Meet The Guy Who Drove Across The U.S. In A Record 28 Hours.
You might think the hardest part of setting the cross-country driving record is driving across the country. You might think the hardest part is staying awake for more than 24 hours, or constantly keeping your foot on the floor. You might think the hardest part is round-the-clock vigilance for law enforcement. You’d be wrong.
Wow.
This was posted on reddit this morning: I survived a Traumatic Brain Injury with a 10% chance of recovery. I couldn’t eat, walk, or talk for 4 months. I compiled a visual journey of my experience, with some pretty amazing and inspiring images. He’s got a blog over at http://cavinb.wordpress.com/ with more information and details. Very cool to see the power of someone moving forward after surviving something like this.
His project, Lights, Coma, Action, has not only a great title, but a cool video to go along with it.
So good job Google, with news of long rumored, hyped and leaked Nexus 5 officially announced, and selling out in 27 minutes!. The Verge has more details and hands on impressions, but the short and sweet is this:
A nice sounding release and a “pure google” experience. I look forward to getting a hands on from my buddy Jim, who got in before all versions and colors sold out 27 minutes after the phone was announced.
X-MEN: Days of Future Past now has an official trailer with a fair hint at how it’ll be setup.
Mind-Bending Ad Uses Anamorphic Illusions & Forced Perspective To Fry Your Brain.
Very well done.
With a title like Heart plays Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven, makes Robert Plant cry, I couldn’t help but watch this this morning when it passed through my facebook feed. Huge kudos to my buddy Jim for passing it onto me. Amazing version of Stairway.
Justice is done! No, not really. Seems the cop that pepper sprayed the protesters a couple of years ago got $38k in workers comp. Some of the details are a bit crazy to be believed, read JWZ’s commentary here as well as the link to the full story.
It must have been so hard for him to get his salty, salty tears out of his riot helmet after all of those mean, mean emails.
Crazy.
After weeks (months?) of anticipation and wondering, Tweetbot for iPhone version 3 is out the door. Completely redesigned UI and cool (but IMHO a bit too much) animations. Yup, you’ll have to re-buy it for $2.99 (soon to be $4.99), and yup, if you complain about having to pay $3 for an app for your $900 phone, you’re a dick.
A few other reviews:
Vancouver City 2 is a gorgeous time lapse video done in 4K. Those with big monitors might be able to tell when they set the Youtube quality at “original”. Very beautiful to look at!
Big shout out to my buddy Jeffery Saddoris for his excellent facelift to the best photography site on the internet, Faded + Blurred. A great responsive layout and a great focus on the images. Excellent work!
Triumph the Insult Comic Dog at his best.
GIMP 2.9 (2.10 Development Builds) Available In New PPA For Ubuntu 13.10. Looks nice! You can also check out the GIMP roadmap to see where they’re going.
I’m not going to say anything more about Captain America’s First Winter Soldier Trailer other than to quote a great man (myself) in saying…
Oh.
Hell.
Yea.
Trailer below.
OSNews has the punchline in the title: The Surface RT is simply a very bad product:
The Surface proposition is intriguing. Sadly, the quality of the software is not. It’s been 3.5 years since the release of the original iPad, and everything Microsoft has to show for itself is broken, crappy software that is entirely unpleasant to use.
OS X Mavericks: Tips, Tricks, and Details over at macstories has a great list of the new less than obvious updates to Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks.
I don’t like making fun of people, but watching the Drunk Irishman Has Trouble With Hill video really did make my afternoon.
Today’s Apple Event: What You Need to Know has the hits from Apple’s event this morning for anyone who missed it, and cares. Main things:
Lots of other things, but those are the two highlights for me.
It’s definitely NSFW, but this Pete Homes take on Superman vs Batman is something I’d love to see.
BlackBerry announces BBM for iPhone & Android, with a reservation system. So if you’re a BB addict and can’t wait to get back into your BBM, now’s your chance.
Via 9-5 Mac.
My first thought when I read the article Apple Sued Over Automatic iOS 7 Downloads to iOS 6-Powered Devices was “are you f-n serious?”
After iOS 7 was released, some iOS 6 users discovered that as much as 3GB of storage was being used up by an automated over-the-air download of iOS 7.
I don’t know if it’s people in the US that are overly-litigious, or the people in general. But seriously, a lawsuit about some disk space taken up? Is this what courts are being filled up with now?
sigh. Seriously, screw these people.
Wolfram|Alpha’s New Data about Pokémon was announced today:
Given those two facts, we thought it was a good time to add data about Pokémon to Wolfram|Alpha. In many ways, Pokémon are an ideal subject for a computable knowledge engine. They have a set of well-defined characteristics with lots of numbers to which we can apply our analytic capabilities. Heck, Pokémon come complete with their own unique identifiers from the game’s internal database, the Pokémon Index, or Pokédex.
I have no idea about Pokemon, but this does look cool to have all this info in a searchable, computable, form.
Great job by John Koetsier in his latest article all about this crowdsourced anti-NSA video. Worth the watch.
Square Cash Sounds too good to be true. Email someone an amount, CC cash@square.com, and they get the money (after signing up with Square if they haven’t already). There is no step 3. Also, notice that if you send them $20 they get $20, and you pay $20, no fees.
No more pricing grids. No more fine print. Sending and receiving cash is free without gimmicks.
Nice review of the service at All Things D. The biggest catch right now is that it only works in the US with debit cards from MasterCard or Visa. Still, even if this is just a play by Square to get a huge number of signups, it sounds like a great deal, and it concludes with:
[…] Square Cash is the quickest, simplest method I’ve seen for sending money from one person to another.
I agree with Jim on this Epic bus ad from Denmark… just try to come up with a cooler ad for public transportation.
I’m not normally one for bromance movies, but the “boner pill” section of ‘That Awkward Moment’ Red-Band Trailer was absolutely hilarious.
‘Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit’ International Trailer over at /Film. I’ve been a huge fan of the Jack Ryan novels from Tom Clancy, and even though this is really a “based on the characters” movie, I’ll still be there. Looks like a nice mix of Spy Game and The Bourne Identity. Looking forward to it.
In the latest blog post, it’s announced that Godaddy has bought Media Temple.
Hmm… not sure how this is going to end.
Apple announces special event for Oct 22.
Right on schedule. My predictions:
A nice list of free programming books compiled over at github.
Great talk by Maciej Cegłowski, inventor of Pinboard at this years XOXO. Very funny and insightful.
Just watched the trailer for Avalanche Sharks on io9. I’m. I’m. Speechless.
Google’s new cloud development tools for iPhone apps are a complete strategic masterpiece, because it gives developers a fast and easy way to setup a backend (in Google) for your iOS apps.
But meanwhile, in releasing the new Mobile Backend Starter for iOS, Google staked a claim to a platform beneath Android, beneath iOS, and potentially more long-term sustainable and lucrative than either of them.
Nest, who re-invented the termostat a couple of years ago today introduced the Nest Protect, a new take on the classic smoke detector with a few new tricks.
Disconnect Search is a search engine without tracking. You can head over to https://www.disconnect.me/search to check it out. From the Techcrunch article:
The extension works both on the search portals’ main sites, as well as through a browser’s omnibox (in the case of Firefox) or browser bar (in the case of Chrome). (The “search from everywhere” feature is still in beta.) Disconnect says that it has applied for patents to protect the proprietary way in which it does this.
I like this as an option, but honestly, the fact that google is tracking me means that I get personalized search results that tend to be more relevant and therefor, more valuable. This isn’t the case for everyone though, and having a nice and easy option like this is a great thing to have available.
I’ve expressed my opinions of open source bug reporting systems before, but Bugzilla Bug #923590 is one I can get behind wholeheartedly.
It’s very simple. Pledge never to adopt, implement or assist the W3C’s EME specification.
The first new Godzilla movie footage is monstrously awesome. Oh yea.
Very cool Windows 9 mockup, via OSNews. Some pretty neat ideas in there. No idea how it would work in real practice, but something fairly cool looking for the Windows Desktop.
The Intersection show was featured on Daring Fireball, talking about iOS 7 and accessibility.
I was going to feel sorry for this guy, but I’m pretty sure he has a better setup, rig, and more podcasting and public speaking skills than I have.
A Message From Gabe Newell goes deep into Valve and Half Life 3, or rather, the lack of Half Life 3.
I have no idea if this is real or not, but it’s a great read. I also don’t know why the whole article is actually just a big image. I am not surprised that the comments are full of people complaining either :)
Note: Yes, this is a joke site, but I do think that Gabe would say something like this :)
‘The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug’ Trailer.
Not much more to say, other than “wow”.
Paper by FiftyThree app now lets you create & order customized Moleskine books.
Paper by FiftyThree, the popular sketching and illustration app, today announced that it has teamed up with Moleskine to offer its users the ability to create and order customized 15-page Moleskin books directly from the app. The partnership with Moleskine means you’ll get a quality, hand-assembled 15-page foldout book on sustainable matte paper, but it also means you’ll have to hand over $40 USD in the process:
Very interesting partnership. I wish I had the skill to make it worthwhile to do something like this, but sadly I don’t think I could justify $10 on my chicken scratch drawings, much less $40. Still, if you’re a digital artist and are good with an iPad, this might be a very cool thing.
Via BGR, this Windows 8.1 Ad features the start button a lot.
Despite its return, the Start button now serves a different purpose — switching seamlessly between Metro and the classic Windows interface. The remainder of the ad focuses on the hotly-contested new Windows 8 interface and its potential for customization. The ad is titled “Windows 8.1 Everywhere,” as Microsoft hopes to push the new OS along with its RT counterpart to all Windows PCs and tablets, including the fresh new Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2.
The big question is, is the lack of a start button really the big problem with Windows 8?
