The Joss Whedon’s take on Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing UK Trailer
Limited release in June.
Sipping my Mocha I have to agree with The Doghouse Diaries about What Your Coffee Says About You. I am creative dammit!
Any FYI from njabl.org that they’re shutting down their DNSBL.
March 1, 2013: NJABL is in the process of being shut down. The DNSBL zones have been emptied. After “the Internet” has had some time to remove NJABL from server configs, the NS’s will be pointed off into unallocated space (192.0.2.0/24 TEST-NET-1) to hopefully make the shutdown obvious to those who were slower to notice.
So grep through your mailserver configs for “dnsbl.njabl.org” and comment it out lest any issues pop up.
You can uhm, now get, Google Now on your iPhone and iPad, with the Google Search app. Pretty impressive, but keep an eye on your battery, it keeps the GPS on all the time, causing faster than normal battery drain.
Great stuff, just wish that it was usable with non-gmail accounts (or could take advantage of them that is).
The team that creates the excellent iPad to Lightroom sync App PhotoSmith (app store link) blogged today that they are looking for beta testers for the next version of the app. This app is going to bring some huge changes which will make long time users happy and new users even happier.
So… we are asking you, dear readers, for 10 volunteers to help us really work the app over hard and smash it to bits to make sure it’s really as solid as we think it is.. To be clear, this isn’t a chance to play with new goodies for free like our Adobe brethren are able to do. No, we are asking for volunteers dedicated to helping make sure this app works no matter how crazy your workflow is.
There’s a beta signup link. If you are a lightroom user and looking for a great syncing setup for your iPad, and want to help out, give them a look.
A New Trailer For Pixar’s ‘Monsters University’ Released via Geeks of Doom.
Instapaper acquired by Betaworks, owner of Digg.
Whoah
Marco has the details over on his personal blog where the announcement went out.
Congrats to Marco and thanks for the awesome app, looking forward to more/better in the future!
Saw that Twitter for Mac goes Retina, gets design tweaks and 14 new languages. I honestly didn’t think this would ever happen, after the year (or more?) of complete inactivity on the official twitter app for the Mac.
Ubuntu released Ubuntu 13.04 today. There are a bunch of new updates you can find on the virtual tour or just check out the overview of the desktop or just download it now.
Congrats on the Ubuntu team.
How 99.9% of people judge the quality of their coffee. I’m a sucker for coffee comics.
Great set of images from a 100 year old time capsule. Most interesting I think was that they included a player for the gramophone recorded greetings, knowing that technology would have progressed past wax cylinders in 100 years. I wonder if our “current” time capsules include the power and adapters needed to play / use whatever “modern” tech we’re including in it. How far up the chain do you go? A hand crank in case power standards have changed in 100 years?
The Verge posted their Samsung Galaxy S4 review, with a final score of 8/10. Mostly good, though Gruber points out a few interesting bits in the review (ie: the display being horribly over-saturated but still getting a 10/10) as well as a snipe at the easy mode.
Still, if you’re ready to upgrade and in the Android camp, this sounds like the phone to get.
BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public:
BitTorrent Inc. has opened up its Sync app to the public today. The new application is free of charge and allows people to securely sync folders to multiple devices using the BitTorrent protocol. Complete control over the storage location of the files and the absence of limits is what sets BitTorrent’s solution apart from traditional cloud based synchronization services.
Trailer for Thor: The Dark World came out today. It looks good.
Related to the last post, check out FocusTwist which lets you focus photos after taking a picture. It’s a $1.99 iPhone app available here.
From this reddit thread comes this Hack: DOF-Changeable Photos with an SLR. It fakes out the any-DoF effect by using a short video manually focused through the entire depth of field and then some online magic to create the “clickable” image.
It’s definitely not the Lytro “take a picture” method, but it’s pretty neat if you find something that requires this particular style of tech.
Tweetbot, from TapBots released Tweetbot 2.8 (app store link) today, which introduces, among other things, the new “Media Timeline” view, which is basically a view where the standard Twitter timeline has any media already in it’s “expanded” state (Update: This view shows only tweets with media in them, not all tweets). Less tweets to read per page, but a very sexy look!
A reminder that the UFies.org site tweets at @ufies and I tweet at @alanbailward.
Hadouken Shoot - Take One is an awesome and professional take on the Hadouken meme. Really cool to see a real photographers take on this, with good lighting, setup, etc. Also Bill Wadman is an expert on making things fancy, so of course it’s awesome.
Remember the crazy sorority letter that was going around last week? This week brings two (that I’ve found so far) dramatic readings of it:
- Michael Shannon Reads the Insane Delta Gamma Sorority Letter over at Funny or Die
- Alison Haislip does a credible job as well at Break.com
Both are very NSFW (language) of course.
Jonathan Coulton’s new secret project is Code Monkey Save World:
About a week ago my friend Greg Pak and I announced a secret project we’ve been working on called Code Monkey Save World. It’s a graphic novel based on characters from a few JoCo songs, and we’re funding it through Kickstarter.
Just based on the title this looks fantastic. They’re already at $138,333 of the original $39,000 goal. $40 for a hardcover signed book plus digital download + soundtrack + other stuff? Sign me up!
jQuery 2.0 Released is released.
Highlights:
- No more support for IE 6/7/8
- Reduced Size
- Custom builds for smaller files
- jQuery 1.9 API equivalence
Nice selection of Roof Topper Photographers on the 500px blog. Definitely something not for the weak-stomached :)
Via 9-5 Google: Google Babel to have Hipchat-like group conversation features across Web/Android/iOS platforms.
Twitter rolls out #Music app for iPhone and web, with iTunes, Spotify and Rdio integration. Interesting, I’m not sure it’s for me, and how it’s not Just Another Way To Advertise. I can definitely see this as a way to move in on the ‘myspace music’ mindspace that I think still exists, and maybe a bit on band’s facebook pages as well.
We’ll see how this goes.
Next Evolution of Facebook Platform for Mobile was announced today for mobile developers.
We’re launching three important products that further our transition to a mobile-first platform. We’re making it easier to implement Open Graph on mobile, improving Facebook Login, and releasing a new Facebook SDK 3.5 for iOS. We’re also announcing a new partner program to help developers integrate Facebook on a variety of mobile platforms.
Looks like good stuff if you’re doing iOS or mobile facebook integration.
Funny or Die’s iSteve is out and alive, for free, all 80 minutes of the first (and fastest written) movie about Steve Jobs.
Great article on Charlie’s Diary: PSA: Ignore the news
[…] publicly available news media in the 21st century exist solely to get eyeballs on advertisements. That is its only real purpose. The real news consists of dull but informative reports circulated by consultancies giving in-depth insight into what’s going on. The sort of stuff you find digested in the inside pages of The Economist.
First, there’s photographic evidence and rumour. Then there’s some initial information—immediate numbers of dead and injured, scary photographs. But the amount of new information coming out tapers off rapidly after the first hour or two, and gives way to rumour and speculation.
Seriously, once you start noticing the pattern you’ll see that this happens with everything. I even saw a 30 minute long video posted by a “friend” on facebook today about how the Sandy Hill massacre (you know, a bunch of children killed by a nutcase) was in face perpetrated by the government (and covered up) to help ban assault rifles and continue on the world government. Or something. The 10 minutes or so I could stand of the video (think tin foil hat folks) was basically piecing bits and pieces of news from different networks and different times and you could just tell that they were grasping at straws and using what kids were telling the news right after it.
Anyway, it was disgusting and you should stay away from the 24 hour news stations. Seriously, you’ll be happier. De-friend stupid people on facebook as well.
I found out via Facebook. Canadians share their memories of Rita MacNeil. Definitely not everyone’s cup of tea, but Rita was a staple of Canadian culture and I’m very sad to hear of her passing.
There’s a new ‘Man Of Steel’ Trailer out for you this morning. Looking good.
Jim pointed out that Star Trek Into Darkness - Official Trailer #3 was out.
Oh yea.
Read Marco’s thoughts on how the Linode customer database was hacked:
Yesterday, a group named HTP claimed responsibility for accessing Linode Manager web servers, we believe by exploiting a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in Adobe’s ColdFusion application server. The vulnerabilities have only recently been addressed in Adobe’s APSB13-10 hotfix (CVE-2013-1387 and CVE-2013-1388) which was released less than a week ago.
The IRC transcript is interesting as well.
Coldfusion? Seriously?
Kudos to @halkeye for the most concise description of IT Security in a Nutshell I’ve seen.
I honestly thought when I saw a link about this on Reddit this morning that it was a fake, but I stand corrected. The Verge has info on the Adobe Lightroom 5 beta. Main features are Smart Previews, radial gradients, and easy straightening.
You can also check out Terry White’s favorite features video below:
A compelling argument: Don’t be a Padhole over at the Best Page In The Universe.
Just because your tablet can take pictures doesn’t mean it should. The phrase that carpenters and handymen live by is, “use the right tool for the right job.” It’s possible to hammer a nail with the butt of a gun, but just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Hope you’re ready developers, the Pebble smartwatch SDK is here. Along with the recent release of version 1.10 of the watch firmware, I’m really looking forward to playing with this.
You can get the SDK and documentation here.
Question now is, how long before the first XXX rated watchfaces are released?
No More Voices is a very cool project.
Things to do with your voices will explain it a bit more.
Everyone has them, those nagging voices of fear and doubt. They only get loud when you do things that matter. And since we’re going to do a lot of things that matter, we can expect some voices headed our way. So what do we do?
Stuff like this is awesome. Contribute. Create.
Samsung Galaxy Mega is official and comes in 6.3- and 5.8-inch sizes. I know Samsung wants to not be Apple, but this is starting to get stupid. Please show me a picture of someone using this phone and not looking like a complete dork.
Battlestar Galactica remade as a Friends episode.
No further comment needed!
Sport Balls Replaced With Cats Tumblr site.
I just found my new favorite site on the internet.
Gwibber Dropped from Ubuntu 13.04 and replaced with a new app called ‘Friends’.
But anyone booting into the new-fangled Ubuntu 13.04 desktop later this month will notice that it’s missing; Gwibber does not come pre-installed on Ubuntu any longer.
It also comes with a new Unity ‘social lens’ app so you can search your friends right in the Unity dash. Something I doubt I’ll ever use, and plan on removing as I did the Unity music, video, and shopping lenses.
Note that if you’re running the Beta of Ubuntu 13.04, you need to do an additional ‘sudo apt-get install friends-app’ after you do the ‘sudo apt-get dist-upgrade’ (the former installs the app, the latter upgrades and removes gwibber).
Saw this this morning: “Firefly” Hat Triggers Corporate Crackdown. The short (and slightly wrong) version is that ThinkGeek got the official license to make the hats commercially, so Fox started cracking down on the homebrew DIY folks selling the hats on Etsy etc.
“The irony of it is that it’s the fans of the show who have propelled the hat into the iconic symbol that it is. The hat itself had only a few measly minutes of screen time in one episode— an episode that Fox didn’t even air.”
My response:
Dear Fox: Screw you.
I got my hat from a facebook friend who has made over a hundred of them and I will continue to support her and not ThinkGeek in this case.
Update: ThinkGeek has responded, including the promise to donate all proceeds from the Jayne hat sales to charity. Good on them.
The first trailer for Elysium is out. This is the next movie from the director of District 9. It stars Matt Damon and has a similar sci-fi look and feel to District 9.
Looks pretty awesome.
This Is How Google Glass Really Works over at mashable.
Nice review of different types of headphones: Regular Audio Human
As the cables hanging from my ears drag across the wool coat I’m wearing, the scratching sound races up the cords with perfect, annoying fidelity. If I happen to be eating peanuts while wearing these headphones, I hear the death cry of each and every peanut I consume.
Via DF.
Just a happy dog to start your morning!
(Also me testing the connectivity of the UFies.org Facebook Page) :)
Les Chevaliers du Ciel is cut together footage, and looks awesome, and is all (as I understand) real fighters, no CGI.
Chase Jarvis goes into MOVI a New Camera Stabilizer from Freefly, including a great movie and behind the scenes movie from the great Vincent Laforet.
Saw today that my favorite site for Photography eBooks has a new free eBook, Craft & Vision 2 available.
Free is free, and C&V has high quality stuff, so run, don’t walk, to your computer to download this now.
Note: There seems to be some sort of wonkiness going with the checkout system right now so it might not be available for download right away. Yea, looks like we killed it.
Over at Inspired By Apple an amazingly reasonable post shows the craziness of tech bloggers while remaining completely rational (despite the blog name). Case in point (emphasis mine):
But plenty of LOLs at the yawning, Silicon Valley-sized gulf between the techbloggers (“OMG! Facebook will steal YOUR SOUL AND YOUR CHILDREN AND YOUR PRECIOUS, PRECIOUS, PERSONAL DATA!”) and, well, everyone else (“It’s a phone. With Facebook. And Android. And it looks like an iPhone.”) I might be wrong, but I don’t think people actually care that much.
Georgia high school to host first integrated prom, via this reddit story.
Seriously, what the hell Georgia? This sort of crap is why the rest of the world thinks you’re a bunch of backwards hicks, and why the US gets looked down at by other countries. Not because you deserve it, but because stories like this get out and all people see is this sort of stupid, backwards behaviour instead of the good people, great deeds, and amazing advances in science, medicine, and technology that you make.
But seriously, congrats on having a prom that lets both white and non-white students be in the same place, that’s really awesome of you.
Note: based on comments on reddit (and if you don’t read the story) it seems that the school doesn’t have an official prom, so it’s up to the community to do it, which makes it a private event, which lets them keep the black people out invite whomever they want.
Still not convinced this isn’t yet another April Fool’s Day joke however.
Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer.
Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago. He had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland.
:(
Introducing Home at the Facebook Newsroom explains just what it is:
Our answer is Home. Home isn’t a phone or operating system, and it’s also more than just an app. Home is a completely new experience that lets you see the world through people, not apps.
This Tokyo Roppongi Gigapixel image is amazing. Not only for the view itself, but for the fact you can read street signs at the far end of the shot. Wow.
The no-BS version of the Chrome Blink FAQ is just a wee bit incendiary.
While you can certainly read the source code, we’re fully aware that actually tracking and understanding a modern HTML renderer is extremely difficult. In addition, the first changes we will make are intended specifically to break compatibility with WebKit, so the only organisation with sufficient resources to track our changes will no longer be able to do so.
I think it’s a joke, but a bit of a ha ha only serious joke.
How Far is it to Mars? is a great look at just how amazingly vast space is.
Disney Shuts Down LucasArts, Cancels Star Wars 1313 And Star Wars: First Assault. WTF?
Staff were informed of the shutdown this morning, according to a reliable Kotaku source. Some 150 people were laid off, and both of the studio’s current projects—Star Wars: First Assault and Star Wars 1313—were cancelled. Disney will still use the LucasArts name to license games, but the studio is no more.
Publicly, Disney is saying their current games could be licensed out to a different publisher or developer, but according to our source, that’s unlikely. Our source says Lucas has pursued the option for “one or both games,” but nothing happened. “With the teams now basically being dispersed I think both games are effectively dead forever,” our source said.
You’re a couple of days late for April Fool’s Day guys… :(
Holy nostalgia trip batman! Watching Forging He-Man’s Sword I was instantly transported back to watching the TV show as a kid.
Thanks to my buddy Jim for the link and the trip back down memory lane.
Google parts ways with Apple over WebKit, launches Blink.
In a move that Google says will technologically liberate both Chrome and Safari, the company has begun its own offshoot of the WebKit browser engine project called Blink. Initially it uses the same software code base that all WebKit-based browsers share, but over time it will diverge into a totally separate project, Google announced today.
I’m sure that nothing bad will happen from having another almost-the-same web rendering engine out there.
Sigh
Fascinating read about EXIF orientation handling is a ghetto and how most online services (and hell, even the iPhone) handles image rotation horribly and inconsistently.
First Trailer For ‘Thief’ Video Game Reboot.
Sexy.
Over at the RDio blog: Introducing Vdio:
The first thing you’ll notice about Vdio is that it’s designed to solve the “what to watch” problem. It’s not just that we’ve got amazing content, but that the experience is now geared to get you from searching to watching faster. We’re introducing the notion of Sets — playlists for TV shows and movies — so anyone can make and share lists of their favorites, making it easier than ever to discover new stuff. Or, you can just check out what your friends are watching in the moment and jump in. Beyond that, Vdio has the beautiful design and social features that people love about Rdio, with plenty more to come.
First of all, cool idea, levering the “what to listen to” technology towards video. Secondly, horribly name to pronounce…. Is it just “video” or “veedeeoh” or “veedio”?
Only available in the US and UK right now of course :(
Via @brian_pearce.
Fantastically bizarre and awesome TED talk: Kees Moeliker: How a dead duck changed my life
Well worth the watch.
A bit in advance of the announcement, 9to5Google says that Facebook Home offers a fresh take on Android UI:
Facebook Home has been well leaked by now, thanks in part to Android Police, information from Techcrunch, and 9to5′s own Mark Gurman. What we haven’t seen yet are many indications of the visual highlights of the collaboration; what will these “Facebook phones” look like when you’re actually using one?
Looks nice for sure. Course, do people really love Facebook enough to buy a phone for it?
Firefox hits 20 and is now allowed to drink in Canada and the UK, but not in the US yet.
Top new features are a new download manager (looks a lot like the one from Safari) and per window private browsing (like in Chrome). Both awesome additions.
Luke and Leia Had Sex says The Good Men Project.
A couple years back, I was watching Star Wars and several things became apparent to me. I’ve since explicated these revelations to a number of other people, and all of them have been persuaded. Now, to help ruin the childhoods of that many more people, I offer for posterity my proof that Princess Leia had sex with both Luke Skywalker and Han Solo after the battle of Yavin.
I’m not a fan of the “Epic Movie” type movies (or Date Movie, or Disaster Movie, or any of that crap). But now I’ve seen the ‘This Is The End’ Red-Band Trailer, I’m all over it.
A new red-band trailer for the film has appeared, and it shows a lot more stars, cameos, deaths, and other drug-induced antics. Check it out here below.
Everything you ever wanted to know about Pac-Man over at OSNews.
A lot of interesting stuff on the internals of one of the greatest games of all time: Pac-Man.
Joey DeVilla found quite possibly the most awesome footage you’ll see today. Spider-Man on 1970s TV. Both the trailer and a full episode.
Utter ’70s epicness.
First Footage From Disney’s ‘Planes’ is out. Looks amusing. Anyone not predict massive spinoffs after “Cars”? :)
Funny or Die Releases Teaser Trailer for ‘iSteve’. Not a lot of “real” content in it, but I still can’t wait for the movie to come out, even if it is a bit of a farce. April 15 folks!