When your product gets people to start blogs called How the fuck did the Q10 ship? you’ve made more than a small mistake.
Joey pointed out this great College Humor original of What Every Tech Ad Seems to Have, which includes, apparently, accordions.
Why the Star Trek Into Darkness Blu-ray is going to rip you off:
The official Blu-ray has seven mini-featurettes. Seems kind of bare bones for such a major summer release, eh? Indeed it does, because Paramount has divvied up all the other features — including the commentary tracks with the cast and director J.J. Abrams, and several additional featurettes — have been given exclusive to the Target release, the Best Buy release, and the iTunes download. Meaning 1) if you buy the normal version you’re getting less than half the special features created for the home video release, and 2) if you want all of them you’re going to need to purchase at least three separate versions.
I’m sure that this sort of thing has nothing to do with people pirating movies. Heavens no.
The Second Trailer For The ‘Carrie’ Remake is out. I still don’t think that Chloe Grace Moretz “is” Carrie, at least how I imagined her reading the book, but damn the movie looks good.
tap tap tap has released A flashlight? WTF?! Oh, a FAST flashlight!
Glorious, eh? We’ve truly embraced the flat design fad for this one. It can be none more flat. If you look closely at the reflection, you can see the shark being jumped.
Be a good sport and read the article. It’s possibly the most compelling thing I’ve ever read to make me buy a flashlight app. Ever.
Note: source code is included.
Nice work by the Instapaper team (no longer @marco, but now the Betaworks guys), on their Redesigned Instapaper on the Web.
When I got the opportunity to redesign the Instapaper website my goal was to do justice to the service Instapaper provides. In the FAQ quoted above, Marco referred to the “information-skimming, speed-overload mode” we often enter while surfing. I think of Instapaper as a place I can go to take a break from that mode, and I wanted the design of the website to signal and support that break.
‘Ender’s Game’ Set Visit: 30 Things We Learned About the Film over at /Film.
- Everyone knows the Battle Room is the most highly anticipated location in the movie - Within the first ten minutes of our set visit, producer Linda McDonough said way before filming started they knew zero gravity in the Battle Room was the thing all the fans were curious about. Extra-special attention was paid to it.
I can’t wait for this movie to come out.
OmniKeyMaster: The Omni Group’s Answer to the App Store’s Lack of Upgrade Pricing via Mac App Storm:
The latter, indeed, hasn’t happened. So today, the Omni team released a new tool, OmniKeyMaster, to help Mac App Store customers transition back to the original Omni Store licenses, in preparation for releasing the hotly anticipated new versions of OmniFocus and OmniOutliner in the upcoming months. It’s a simple little tool: run it, and it’ll detect your App Store licensed Omni apps, ask for your name and email address, then generate a Omni Store license key and email you a backup copy as well.
Definitely an interesting solution to a hard problem. Wonder if it’s something other companies will use as well, to deal with the same issue. Some more information is here.
This fake Batman/Superman trailer is so great even Batfleck looks good:
To celebrate the 4th year in business, Craft & Vision is having a 50% off sale on all their eBooks, presets, etc. To celbrate this, David duChemin put on a pink tutu and let it all hang out, at least figuratively. Figuratively hanging out, he’s literally in a pink tutu.
Clothing choices aside, C&V has excellent eBooks for cheap, and now at 50% off it’s time to collect the ones you don’t have.
Stunning Timelapse Will Make You Love Travel Even More
Not much more to say than that. I knew I’d love it within the first few seconds. HD and a big screen highly recommended.
Let Me Explain Why Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance Was Our Top Story This Morning over at The Onion, via twitter:
God Bless the Onion. Putting modern journalism in its place: http://t.co/7pkFe80QkN
— Michael Hawley (@mjhawley) August 26, 2013
It’s a good question. And the answer is pretty simple. It was an attempt to get you to click on CNN.com so that we could drive up our web traffic, which in turn would allow us to increase our advertising revenue.
Fantastic as usual :)
Fantastic old school documentary video from the 60s about The Apollo Guidance Computer.
Feedly Pro - Available for All means that if you are one of the many (myself included) who jumped on Feedly as your Google Reader replacement of choice, you can now pay $45 for a year of pro features.
More importantly, Feedly Pro means that there’s less chance of Feedly suddenly disappearing some day.
No More Notification Ads and Icon Ads in Android Apps says google in a revision to it’s Play Store rules:
Apps and their ads must not add homescreen shortcuts, browser bookmarks, or icons on the user’s device as a service to third parties or for advertising purposes. Apps and their ads must not display advertisements through system level notifications on the user’s device, unless the notifications derive from an integral feature provided by the installed app. (e.g., an airline app that notifies users of special deals, or a game that notifies users of in-game promotions).
I’m not an Android user, but these sound like good things, especially if they’re being abused. Not sure how the crowd who is against gatekeepers of any sort will feel about this (though I suppose it’s only the official Play Store apps, not sideloaded 3rd party ones). I wish Apple would adopt some of these, particularily the ‘system notifiers for advertising’ thing.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months.
Interesting. Due to some of the (percieved) failure of Windows 8, a personal thing, or just “it’s time”.
PRSM - The Sharing Network. Other than the signup link not working for me, I think this is fantastic.
Sad to hear: Big Fish Games lays off staff, shuts Vancouver office, and closes cloud business.
Since the founding of Big Fish more than a decade ago, we have continually evolved to meet the ever-changing landscape of casual gaming and the needs of our customers. Thanks to the incredible drive and dedication from all of you, our company remains healthy, with steady growth across multiple lines of business, and we have hugely popular games that are enjoyed by millions of paying customers. In fact, 2013 will be our 11th straight year of record revenue and we remain profitable with a positive cash flow. I am truly grateful and proud of what we have accomplished together and excited about the new opportunities ahead of us, which is why this message is especially hard for me to write.
Cool look at the Average Income per Programming Language. PHP is close to the bottom at $94k, Ruby and C# almost neck and neck at $98k and $97k respectively, and my old friend Perl breaking the six figure mark at $100k. Top of the heap is ActionScript at $108 (just over Java by $5k/year).
Very interesting, not only in the fact that all of these “average” salaries are way above what I make, but also how there’s only $20k separating the bottom from the top (well, lets put that “only” in some big air quotes, $20k a year is a salary).
Spooning By Bitbucket - the latest in programmer version control techniques.
Wanted to share this writeup over on Faded + Blurred about the photographer in New York Brandon Stanton, who makes Humans Of New York. This last paragraph is great writing, and inspired me (note: emphasis mine) -
There is power in photography, not just for Rumi, but for each of us. Each individual who has their photo taken by Brandon, for that moment, they are seen, they feel important, they feel like they matter. For all of us who look at these photographs, we are reminded that the world does not revolve around us, but we are all a part of a community. All of this happened because a guy with a camera decided to go out on the street and take photographs of strangers.
Make sure you subscribe to both Faded and Blurred and HONY, on all the social media places.
Kudos to Gruber for digging up the perfect response to the ‘Apple Would Never Make a Gold-Toned iPhone If Steve Jobs Were Still Alive’ Crowd.
Bootstrap 3 has been released.
Today, on the two year anniversary of releasing Bootstrap to the world, we’re shipping Bootstrap 3.0. It’s been a crazy long ride to say the least and we’re stoked to finally have this out in the wild. Thanks to everyone who’s tested our RCs (er, betas), reported bugs, and contributed code. We couldn’t have done it without you beautiful nerds.
I’ll let you hit the link to see all what’s new.
Friend posted today about Groklaw Shutting Down.
On Groklaw today, Jones has announced that she is shutting down the site and removing herself from the Internet. The reason? Recent moves from private e-mail services like Lavabit and Secret Circle to shut down their businesses in order to protect customers from government surveillance.
Thanks again NSA and american government! Stay awesome!
Shown by my coworker this morning is Space Glasses, which claims to be the future of computing, and which if the glasses work half as well as the video shows, will be awesome.
You are Tony Stark
Two things stuck out for me in the video though.
As with any technology like this, I’ll believe it when I see it.
8 Pivotal Acquisitions Made By Google. Really interesting to see just what google has done to move itself into the power position it’s in today, and what parts of the company you had completely forgotten were acquisitions years ago.
Want 1GB of Free Dropbox Storage? Link your Account to Mailbox.
Dropbox now offers users 1GB of free extra storage space by linking your account to Mailbox. It’s the easiest and fastest way to earn extra storage, in seconds. Here’s how to do it.
If you don’t have a dropbox account already, you can use this dropbox signup link to set it up.
Interesting question - Would These Changes To ‘Star Wars’ Prequel ‘Attack Of The Clones’ Have Made It Good?.
Really great video, but make sure you watch the What if Episode I was good to get into the series.
Tim Hortons Lids Letter Voices A Nation’s Pain.
This is a story close to my heart.
Pro tip: Request a “dome lid” when you get your coffee at Timmies, problem solved.
This New Game of Thrones FX reel reveals the magic of season 3 and shows you just how much (or little) is actually happening in the awesome scenes you watch each week.
Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing to be given posthumous pardon. A bit old news, but good to hear that justice will be served.
Alan Turing, the Enigma codebreaker who took his own life after being convicted of gross indecency under anti-homosexuality legislation, is to be given a posthumous pardon.
The release of the Linux desktop suite Luna from the Elementary OS team has prompted a nice article entitled The Road to Luna on their blog:
In April of 2011, a small group of high school and college kids released an Ubuntu 10.10 remaster that we called elementary OS “Jupiter”. And for us, it was huge. It was a demonstration of a desire to create a Linux-based OS that championed consistency and great design. It featured several home-grown apps and heavy patches to the UI of others.
The only way I’ve been able to describe ETERNA is a “supercut of awesomeness”.
Larry, Darryl and Darryl. Man I miss this show.
Via The Loop.
Proof That “The Walking Dead” and “Toy Story” Have the Same Plot.
Mind. Blown.
Perhaps the most ambitious project from XKCD has come to and end. The author talks about XKCD 1190: Time in the latest blog post.
I have to admit that I saw this when it came out, and with a lot of people sort of said “huh”, and continued on. I’m glad that there was follow up and an ending, as well as great resources (viewers, discussion forum links) to make you feel like you can participate and see things as they went along.
Case in point, look at the astronomy section of the wiki. People figured out what year the comic took place in by examining comic star fields. Seriously, this is deep(ly awesome) nerd territory.
I love it :)
Can Surface be Saved? asks Paul Thurrott over at WinSupersite:
Of course, Surface is a bit more dramatic of a story. Surface runs Windows, and Surface competes with the firms that catapulted Windows to great successes over 20 years, turning this once-humble MS-DOS hosted GUI into Microsoft’s core product. The fear at the time of the reveal event was that Microsoft would alienate these partners by making its own hardware. Some complained, some voiced indifference, and some remained silent. But the events of the past year or so should be troubling to Microsoft. Because actions speak much louder than words.
And towards the end:
It’s obvious, too, that the dysfunction of Surface mirrors the dysfunction of the Windows 8 and RT OSes which they run. In full-bore Monday Morning Quarterback mode, I think that Windows RT should be relegated to consumption-first devices that lack a desktop environment, and that the next Surface RT device should be the 8-inch Surface Mini we all know is coming. The desktop experience is lousy on these tiny devices. So just get rid of it already, and do so with the platform that makes the most sense.
So apparently the new cool thing (and I use “cool” with huge implied airquotes) to do is climb into the cages with balls on the floor of Walmart (not what I think of as a “ballpit”, but whatever). This is apparently The New Walmart Ballpit Meme on Vine.
I think this is great. Use this to figure out what people should be sent to [insert remote land here] to remove them from the general population. Easy!
A fantastic photographer and internet friend of yours truly (kinda) announced today that his first eBook TEN is now free. This is a great deal, and even at the $4 or $5 that his eBooks over at Craft & Vision normally it’s a great deal. It’s an eBook all about creativity and getting out of the ‘gear rut’ of photography and back into the Vision side of it.
Short version, just go download it, hey, it’s free right?
Is it wrong that after reading The 35 Best Times Someone On Facebook Thought ‘The Onion’ Was Real I just want to post onion articles to my facebook feed to see which of my friends reacts?
The 6 Ways Apple Should Copy Google
Really I didn’t make this up or anything.