Well, Google Nose (in beta of course) is the first of the April 1st pranks I’ve seen so far.

Coming to your senses: go beyond type, talk, and touch for a new notation of sensation.

Remember, for the next 24 hours or so, don’t believe anything you read on the Internet.

You can Find treasure with Google Maps:

The map was found on a recent expedition in the Indian Ocean, as part of a deep-water dive to expand our underwater Street View collection. Captain Kidd was rumored to have buried his treasure around the world, and tales of a long-lost treasure map have lingered for generations.

Definitely make sure you go into the street view mode for a fun new view as well.

The First Honest Cable Company commercial.

NSFW language. But so, so true.

Speaking of awesome, here’s The Wolverine: International Trailer.

Forgetfoo has a sweet Battlefield 4 gameplay video. Man that game looks awesome.

Second World War Z trailer is out.

Oh.

Hell.

Yes.

The GNOME 3.8 Release Notes have all the details.

Great job GNOME team!

Forecast.io is a sweet new online forecast website from the makers of the Dark Skies iOS app.

Rather than cram these things into Dark Sky, we decided to do something grander: create our own full-featured weather service from scratch, complete with 7-day forecasts that cover the whole world, beautiful weather visualizations, and a time machine for exploring the weather in the past and far future. You can access it from all of your devices, whether it be your laptop, iPhone, Android phone, or tablet.

Geolocation through the browser, a time machine feature (the day I was born was a balmy 40F), worldwide support, and lots more.

Update - also works on mobile and will let you pin to your home screen. Very impressive.

The Chromatic Typewriter is a very cool modification and new medium for art. Or something like that. Easiest to just click the link and enjoy. Also check out http://www.tyreecallahanpaintings.com/enter.

Found via reddit.

I know cracked.com is normally where you go for 7 hotties from the 80s or 4 mindblowingly cool video game moments, but their 5 Mind-Blowing Facts Nobody Told You About Guns is actually pretty damn intereting. For example, here’s some info about the clock tower sniper, discussing the profile of a mass murderer.

Except Whitman didn’t just “snap.” In the last months of his life, he experienced terrible headaches and violent urges he couldn’t explain. He went to a doctor, who turned him away, and in his suicide note he even suggested that they look at his brain to figure out what had suddenly changed. Sure enough, when they opened him up, there was “a tumor the diameter of a nickel” pressing on his amygdala, the part of the brain that “is involved in emotional regulation, especially fear and aggression.”

Anyway, it’s not really pro or con for guns, but more just “about” them (though I’m sure your own beliefs will color what you think the article is about. A good read regardless.

Credit goes to long time UFie RoundTop for the link showing up in my news feed originally!

Oh wow… Quicksilver 1.0 released.

After almost 10 years of testing, Quicksilver lays the beta tag to rest. (If the lack of an eszett brings a tear to your eye, you can always reminisce by hitting ⌥S on your keyboard). What does this release mean? It means more than just a change in the version numbering system - it signifies a maturity of Quicksilver and a sign of what’s to come.

Of course, I think that QuickSilver was pretty stable years ago, but good on them for finally releasing the big “1.0”.

The title of the blogpost says it all: Evernote 5 for Android: New Camera, Evernote Smart Notebook Support, Document Search, Shortcuts, and More. Looks like a huge update for Evernote fans on Android. Congrats to the team!

Just when you thought that stupid and insane laws were reserved only for the US, my boss pointed out that in the UK, a Canvey Island school has banned triangle shaped flapjacks.

Catering staff at the school have been told only to serve square or rectangular flapjacks. […] A spokesman for the Health and Safety Executive said: “We often come across half-baked decisions taken in the name of health and safety, but this one takes the biscuit.

The fact that they have a ‘three point guide’ to flapjacks as the sidebar, and the article is fraught with puns makes me unconvinced this isn’t an Onion story.

Found a link on reddit this morning that led me to interesting information on the The Nik Collection (now) by Google.

Short version is that the full collection is now $149 (or if you use DZISER on checkout you can get it for $126.65 USD) instead of the previous $499.

Even better if you have even one of the previous plugins, you get an upgrade to the entire thing free. If you’ve ever seen some beautiful black and white you will want it just for Silver Efex Pro. There’s a 15 day free trial if you want to check out the software first of course.

I love Gary Oldman. Unsurprisingly, the Gary Oldman Loses His Shit Supercut makes me happy.

Forward is pretty mind-binding.

Full screen, high resolution recommended.

With 13 days left, the project to create a live action Half Life series has raised $11,540 of it’s $75,000 goal. Come on people!! Support the Half-Life Live Action Web Series - The Freeman Chronicles:

‘The Freman Chronicles’ is a 6-episode Half-Life series, funded and created entirely by THE FANS. Chariotdrive and Infectious Designer - creators of numerous fan films based in the Half-Life universe - join forces in producing this ambitious project.

TechDirt reports on how Rep. Gohmert’s Record For Stunning Technological Ignorance Is Broken By… Rep. Gohmert

My goodness. Yesterday we posted about Rep. Louis Gohmert’s incredible, head-shakingly ignorant exchange with lawyer Orin Kerr during a Congressional hearing concerning “hacking” and the CFAA. In that discussion, Gohmert spoke out in favor of being able to “hack back” and destroy the computers of hackers — and grew indignant at the mere suggestion that this might have unintended consequences or lead people to attack the wrong targets. Gohmert thought that such talk was just Kerr trying to protect hackers.

If you’ve ever wondered why laws about computers and technology doesn’t change, take a look at at the article and video and understand this is someone who is in charge, in part, of the US and it’s laws and direction.

I have no words.

Interesting read on The dire state of Wordpress:

The kind of rewrite I’m talking about would require a fundamental rethink of the entire platform. We’re talking thousands of man-hours for no direct financial reward. If Automattic were to do this it would require a shakeup of their business model, given they don’t make any money directly from the WordPress codebase.

Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself talks about the new Google Keep (announced earlier today), and why it might not be the best idea to use it.

Google today launched Keep, an app that allows you to save things, clip stuff from the web, hoard notes and what not and put them all onto your Google Drive. Yup, you guessed it — it is an imitation to Evernote and many other such applications. It is a good thing that Google has decided to compete with the likes of Evernote — it validates their market.

It might actually be good, or even better than Evernote. But I still won’t use Keep. You know why? Google Reader.

I don’t know if I’d go so far myself, even though I am still very bitter about Reader being taken out behind the barn to be shot sunsetted. Evernote I have a clear relationship with and they are very open about their business model. They make an awesome product, and the more awesome it gets the more people use it and the bigger percent will upgrade to the “premium” version (I have premium until sometime in 2014 myself). Google Keep? Not so clear.

Regardless, it’s interesting to see the backlash against google after they nuked a still popular (to those who used it anyway) product. To be fair, 8 years is a long time to have anything running on the net. Other than this site of course :)

New Adblock Plus for Android app released outside the Play Store, via a post on Google+. I had mentioned this last week, good to know it’s available again, and because of Android’s open nature, it’s easy to sideload it without relying on the Android Play store.

Google Keep—Save what’s on your mind shows a very Evernote-like system to let you take audio notes, checklists, images, and put them all in one place.

Every day we all see, hear or think of things we need to remember. Usually we grab a pad of sticky-notes, scribble a reminder and put it on the desk, the fridge or the relevant page of a magazine. Unfortunately, if you’re like me you probably often discover that the desk, fridge or magazine wasn’t such a clever place to leave the note after all…it’s rarely where you need it when you need it.

Nice looking service, Android only though. Wonder how adoption will go. The front page UI looks like though, scaling “notes” and images into a pinterest-like grid. I’ll stick with Evernote myself, but I’d like to see this (if anyone around me had an Android 4.0+ device of course).

Sadly it looks like you can’t use the web service side of it without an android device. I take that back, the errors I was getting seem to be from the service getting hammered.

Ok, Google60 is pretty damn cool.

OK, don’t let the thumbnail of Biting Elbows - ‘Bad Motherfucker’ (Insane Office Escape 2) fool you, it’s not about boobs, it’s about pure awesome. Just watch it.

Don’t Link This points out that College Humor made a live action Dora the Explorer in three parts.

Great stuff on Fstoppers on Building The Animatronic Dinosaurs For Jurassic Park. Must watch videos!

I want options, but I also want a good experience. In Checkboxes that kill your product Alex Limi goes through some simple checkboxes in Firefox that will, in a couple of clicks, make the browser completely unusable, and for anyone not just a little technical, completely “break” the internet.

It’s a fine balance you need when you design a software product to give people options, but not too many, resulting in them shooting themselves in the foot. For me, KDE is one extreme (every option exposed) and GNOME / mac are close to the right mix (for me), but sometimes going too far towards the “too few options” direction. Some people whine and cry about removing options, but if you’re pissing off 1% of your users and making things easier and better for you and 99% of the rest of your users….

Remember when I said that someone was going to implement the “StackSort” from that XKCD? Well, I was right. Here’s stacksort.

As outlined by xkcd’s recent alt text, this site downloads the top answers from StackOverflow for the tags “javascript” and “sort”. If grabs the last code block in the answer (in theory, the “final” example), and tries to determine which function should be called. It proceeds to eval the code from StackOverflow, with the inputted data as the first parameter for the function.

I love the internet.

The awesome David Hobby posted about how he had A Front Row Seat at the 2013 GPP Shootout which includes, awesomely enough, a video of this year’s photographer shootout, which is awesome. I re-watched the last 3 years of the GPP shootout to prepare :)

Ok, this little javascript experiment Winning Solitaire, via @rotational is possibly the most fun thing I’ve clicked on all day. Just keep clicking and clicking and clicking…

The video is called Phantom Flex Highlights but really should be simply “stuff blowing up shot by high speed cameras”.

Thanks Staticred for the link!

Fantastic take on E.T. THe Extraterrestrial if it were a sic-fi horror movie.

Note: If you don’t like ET to begin with, this is the stuff nightmares are made of.

Dropbox says Welcome Mailbox as they acquire the very cool new Mailbox.app which has some new and interesting ways of dealing with mail (if you use gmail). They say:

After spending time with Gentry, Scott, and the team, it became clear that their calling was the same as ours at Dropbox—to solve life’s hidden problems and reimagine the things we do every day. We all quickly realized that together we could save millions of people a lot of pain.

Very cool, though I’m interested to see what the business model is here. I get a bit nervous sending all my email through someone else’s servers when I’m not paying them for the app or service. One might wonder what they’re doing with all the data to make money.

Sorry for the unexpected downtime this afternoon. My partner in crime and maven over at TDI Club installed a new CPU and more RAM, so now the server is running a whopping 16 cores and 32G of RAM. A lot of power to server up some static content huh? :)

Many thanks to Fred for his hard work and hardware.

When I first read the story that Google removes adblockers from Play Store I was ready to rail against google some more, after the previous dick move of killing Google Reader.

In all honesty, this has taken far longer than I anticipated. Google, the world’s largest internet advertising company, has removed several popular ad-blocking tools from the Play Store. While they are technically in the right to do so - they violate the Play Store developer distribution agreement - it’s still a bit of a dick move. Luckily, though, unlike some other platforms, you can easily sideload the adblockers onto your Android device.

Reading a bit more though, they do have a point.

The reasons for the removal are actually more sound than you’d think, at least for some of the removed adblockers. AdBlock Plus, for instance, used a security vulnerability to allow it to work without root access. A tool like AdAway, in the meantime, took a more ‘wholesome’ approach and edited the hosts file to block ads everywhere - in browsers and ad-supported applications.

Apple doesn’t allow these sort of apps that require low level access to the OS for exactly the same reason, so I guess I can’t fault them for wanting to make their OS more secure (especially with the more recent reports about the amounts of Malware that is already present in the Android Play store.

“Patches accepted” is harmful: How to improve your volunteer introductions:

“Patches accepted.” It’s one of the most offensive things you can say to people who genuinely want to help with your project.

This guy gets it. I’ve bitched about this more than once, as to the end user it translates as “screw you”, in my humble opinion.

Digg.com says they’re building a Google Reader replacement, as I saw via iPhone in Canada.

Digg says it hopes to implement the best of Google Reader’s features including its API, but also looks to ramp it up to work with what’s required to be on the internet in 2013, most importantly social sharing. They continue to say it’s a pretty big undertaking but they are confident they can “cook up a worthy successor.” The company is also asking the public for feedback in what you’d like to see in a new Reader replacement.

I say this… if Google really values “open” as much as they say they do, release the source code, or as much as possible so that the API and UI (I don’t care if the UI is stuck in 2010, it works great for me) can be re-implemented elsewhere, even just so the core that (I think) most people care about is implemented:

• The API for third party readers like Reeder, Flipboard, etc
• The frontend UI
• The backend crawler

Hell, even just the API and the frontend. Will they? No chance of course, google is as “open” in this respect as anyone else. IE: closed.

Sorry for the tons of stuff about google reader, I’m still pretty broken up about this.

Modder proves SimCity can run offline indefinitely via Geek.com

Ever since SimCity launched, there has been a suspicion that the need for the game to always be connected to a server was mainly a form of DRM, not for social game features and multiplayer. Then a Maxis developer came forward to confirm the game doesn’t actually need a server to function, suggesting the information coming out of EA wasn’t the whole truth. Now EA and Maxis have some explaining to do as a modder has managed to get the game running offline indefinitely.

I’d also heard that the online requirement was because some of the processing that was needed for the game was sent back to the EA mothership’s servers. Looks like that was a lie too.

Worst news ever… Google is Powering Down Google Reader :(

We have just announced on the Official Google Blog that we will soon retire Google Reader (the actual date is July 1, 2013). We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too.

This really sucks. I pretty much live in google reader daily, and all my RSS reading mobile apps use it to hook in. Time to find a new service I guess :( I just will really, really miss the slickness, keyboard shortcuts, and polish from reader.

Hoping that they reverse this decision.

There’s a ‘Kick-Ass 2’ Red-Band Trailer out. I have no opinion of it though, as it’s not available in my country.

Didn’t know Canada was so hard to get packets to MTV.

Update: Ok, someone’s got a Youtube link now.

I was not surprised in the least that the top forum post for today’s XKCD (Ineffective Sorts) is this:

I will buy a cookie for anyone who writes a working StackSort implementation. Two cookies if it doesn’t occasionally crash my computer. Three if it occasionally crashes StackOverflow.

Note: If you’re not a programmer this will be O^n less funny than if you are.

iFixit has a full Pebble Teardown if you’re wondering what’s going on inside your new smartwatch.

If you’re interested, the Cardinals just elected a new pope.

Mozilla won’t bring Firefox to iOS until it can use its own rendering engine via The Verge.

Jay Sullivan, the company’s vice president, told an audience at SXSW that Firefox won’t be coming to Apple’s platform until Cupertino relaxes its stance toward third-party browsers.

I’ll echo Gruber’s comment about no one holding their breath for Firefox for iOS. There are already a bunch of browsers on iOS, all do basically the same thing and other than a couple of differentiating features, they’re all the same. No need for another one, and frankly even if Firefox for iOS could run it’s own rendering engine, why would I use it? There’s just no leverage there.

This entry for QuickTime 4.0 in the Interface Hall of Shame is a great read. From what I see (I don’t remember it myself, or blocked it out) it well and truly deserves to be there.

The application does provide additional means to determine the names of one’s favorite media files, but the user must go somewhere else. The application’s menu bar offers a function labelled “Organize Favorites”, which when selected provides a standard listbox containing the names of the favorites. The listbox allows the user to rename favorites, delete favorites from the list, and reorder items in the list; these functions are notably unavailable from the Favorites Drawer itself. The Organize Favorites dialog is not without its own design problems. Surprisingly, the Organize Favorites dialog does not allow the user to Add favorites to the list, for that, the user has to …go somewhere else.

Anyone who thinks that Apple can do no wrong and has always produced winning software out of the gate that should be a beacon of light to the other doldrums of software out there needs to read this.

Seriously, what were they thinking?!

Today Dropbox Announced big updates for it’s desktop apps for windows and Mac. It’s a re-skin, but also an integration of notifications along with the current functionality (recently changed files, opening the folder or website, etc). Looks really slick.

Via The Next Web:

In keeping with that change, the Dropbox menu has been improved to also accept files more simply, with access to shared files - in the new link form - in the menu itself. The notifications will be sent out in real-time, according to the firm.

Can’t wait to get home to check it out. Sadly no updates for the Linux Desktop client yet :(

I’ve heard it before, so when I saw that Pentax is rumored to announce several new DSLRs and a new compact APS-C camera, I’ll say what I’ve said before.

Pentax is rumored to announce several new DSLR cameras (as early as this month, as many as 5 new DSLRs) which will be priced between $400 and $2000.

“I’ll believe it when I see it.” I’ve been hurt too many times before to get my hopes up.

Ok, yes, it’s “another” Star Trek: Into Darkness Trailer, but on man, I can’t wait for this. Almost all new footage in this trailer too.

A new trailer for ‘After Earth’, the new Will Smith Kid fame vehicle is out.

Trailer for The Hangover Part 3 is out:

Saw this this morning: Trojan Horse Hidden ‘Beautify’ Photoshop Action Reverts Women’s Bodies to Un-retouched State. Viral marketing at it’s best of course. While I’m all for people being satisfied with themselves, young girls not being pressured by the media, etc, blaming “photoshop” is just silly. So much of what people consider “unphotoshopped images” these days are really just “bad pictures”. You can do a ton to change perception with just a pose, good lighting, and a pretty model before you start doing massive body alterations with the liquefy filter.

But lets call this what it is, a viral marketing add to get you to buy beauty products from Dove. Altruistic as they are, their goal is to get you to give them money in the end.

Picasa web is now redirecting to Google+, long live picasa web.

I have to agree with Leo on this weeks This Week in Google, I don’t mind so much if all the features are still there (though I haven’t used Picasaweb in ages), but the “plusification” of everything makes me a bit nervous.

Maybe a new personal computing revolution is upon us. My buddy Jim sent me a link this morning to the Buddy Bluetooth watch, which seems very similar to the Pebble watch, but allows more notifications and interaction with your smartphone and has what appears to be a much higher resolution color display.

This looks super cool (not sure I like the styling myself, but I’m a bit more minimalist), and if they can deliver (especially on the battery life… “5 days to 2 weeks standby”… please define “standby”?), this sounds awesome :)

I’ve tried to avoid this for as long as possible, but yea, if you go to youtube and search for do the harlem shake, yea, it does it.

Kids these days.

Unsurprisingly, a Viral video showing Sun’s motion through galaxy is wrong.

However, there’s a problem with it: It’s wrong. And not just superficially; it’s deeply wrong, based on a very wrong premise. While there are some useful visualizations in it, I caution people to take it with a galaxy-sized grain of salt.

You don’t have to be into cycling to appreciate this Open Letter to Assos over at Fatcyclist.com

Now, I firmly believe that when a company does something right, they ought to hear about it. They deserve our praise and respect. And that’s why I’m writing to you today: to give you kudos for your latest ad, supporting your limited edition SS.Lady ellisse jersey:

You do have to read the full thing to get it.

Thanks to my buddy @curtismchale for tweeting this out.

Via Webupd8: Intermatrix U7: The First Ubuntu Touch Tablet Available For Pre-Order, To Ship In October 2013.

Holy crap, the new Iron Man 3 Trailer looks epic.

Twitter discontinuing iPhone, Android, and Air versions of TweetDeck.

Twitter has announced that it will be discontinuing several TweetDeck apps in favor of the web client. The Android, iPhone, and Air-based desktop clients will all be affected; the apps will be removed from their stores in early May, and stop functioning soon after. Facebook integration will also be removed.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. The clients haven’t gotten any more than a handful of updates recently, and twitter is definitely more interested in having users use their (controllable, unable to remove ads and promoted tweets on, able to push “partner content” on users from) web platform.

I’m not hugely sad about this, I haven’t used TweetDeck in ages. However I do see this as the harbinger of things to come for the also unloved desktop Twitter official apps.

I’m all for Apple news, but when I see headlines like this, I go into a rage: Apple’s iWatch May Come Out In 2013, Could Hit $3.6 Billion In Profit First Year.

Let me get this straight. They’re writing an article about the first year profits, or a product that isn’t out, hasn’t been announced, or for that matter has been anything but rumors from Mac rumor sites? Next you’ll see that the iWatch will be a failure because it’s not going to sell $3.6b in profit the first year, followed by a massive Apple stock drop because of this.

Seriously people, regardless of the seeded leaks that may or may not have happened, no one really knows anything about this and, as with all things Apple, we’ll only know it’s actually real when Tim Cook shows up on stage and announces it. Until then why don’t you all settle the f down a bit.

Oh, I hear the iWatch will also integrate a new NFC technology that will enable the new iCoffee maker, which will be announced in early 2014. Seriously a guy who knows a guy who heard it from a friend who is “knowledgeable in the matter” told me.

The Pirate Bay blogged this morning about a new chapter in their interesting history:

We believe that being offered our virtual asylum in Korea is a first step of this country’s changing view of access to information. It’s a country opening up and one thing is sure, they do not care about threats like others do. In that way, TPB and Korea might have a special bond. We will do our best to influence the Korean leaders to also let their own population use our service, and to make sure that we can help improve the situation in any way we can. When someone is reaching out to make things better, it’s also ones duty to grab their hand.

Very interesting turn of events… what do you think about this?

Update - I’m kinda disappointed that it was a hoax :(

Sharp eyes over at Geeks of Doom noticed that there was an Extended ‘Game Of Thrones’ Season 3 Trailer Released.

I so can’t wait for the season to start!

A bit of an inflammatory headline of course, but In The Security World, Android Is The New Windows is an interesting read. “Open wins” isn’t always true.

I do take umbrage with some things however, such as this:

Even as Android takes the lead in global sales, it’s been much less successful from a security standpoint. “We sell an anti-virus product for Android,” Cobbnoted. “No one sells anti-virus for iOS.”

I’d say that this is not because no one wants to sell anti-virus for iOS (I’m sure that McAffee and friends would love to have a subscription anti-virus installed on your iPhone by default, but because the App store doesn’t allow it.

Great Interview with Photographer Joey L. over on PetaPixel for all you photo buffs out there.

I’m watching the Joey L vs Lara Jade video right now and he’s got some pretty awesome skills.

Saw that Apple Maps is Updated with 3D Maps for Metro Vancouver and have to say, they do look fine.

I don’t say “holy crap” to lego creations that often, but when I saw Lego Hogwarts I did indeed say “holy crap”.

I assume that it’s labelled as Female Super Hero Fan Film for legal reasons, however this fan film is something for the studios to pay attention to in terms making strong female superheros.

Kudos to Jim for the link.

Steven Frank reviews the Surface Pro:

The interface previously known as Metro (abandoning that name was a terrible idea — I have no idea what it’s called now or how to refer to it) is spartan, but refreshingly different. Overall, I like the way the Metro interface looks, with a couple of exceptions:

Good stuff in there.