Remember the viral video a couple of years back that was race car driver Jeff Gordon doing crazy test drives on unsuspecting car dealership owners? Well, he’s back for “Test Drive 2″.
I have to blame my boss for passing this on, The Most Insane News Story Of 2014.
I honestly find it hard to believe that this isn’t a parody site.
The internet is fucked is a great opinion piece at The Verge. My favorite quote is this:
(And if anyone tries to tell you that ultra-expensive mobile broadband is somehow competitive with wired service, ask that person to buy you a nice dinner and tell you the story of when they realized dignity had a price. You’re talking to a cable industry lobbyist; they can afford it.)
What happens when some photographers rent a helicopter and go Above San Francisco?
This:
So the new Samsung Galaxy S5 has been revealed to the world.
The 500px blog has the The Story Behind that Insane Shanghai Tower Climb which produced this amazing image.
Best viewed full screen on a big ass monitor, but not for anyone afraid of heights. In fact, I’m not afraid of heights and got a bit queasy in a few places!
Apparently the encryption malware Bitcrypt has been broken. Here’s a fascinating look at the analysis required to figure out the virus and reverse engineer it.
With such factors, we could build a Python script implementing all the cryptographic operations to decipher the encrypted files, and save the precious pictures. Such a Python script is available on our bitbucket repository.
This story of How One Scammer Manipulated Apple’s Top Charts To Earn Tens Of Thousands Daily Using A $10 Template shouldn’t come to a huge surprise to anyone, but it’s still a great read.
Remember how Facebook spent $16 Billion on a messaging service? The Verge has some good thoughts on Why Facebook needed WhatsApp to explain just why such an ungodly sum of money went to it instead of say, feeding the hungry, providing medical for a small town for a year in the US, cancer research, or something more interesting than the acquisition of 450M active monthly users.
DHH Tweeted to say that Jim Weirich, the speaker and legend in the Ruby on Rails world passed away last night. His last github commit of less than a day ago already has almost 700 comments expressing sorrow.
Google says welcome to the new Google Maps as their maps roll out of the preview it’s been in since may.
Here’s the First full-length Guardians of the Galaxy trailer:
Thanks Aryk.
TEN MORE from Craft & Vision is now free. If you’re into photography then this is a great book to have and add to your collection. Even at it’s full price of a whopping $5 it was well worth it.
The full list of free Craft & Vision eBooks is:
10 Ways Canada Has Already Won The Winter Olympics.
Yea, we’re pretty awesome like that.
Note: #6 is my favorite.
Gary Wozniak (Woz’s son) takes us on a thrilling skeleton run.
I honestly had no idea that they were quite this crazy.
Guy Lines Up for Apple’s Unannounced ‘iPhone 6′.
a guy named Yoppy has already lined up outside Apple’s flagship Japanese store to buy the unannounced ‘iPhone 6’ , a device that isn’t expected to launch for another seven months or so
Other fans of Apple hardware and software, this is the sort of shit that gives us a bad name. Stop it. ok?
Google will block local extensions in Chrome 33 for Windows, disable existing ones not in the Chrome Web Store. I assume this has to do with the current spam issue of legitimate extensions being bought and then “updated” with spyware, ad injection, and so on.
Google today announced it will block local Chrome extensions on Windows as of version 33. As a result, Windows users will only be able to use extensions for the company’s browser that they install from the Chrome Web Store.
Paul Thurrott has a nice Windows Phone 8.1 Preview for those interested.
Bloomberg says Facebook Puts a Downer on Upworthy
Facebook Inc. changed its newsfeed algorithm. You’ll never believe what happened to Upworthy’s traffic next.
So this means either:
1 - My newsfeed will be flooded with all the clone sites looking to capitalize on the way that upworthy worked.
2 - My newsfeed will return to sanity
I honestly don’t know what to say about this.
Welcome to Sochi. Bam, you’re hacked. How real is this scenario?
Yikes. Can this possibly be true? At first blush, this sounds like an incredible overreaction. This report was filed by NBC’s Brian Williams and Richard Engel, not some novice journalist. There’s background assist from Kyle Wilhoit, a Senior Threat Researcher at Trend Micro.
I saw the original video yesterday, and other than the abhorred way that they opened that poor, defenseless MacBook Air box, it just smelled of sensationalism and…. something was off. Glad that some more real information was tracked down.
Love that someone’s been willing to speak out and talk about the show’s weird sexual issues.
The show assembles a harem of attractive women who attempt to woo one man not just with their charm, but their bodies, their insecurity, and their willingness to suppress any part of their personality that might make them seem difficult—in particular, their innate discomfort that this man is availing himself of numerous other women as he speaks to each of them about feeling a “real connection.”
I love that this is more morally pure and acceptable to children than a gay version of the bachelor.
Satya Nadella - Microsoft’s CEO is a great looking page to do the announcement, really nicely done. I don’t know enough about Satya, but I suspect that he’ll be analyzed by the tech press mercilessly over the next few weeks.
Will he be able to steer the ship that is Microsoft? Who knows. Will things change and the company become more “relevant” (to the iPhone, MacBook, Android, ChromeBook touting techies)? No clue. Will Microsoft to an IBM and move over to the enterprise only and leave the consumer space for Apple and Linux? I can only imagine.
It’ll be an interesting year.
How In-app Purchases Have Destroyed The Industry is a look at how in app purchases have…. wait for it…. destroyed the industry. Maybe a bit hyperbolic, but if you look at games as a way to have fun, watch the 8 minute video embedded and see how the game doesn’t remotely look fun at all.
The modern-day Dungeon Keeper is not even a game. It’s just a socially engineered scam. And since people don’t remember what real gaming was like in the 90s, they are giving it the highest rating in the app store.
Language is a bit NSFW, but for good purpose. Just a warning.
Racist Revolt As Coca-Cola Airs Multilingual ‘America the Beautiful’ SuperBowl Ad. I know that this isn’t everyone, and I am sure none of my american friends would say anything like that, because they’re not racist, small-minded assholes… of which there are apparently a lot still out there.
Pebble says It’s time to explore the Pebble appstore. The post says that the new app is available in the App Store, but for me I’m only seeing the old version so far. Looking forward to playing though!
Ok, this is a great spoof of a new movie called Obama starring Daniel Day-Lewis. Pretty impressed at the talent they got for the promo: