Typeset In The Future has a great peice for you font and design nerds out there about the typsetting and fonts of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Bill Bailey’s message to Metallica is that he’s got them covered (so to speak) if they need him.
Ok, this commercial for lego Star Wars microfighters is really good.
Ahmed Shihab-Eldin writes Why I Hate Coming Home to America:
Like all Americans (and every human being for that matter), I want to be safe. But I can’t help but question the efficacy of our national security policy, including the practice of detaining U.S. citizens because something (never specifically explained) about a name or person’s identity is said to match that of someone somewhere in the world who is deemed to pose a threat to America. How close is the match? What aspects of one’s “profile” are searched for a match? None of that is ever explained.
Read the whole piece… Ahmed is very aware of the “safety” of screening and all that crap, but come on, WTF guys. Why can’t you just say “we’re going to discriminate against brown people because they’re brown… oh, and anyone with a funny terrorist name” and have it out in the open, instead of pretending that they were randomly selected, or a profile match, or whatever excuse that isn’t “you look like the people who attacked the US on 9/11 so we’re going to fuck with you”.
Come on.
Kudos to the guys behind the Evernote sync engine for re-engineering it for speed. Updating a system of this size is no easy task, and they did a great job.
Yea… so the Apps Status Dashboard over at google is showing that pretty much everything is down. Someone’s not having a good day.
So yea, google+, gmail, blogger, and a host of basically all of google’s properties right now are down. Hopefully not for long.
Only 30 years later, iFixit has a Macintosh 128K Teardown:
Join us as we live the time-traveler’s dream—the deep, lucid, Orwellian vision of hope, fear, and nostalgia that is 1984. Just in time for its 30th anniversary, we laid hands on an ‘84 original: the Macintosh 128K. And, you guessed it—we’re tearing it down like it’s the Berlin Wall.
15 Rare Photos of New York’s Graffiti-Covered Subway in the 1980s:
New York was a very different place in the 1980s. Throughout America, and the world, it had a reputation for being a crime-riddled, dirty metropolis - one much changed from its bustling, mid-twentieth century prime. And nowhere was this more evident than on the city’s subway trains and platforms. Once the pride of Manhattan and the boroughs, the network had become a virtual no-go area both at night and during the day. Indeed, even a cursory glance at crime statistics shows us that in 1985 there were approximately 14,000 underground felonies - a far cry from today’s approximate 2,000.
Great shots.
Chief O’Brien at Work is a hilarious comic about Star Trek TNG Chief engineer O’Brien. Sad and dark and hilarious, all at once. I had seen one of these before, but there are 16 (so far) to enjoy.
A Star Just Exploded ‘Next Door’ And It’s A Huge Deal over on the Discovery blogs.
Big badda-boom…
I’m pimping Super Fantastic Nerd Hour! for a friend, but if you’re on this page, chances are you’ll be interested. Have a look at the preview for episode 1:
It’s the first episode of the Super Fantastic Nerd Hour! We discuss the forces that turned us into super nerds, why we created this show, and break down origin stories from Gilgamesh to Luke Skywalker. We throw Man of Steel’s Clark Kent against Monsters University’s Mike Wazowski in the INFINITE CROSSOVER CHAMBER and countdown our top 5 favorite origin stories.
Subscribe now and listen. Do it for the power of Greyskull!
On the Backblaze Blog the question of What Hard Drive Should I Buy? is answered. Backblaze, providing backup services, goes through a lot of drives, and keeps records of failure rates, performance, and so on. Very interesting data, and far more useful than your friend who’s always bought some brand of drive and never has had any problems, so they’re the best.
Suddenly had extra ads, popups, and new search results show up and your virus and spyware scanner reports everything as a-ok? It might be to do with the report from Ars on Adware vendors buying Chrome Extensions and updating them with spyware. Because Chrome extensions update silently, and are out of the scope of spyware and virus scanners, it’s a great new vector to use for scammers and advertisers. Other things:
- Chrome extensions are fairly easy to make, so being offered a few thousand for a couple of hours work that it took to make an extension is a good deal if you’re not clear on what the new owner will do with it.
- Many extensions ask for full access to all your browsing (normally by necessity), making them an attractive target for purchase.
Something to be aware of. If google was smart they’d either add in some sort of spyware checking, or add a notification to the user on either extension ownership change, or a more obvious changelog.
This release includes are nftables, the successor of iptables, a revamp of the block layer designed for high-performance SSDs, a power capping framework to cap power consumption in Intel RAPL devices […]
Via OSNews. LKML notes here.
What’s more Canadian than a 14 minute video of pissed off hockey goalies.
London in 1927 & 2013 is a great mashup of a great color film from 1927 showing parts of downtown London and the same shots re-done in 2013.
London in 1927 & 2013 from Simon Smith on Vimeo.
Fascinating to see just what’s changed and what hasn’t in the last 87 years.
This iPhone 6 Concept with 4.7″ Display Looks Amazing, but you know what, it’s just a concept video of some 3D modeled thoughts of a designer… you don’t need to put specs on it, like the chip (A8, just a guess) and it’s speed (1.2Ghz, again, just a guess). Give us the renders, but don’t add a bunch of specs for your rainbow-farting-unicorn render.
Winnie-the-Hulk is exactly what you think it is, and it’s awesome. Thanks to Jim for sharing this originally.
Sightsmap is a very cool site, which gives you an overlay “heatmap” for photos taken in a particular location, and using data from panoramio shows you the images all geolocated on the map. Very cool, though if you take the time to look at the images, you’ll realize there is a lot of crap out there :)
Pretty cool article from a Recovering Windows Phone User, comparing the Windows Phone world with the iOS one (though sounds like it’s easy enough to lump in Android as well). Some interesting observations, such as:
Xbox music sucks. In every way imaginable. It’s not like iTunes is so great - it’s not - but XBOX music really is terrible. Zune was and still is the best music app - why can’t we get that experience on our phones/tablets? It’s not like they don’t already have the code! Get a grip and get it right.
A case for The Grinch puts together a nice and concise argument for why The Grinch was perfectly justified in doing what he did.
Yup, the Game of Thrones Season 4 Trailer is out. Looks as epic as one would imagine. Can’t wait for this to show up! Come on April!
Sometimes I really think I’m missing out not having an XBox :( Case in point: Gamer Tricks Other Players into Signing Out of Their Xbox Ones by Changing His Name to ‘Xbox Sign Out’.
I had no idea that Visual Supply Co (VSCO) had a Journal with fantastic interviews (and pictures) from interesting photographers.
Very cool news this morning, Light Table is open source. Light table is a pretty sexy concept for a developer IDE that I first saw back in 2012.
How to Tell If a Canadian is Mad At You, via The Loop. Hilarious. And accurate.
Chain of Fools is a video of the install / upgrade procedures for every version of Windows. How far we’ve come…
Ok, this video of how a mechanical watch works answers questions I’ve had in the back of my head for the last 38 years, and is utterly fascinating.
Today I learned that “Drone Metal” was an actual genre.
How To Fold A Fitted Sheet Song. Catchy and educational.
I’m not a huge fan of metal watches, but I have to say that when Pebble Steel was announced I had the “new shiny” syndrome, now my original pebble looks and feels completely inadequate, even though other than a new form factor and a single LED is the only difference between the Steel and original version.
Still, the announcement keynote had some goodies about what’s going on and coming next. Sadly nothing immediate, the apps (FourSquare / Yelp / etc) are all coming soon. No word on changes to the 7 faces/app limit as well, but still, I’m excited about what’s coming next.
Nice story about how $25k that should have been the marketing campaign for ‘Walter Mitty’ was spent on on Philippines Disaster Relief
He explains how he received an email from Fox, inviting him to take part in a promotional campaign inspired by Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. “Dear Casey, Fox is releasing a new movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. We want to run a campaign under the concept, ‘Live Your Dreams,’ “ Neistat said to the camera. “The collective theme behind this initiative is to motivate, inspire and give people a catalyst to do something they’ve never done. We’d like to know if you’d be interested in creating a video about living your dreams.” He responded: “Here’s my concept. Give me a budget, I’ll go to the Philippines and spend every penny helping people in need.”
Of course, the more cynical among us would be the sort to say that this is still getting them PR for the movie (which is great by the way, I really enjoyed it, it’s about the most un-Ben Stiller-ish movie of his I’ve seen).
To quote MacSparky, you have to respect a blogger who can keep you interested for 1,500 words on charging of your batteries.
Well I’m surprised it took this long, but the early stages of “Apple New Product Rumor Mania” are beginning. First it’s the rumours of the product, the debates about them, and then at some point the as-yet-un-announced-or-confirmed product will start getting rumours like these:
Early ‘iWatch’ Production Seeing Poor Yields Due to Issues with Body Finish Treatments? - Mac Rumors
So obviously Apple Is Doomed(tm) right? An unannounced product with an un-announced ship date is having yield issues with some part of itself.
sigh