Cool video showing the Graphical evolution of First Person Shooters from 1992-2012.
Pretty sure I’ve played almost all of these.
Hard to describe in the title, but you’ll want to check out some great images by muradosmann on Instagram of his girlfriend yourleo.
Found via this reddit thread.
Liking performance is Facebook’s attempt to speed up the web and all the slow (and terribly designed apparently) like button.
Comparing low-distraction readers over on Unclutterer and looks at the top few, with pros and cons.
Each has its own pros and cons, but which is the best? Everyone has their preferences, but I took a look at three options and picked my favorite. Here’s what I found while comparing Safari Reader, Instapaper Text, and Clearly:
Awesome Video of What It’s Like To Be In Lightsaber Duel Between Darth Vader and a Jedi.
The Stunt People created a short first-person perspective video on a GoPro camera in which you start as Vader himself fighting a Jedi, and then eventually transition over to the Jedi’s perspective. The results are pretty awesome…if you can get past this all going down in what appears to be an office building or something. They pulled it off in a half hour, what do you want?!
What are you waiting for? Watch it now!
Backblaze (the online backup company), has announced Storage Pod 3.0, their 180Tb storage solution. It’s an open source design with parts list, etc.
Really, isn’t 180Tb good enough for everyone?
I haven’t even figured out Rails 2.0 yet and Rails 4.0: Beta 1 has been released!
Lots of changes here, hit the page for more details.
The purpose of this beta is to get as many people as possible to try to upgrade from Rails 3.2 and earlier and to get an adventurous few to start new applications directly on Rails 4.0. That’s the only way we’re going to suss out all the issues and ensure that we can launch a solid final release. So please help us with that if you can!
App.net today Introduced a free tier, allowing anyone to take part in the twitter-like service.
The free tier has some significant limitations:
- Have to get an invite from an existing (paid) user
- Limited to following 40 users
- 500mb of file storage
- 10mb max file upload
There are incentives though, if you invite someone and they invite others, you both get additional file space.
This is an interesting play, but I’m not sure if it should be seen as doom and gloom: “App.net is struggling for users and has resorted to giving the service away” or exciting: “App.net is livening up the ecosystem and bolstering their position as a social network.”
Either way, if you want to through me an invite at @arcterex I would love you forever :)
Sun is an HTML5 weather app that runs from your iPhone home screen. It’s a fairly simple app, and not as fast as a native one, but the coolness is definitely in how much like a native app it is. Pinch and zoom, editing of locations, sounds, etc. Very impressive.
Unfortunately right now it seems to only work on iOS devices, the one Android device I have available to me just shows the same page you see in the browser.
Hit the Read more for a couple more images.
Tapping a location:
Viewing all locations by pinching:
Settings screen:
God Made a Sysadmin is a beautiful tribute to sysadmins. It’s possibly the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I’m keeping this in a constant loop.
Via Geeks of Doom comes a couple of ‘Ender’s Game’ Images.
Summit Entertainment has teased Ender’s Game fans with a few production photos and official stills in the past and with the film just a little under a year away from release, the marketing team is continuing to slowly churn out more promotional goodies.
Only one real image there, but still, awesome to see things moving forward with this project.
Joshua Topolsky writes for the Verge: I used Google Glass:
What was a total oddity a year ago, and little more than an experiment just 18 months ago is now starting to look like a real product. One that could be in the hands (or on the heads, rather) of consumers by the end of this year. A completely new kind of computing device; wearable, designed to reduce distraction, created to allow you to capture and communicate in a way that is supposed to feel completely natural to the wearer. It’s the anti-smartphone, explicitly fashioned to blow apart our notions of how we interact with technology.
… and …
The design of Glass is actually really beautiful. Elegant, sophisticated. They look human and a little bit alien all at once. Futuristic but not out of time — like an artifact from the 1960’s, someone trying to imagine what 2013 would be like. This is Apple-level design. No, in some ways it’s beyond what Apple has been doing recently. It’s daring, inventive, playful, and yet somehow still ultimately simple. The materials feel good in your hand and on your head, solid but surprisingly light. Comfortable. If Google keeps this up, soon we’ll be saying things like “this is Google-level design.”
Yes, I’m insanely jealous, just like every other tech nerd out there. The hardware has gotten smaller than the early beta testing I heard about. It takes a bit to get into the bits that we all really care about, how they are to use, but it’s well worth the read.
I hate you Joshua, I really do :P
The Chromebook Pixel is not for you is a really interesting look at the new Chrome notebook from Google. Mostly the issues are around the price.
$1,300 is MacBook Air territory. It’s Lenovo Yoga 13 with 8GB of RAM and 384GB SSD territory. It’s pretty-damn-good gaming desktop-land. Hell, for $1,500 you can get a Lenovo X1 Carbon Touch or a 13-inch Macbook Pro with Retina display. Know what those things have in common? Robust, complete operating systems with huge ecosystems of apps that can use that powerful Ivy Bridge hardware even when there’s no Internet connection available. Know what the Pixel doesn’t have?
I was excited when ChromeOS was announced, and I think it’s something new and interesting, but I don’t know exactly where it would fit in my workflow. However, a $1300 laptop is a lot of money to drop on a laptop, and for $1300 I’d expect not only the sexy hardware with fit and finish that google appears to have presented here, but also a fully functional OS, not a web browser that I can run just as easily on a crappy netbook.
Time will tell however.
Thanks for the Memories over at the memlane blog exlains that they’re shutting down after 2 years.
Today we want to share the exciting news that our team is joining another company that will utilize the Memolane features in an expanded way, adding more value to all the great memories captured on social media.
Unfortunately this also means that we will be shutting down the memolane.com service. Your account with Memolane and all its content will be deleted on Friday Feb. 22th 2013. Please note that Memolane only aggregates content so all of your social media memories will still be available on the existing social media services you use.
A bit sad, and interesting that they didn’t name the company they were purchased by. Still, a cool service and nice guys, thanks for the memories!
Were you like me and offline all day yesterday, and miss the PS4 (kinda) announcement? If so, you’ll want to watch the PS4 Announcement - Abridged Version for a cut down version of what happened.
Commit Logs From Last Night is another great site making the rounds today. No RSS feed (fail), but a great little webapp that looks for “interesting” messages in github commit logs. If you scroll 2/3 thorugh the scraper for what they search for.
Amazing 320-Gigapixel London Panorama Breaks Record for Largest Panoramic Photo. Pretty sure I can see my house in there, and I live in Canada!
Coding Confessional is just what it sounds like, a place for developers to confess their sins.
Awesome.
World’s first 3D printing pen smashes Kickstarter goal in a few hours via The Verge. I somehow missed this. It looks like the absolute coolest thing I’ve ever seen.
Anyone else getting one?
You had one job! Great site with a nice collection of cases of people with, well, just one job to do, and screwing it up.
A Guide To Driving In India Without Dying is hilarious. Thanks for the link Aryk.
Ubuntu on tablets is the next big thing for Mark Shuttleworth’s company, and there’s a nice 6 minute video going through the UI.
I have three thougths:
- If they can pull this off, if, I will be super impressed. The UI and touch interface, and the way that multitasking is done looks, to this iPhone fanboy, awesome. But that’s a big “if”.
- I didn’t see a single hardware keyboard in there. Seems an odd thing to exclude. No conspiracy theory here, the video was mostly about the UI and multitasking, it just seemed an odd thing to not show in the video or on the webpage. Which leads me to…
- The one time that “real” work was mentioned, they talked (pun intended) about using your voice for entry. The example they gave was using an image editor and entering the term ‘exposure’ in a HUD window, then selected the menu entry for adjusting exposure and moved a slider. This to me says a couple of things:
- The HUD, which seems like a ridiculous concept to use on a desktop or laptop, may just have been a brilliant long-con to deal with porting desktop apps to tablets and phones without having to have the user poke at menu items.
- Voice input as the only way to access menu items will be a horrible user interface. I assume that this is just part of their demo.
- A lot of this was a slick demo (hell, not even a demo but a product marketing video), and things like “just sit back, point your remote at the tablet and use it as a TV” made me laugh, because the last time I tried to setup a remote with Linux it involved recompiling LIRC.
That all said, we’ll see what happens on 25-28 of February and Mobile World Congress and more when this is fully announced, and demoed. If it looks and works as slickly as they show though, I’ll buy an android tablet and use it (budget allowing).
Fascinating: Duke Nukem 3D Code Review
Silverman would write a new engine for 3D Realms but he would keep the source code. He would only deliver a binary static library (Engine.OBJ) with an Engine.h header file. The 3D Realms team on their side would take care of developing the Game module (Game.OBJ) and would also release the final executable DUKE3D.EXE.
When my buddy @halkeye send me over the link to Vivify I was a bit confused, but if you click on one of the languages, then click on part of the code, it lets you edit the color scheme right there. Very cool stuff, and very slick.
I’m not sure if this is new or not, but it’s new to me! A new style Looney Toons animation… same content, but modern animation.
Weta’s FX reel shows why working on The Hobbit made Ian McKellen cry. Not because it’s so good and amazing (it is) but for making him act with a bunch of light stands.
Thanks Aryk for the link.
Happy Phil Collins Day. Yes, it’s a real thing, not just another day in paradise.
Finding Vivian Maier - Official Movie Trailer is out. If you haven’t heard of Vivian Maier and have an interest in photography, definitely check out the trailer, which gives you the story.
Can’t wait to check this out :)
So the summary of the Tesla vs. The New York Times story is that the NYT wrote a story about a test drive in a Tesla electric car and how they ran out of juice at the wrong times, had issues, etc. It’s worth the read. However, read it with a big grain of salt, because it wasn’t 100% true.
Tesla responded because they have all the data from the drive and so they know exactly what happened on the drive, and their facts definitely didn’t match up with the reviewers, not only some little details, but some big details.
Heard about it for the last day without actually watching the video. So glad I did: Watch the Canadian Parliament Hilariously Debate the Zombie Apocalypse.
Proud to be a Canadian, happy that my government is assuring that my beautiful country will never be a safe haven for zombies.
I have to agree with io9 when they say that The “Hobbit Hole Litter Box” is even more beautiful than we imagined.
We didn’t even know we wanted a Hobbit-themed litter box until we heard it existed. Now we can’t imagine our without it. We’ll be sure to let you all know when this bad ass box is available for purchase.
Could not agree more. TAKE MY MONEY!
I was honoured to do a guest post on Venture Beat for my friend John Koetsier, and after some editing (and a heck of a lot of reformatting), it’s posted:
Many thanks to John for giving me the opportunity to do the post!
iFixit has their Microsoft Surface Pro Teardown (complete teardown is here). Seems that it’s less repairable than the latest offerings from Apple (surprising), by one point.
Cool to see what MS did with the innards.
Kinda big news from Opera Developer News this morning, they posted that they are going to move to WebKit for the rendering engine for Opera.
The short answer is that it shouldn’t affect your day-to-day work. Keep coding to the standards, not to individual rendering engines; test across browsers - Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer; use all vendor prefixes and an unprefixed form in your CSS and JavaScript. However, it remains important to keep the following in mind:
(Via Reddit).
The reasoning they give is:
The WebKit project now has the kind of standards support that we could only dream of when our work began. Instead of tying up resources duplicating what’s already implemented in WebKit, we can focus on innovation to make a better browser. Opera innovations such as tabbed browsing, Speed Dial and data-saving compression that speeds up page-load, have been widely copied and improved the web for all.
This is interesting. On one hand, I agree with the top reddit comment about how it’s got to suck for the people who have been working on the Opera rendering engine since 1994. It was the first “alternate” engine that I used and had, and still has, some pretty awesome stuff, and it’s still (I believe) one of the fastest browsers, and has some great performance on low end machines.
On the other hand though, maybe the market has spoken and crowned WebKit the third browser engine and said there’s just no place for another engine. In reality I think this is the better way. Web developers have enough to deal with writing cross platform compatible code for:
- Mozilla rendering engine
- Webkit (Safari, Chrome)
- IE
- Old versions of IE
Opera- Mobile
- Three different operating systems
- All the minor differences between different versions of all the above
I dislike redundancy, so I applaud this move. While I love openess and choice, having 18 different media players, all 3/4 baked and none complete or fully tested is a far worse thing (in my opinion) than having 2 or 4 really awesome media players that have full communities and momentum behind them. Sounds like Opera is up with this too.
Of course, really respectful web developers will still have to support Opera (which is pretty standards compliant already, so it’s not a huge deal) for a few years, as I hear there’s a fairly vocal Opera user group out there :)
Bit of shameless self-promotion here, I blogged about My Favorite Photography Podcasts today and thought ya’ll might be interested. If you’re into Photography this might help you out!
Nice post Comparing iPhone Twitter app timeline views, should you be concerned with such things. Interesting to see the differences and similarities though.
How the Star Wars Kessel Run Turns Han Solo Into a Time-Traveler.
You’ll hear any reputable Star Wars fan point it out eventually: Han Solo’s famous boast that the Millennium Falcon “made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs” may have sounded impressive, but from an astronomical perspective, it made no sense. A parsec is a unit of distance, not time, so why would Solo use it to explain how quickly his ship could travel?
Just read it.
Pretty funny post on how Google fails the Turing Test. Not so much a comment on Google itself as dealing with any big company.
5 days pass. Saurabh shows how deep the rabbit hole goes - his unresponsiveness makes me question if he wasn’t the product of some Google engineer’s “20% time” phone prank side project, weaponized into customer support software. Giving him an Indian name and accent was the perfect cover - any robotic imperfections could be chalked up to cultural miscommunication. He definitely passed my Turing test. I feel betrayed.
My buddy Jim shared this post in my google+ stream: Web Development: A Crazy World and I have to admit I’ve felt this same way. It started with Rails in 2005 or so when I first heard about it, then a couple of years later it was a crazy parade of NoSQL databases and new ways of manipulating javascript and data structures, and the 80 latest test suites developed this week.
How to Hang a Sweater, for the hipster in your life.
Great rant on reading news on the web called No, I’m not going to download your bullshit app.
Can’t say I disagree (other than the throwing your phone off the roof part).
i found your mitten. Just click on it, it’s cool. Then head over to I Found Your Mitten.com.
LibreOffice Hits 4.0, Adds Unity Integration & ‘Persona’ Theming:
“LibreOffice 4.0 is a milestone in interoperability and an excellent foundation for our continued work to improve the User Interface,” says Florian Effenberger, Chairman of the Board of Directors at The Document Foundation - the hands steering the project.
From OMGUbuntu.
Mailbox review by Shawn Blanc:
For his review at The Verge, Ellis Hamburger titled his article: “Mailbox just fixed email on the iPhone — How a startup outdid both Apple and Google in one fell swoop”. That is a massive statement right there. Got iPhone email troubles? Not any more.
Sadly, it’s only GMail, and even more sadly, it requires a backend server component, which they need to get to the people. Currently I’ve got 393,785 people in front of me, and in the 2 minutes since I installed the app, 440 people are behind me in line. No 450, no 460, 540…. lets just say lots.
700 now, and growing by about 5 per second, based on my very unscientific “one one thousand, two one thousand” method.
870 now. I’ll let you go.
Time for a Forward Thinking CMS via The Brooks Review.
That’s all well and fine, but isn’t it time someone built a CMS that actually works for users? I like WordPress a lot, that’s what I use here, but it’s about as user friendly as Windows, which is certainly better than MS-DOS, but falls a long way short of OS X.
I love the idea, and as someone who’s written a few CMSs in my time, have no idea how it’d be done.
Yet.
The biggest issue I’ve seen is that everyone want something just a tiny bit (or sometimes a lot) different. To accommodate this, at least the old way of dealing with it, is you either:
- Build something specific for the use case, small and tightly coded which does exactly what’s required (and end up with a fast and small system that needs to be rewritten or added to as soon as you or your client decide you want a bit more functionality), or
- Build something big and flexible, which will do whatever is needed through either options, plugins or extensions (and end up with a massive gargantuan bloated, but very flexible, mess), or
- Somewhere in between that compromises both the pros of the above.
That said if someone can give me the power of wordpress, the ease of use of squarespace, the ability to use dropbox as a store, and does a bunch of nifty things out of the box… I’m all over that.
If you’re a Mac nerd or a productivity or GTD guy, you have heard of Omnifocus and will want to check out the OmniFocus 2 Debut video below.
The 2013 Sony World Photography Awards at In Focus from The Atlantic.
Wow. Some amazing work in here.
Internet Explorer parody ad. Make sure you watch it all the way to the end to see what it’s really about. Pretty awesome.
Great story of how the Starfish smartwatch saga illustrates entrepreneurial stumbling blocks at MacWorld/iWorld this year.
What’s more, the photo in the advertisement appears to defy my own understanding of how such a wristwatch could work: The interface is clearly not just scaled but resized to fit the watch’s square display; it doesn’t match the aspect ratio of either the iPhone 5’s display or that of earlier iPhone models—it looks closer to the sixth-generation iPod nano than anything else. And assuming the AirPlay connection did work and the interface could be resized as shown in the ad, how could the watch be interactive?
Via Daring Fireball.
I have no idea what to say after watching this. Watch The Most Insane News Story You’ll See Today Video on Break.com, via my boss Chris.
The Most Insane News Story You’ll See Today - Watch More Funny Videos
Note: NSFW language.
The Instagram Blog announced that there’s now an Instagram Feed on the Web.
Today, I’m very excited to announce the launch of a product we’ve been wanting to build for quite some time now. Since our launch in October of 2010, we’ve focused on building a simple app that has inspired creativity while capturing everyday moments through the lens of your mobile phone. In fact, our focus on building out a mobile-only experience is a unique path that we’ve chosen for many reasons, the most important of which is that Instagram, at its core, is about seeing and taking photos on-the-go. However, to make Instagram even more accessible to our growing community, at the end of last year we started to expand to the desktop web, giving you the ability to see profiles from instagram.com. To continue that path, as of today, you can now browse your Instagram feed on the web - just like you do on your mobile device. Go to instagram.com and log in to your account to give it a try.
So no more mobile only. Interesting…
Note that this is only your feed, not the ability to upload images. Looks good though.
Dell Enters into Agreement to Be Acquired by Michael Dell and Silver Lake. Short version is that Dell’s going from publicly traded to private.
Dell Inc. today announced it has signed a definitive merger agreement under which Michael Dell, Dell’s Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, in partnership with global technology investment firm Silver Lake, will acquire Dell.
Accuvant LABS Blog has a cool analysis of the Evasi0n Jailbreak’s Userland Component.
The latest jailbreak is out, and it’s time to dissect it and document all the exploits and techniques it contains. These days, jailbreaks are so well tested that it’s easy for people to forget all the complexity that goes into them. There are numerous exploit mitigations in iOS userland, such as sandboxing, ASLR, and code signature requirements that make jailbreaking incredibly difficult.
Via Daring Fireball
Well, my Pebble Watch hasn’t arrived yet, but it’s almost as good news to see that Alien Blue 2.7 (iPhone) is now available. Lots of subtle UI changes and great improvements to the moderator tools.
This ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ Super Bowl TV Spot Warps Into Awesome. Via Geeks of Doom.
Wow. I can’t wait for this.
Via iPhone in Canada is the How to Jailbreak iOS 6.1 with evasi0n post. This is the eagerly anticipated jailbreak for the jailbreak for the newest iOS release.
Ladies and gentlemen, the waiting is over! As we’ve just informed you, the evad3rs have released the eagerly awaited jailbreak tool called evasi0n that will set your iDevice free in just a couple of easy steps. Just as we did with Redsn0w, which allowed a tethered jailbreak for A4 devices running iOS 6, 6.0.1 or 6.1 beta, we have written an easy-to-use tutorial that will show you how to jailbreak iOS 6 on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.
IIC also has a post with evasi0n download links.
The little-known Apple Lisa: Five quirks and oddities - via MacWorld.
Amazing how far we’ve come.
First-Ever Incredible Footage of a Thought Being Formed via Gizmodo.
A team of Japanese researchers has achieved something incredible: they’ve captured, for the first time ever, a movie which shows how thoughts form in the brain.