tradition of being awesome, id Software is going to release the Doom 3 source code after their next gen game Rage is shipped.
Two nice posts this morning, first is Geeks of Doom with a First Official Look: Anne Hathaway As Catwoman In 'The Dark Knight Rises' and the second is Forever Geek with a First look of Henry Cavill as Superman.
Forgetfoo gets another one: War Between Developers.
Geeks of Doom has a New 'Apollo 18′ One Sheet Will Leave You Screaming. Trailer and poster. Looks nifty, not sure if the footage will be all in the Blair Witch style or not, but it's definitely a cool premise.
Great look at how do Macs get on the network so fast? Someone did some packet captures and tried to figure out just why it takes a mac less time to get back on the network from sleep than a similar windows/linux computer or tablet.
Interesting is that this is not all that dissimilar from the IE "hack" that lets it connect and talk faster to IIS servers by cheating in the network stack.
Aryk passed on the First In-Game trailer for the new version of XCOM from E3:
And the 2011 trailer is here.
Companion Cube Soap for those not lucky enough to get your own knitted companion cube...
The title Amazon App Store: Rotten To The Core should give you an indication of how well it went for an Android app development shop whose app was put up as the 'Free App of the Day' on the Amazon android app store.
To add insult to injury Pocket Casts relies on a server to parse podcast feeds (allowing instant updates on your phone), and all these new users forced us to buy more hardware just to meet demand. Hardware that we are going to have to support indefinitely at our own cost.
Great for users, really bad for devs. Hope there's a better way to do it.
Interesting article of An iOS Developer Takes on Android and details porting his iOS app to Android.
Overall, the Android frameworks are very well designed and consistent, and the API works harmoniously with the Java language. It's actually similar enough in the fundamentals that our app has almost the exact same class structure on Android as on iOS.
Lots of good bits in there.