Goodbye cruel world... Wow these guys are crazy... but man it looks like fun.

Things You Can Do With A Hundred Pounds of Magnetic Putty

Man this makes Silly Putty look tame.

Noticed today that Nik introduced Analog Efex Pro v2!. Lots of nice updates there if you’re into photography.

Great BBC Documentary: 2013 Moments In Time

Great article: The Eternal Struggle Between Business and Programmers

The Programmers plead: “If only you’d let us refactor! We have a sick design; it actively prevents us from adding features sensibly. It encourages us to do the wrong things. It encourages us to duplicate code, which makes mistakes seem inevitable. It has code that nobody understands any more, and so when we have to change it, we need weeks to read, to research, to gain confidence that changing it won’t anger our existing customers. If you’d let us refactor, then we could spot design improvements that would unblock new features, that could reduce the cost of new features by 20%, 30%, 40%, and more! Why don’t you let us refactor?!” They appear to have a point.

Especially relevant for someone who just spend 10 minutes telling his bosses “it depends” when they ask questions and wanting simple and clear answers.

Unless you’re a complete moron, you know that any “reality TV” bears little resemblance to reality. The 5 Details They Cut from My Season of ‘The Biggest Loser’ show nicely just how much telling the story overrode “reality”.

And sometimes the “healthy habits” you saw on the show were no such thing: My season made a big deal of showing us all drinking our milk to prove how nutritious it was. But as soon as “cut” was yelled, the trainers made us spit it out. Calories do not trump calcium, apparently.

I never knew the name of the car, but the sound of the Ferrari F40 LM stirred the little kid who wanted to be a race car driver.

Wait, that came out wrong.

You know what I mean.

So you’re telling me, that today I can go to my computer or phone and watch LIVE VIDEO from a space station orbiting the earth. In high def. With a real time video tracker.

What a crazy world we live in.

This short animated video is pretty good. Definitely worth a watch.

It’s about a lazy delivery man of the universe in the year 2150 who stumbles upon an alien world that he doesn’t quite understand. It’s cute and hilarious and oodles of fun. I don’t want to spoil any more, just enjoy yourself.

The Ape-Human War Begins In New Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes Trailer

Must say I’m looking forward to this one.

Fishing for Hackers: Analysis of a Linux Server Attack is a pretty fascinating look at the analysis and recreation of an attack on a vulnerable Linux server.

SPOILERS

If you’ve seen Spider-Man 2 you’ll know the movie, while visually great, has a few issues. CHeck out The Amazing Spider-Man 2: The Amazing Spoiler-FAQ to have some of these issues answered, though sometimes only with the answer of “crappy storytelling”.

Obviously the article is spoiler filled.

From the App.net State of the Union:

As many are aware, the first major round of subscription renewals from the original App.net launch happened a few weeks ago. We have been anxiously anticipating what our subscription renewal rate would be in order to do budgetary planning. Since we have not been sure what to expect the renewal rate to be, we mentally prepared ourselves for a wide variety of outcomes. The good news is that the renewal rate was high enough for App.net to be profitable and self-sustaining on a forward basis. Operational and hosting costs are sufficiently covered by revenue for us to feel confident in the continued viability of the service. No one should notice any change in the way the App.net API/service operates. To repeat, App.net will continue to operate normally on an indefinite basis.

Rovio (makers of the Angry Birds series of mobile games) just Soft Launched a Flappy Bird-Like iOS Game ‘RETRY’. It’s a star collecting, in-app-purchase supplying game and it’s hard and frustrating, just like Flappy Birds (no doubt to capitalize on games where it’s near impossible to progress). It’s got a fun 8-bit look, and after about 30 seconds of play it seemed fun. A nice game to play for a minute or two at a time while you’re waiting in line.

Rovio has soft launched a new gamed called RETRY exclusively in Canada, Finland and Poland. This game is their take on Flappy Bird with 8-bit graphics and similar gameplay. The name ‘retry’ refers to how you’ll get many chances to keep playing the game over and over.

Ruby 2.1 In Detail goes through the new changes and features of the new Ruby 2.1 release.

onOne Software’s Perfect Effects 8 available for free. Always been a big fan of onOne, so this is pretty cool.

onOne Software is offering its Perfect Effects 8 Premium Edition plugin for free for a limited time. It gives you hundreds of creative presets, fully customizable filters and ability to combine effects. Perfect Effects 8 works as a standalone application (Windows or Mac) or integrates with Adobe Lightroom, Aperture and Photoshop. Go to the onOne Software site to get this fully licensed version - worth $99.95 - for free (a the time of writing).  

My Experiment Opting Out of Big Data Made Me Look Like a Criminal is a fascinating look at how, and the consequences of, opting out of big data, and dealing with the results.

It’s even more interesting when you look at the Disconnect.me plugin for the number of trackers on the site…

Of course what you should remember is that this on the internet isn’t new. Companies have been tracking people since they realized business could benefit from (for example) knowing when someone got pregnant, whether it’s Facebook for advertising at you, your grocery store and their club cards, or Hank down at the general store making a little mark in the calendar on when to mention to you that he’s got a great deal on newborn diapers.

Disney’s core animation principals shows how some simple (well, for animators I suppose) ways to make your animations more lifelike/realistic/appealing/disney-like.

When CNN says DO NOT Let Your Husband See This, they’re right.

Humans of New York has a great talk on approaching people on the street. He’s done it in the area of 10,000 times, so he knows really well what to say (and not say) and how to present yourself. Great for street photographers.

Programming Sucks is perhaps the most accurate description of working as a real world coder I’ve ever read. It’s the Office Space of text.

Remember that stuff about crazy people and bad code? The internet is that except it’s literally a billion times worse. Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses. There’s a team at a Google office that hasn’t slept in three days. Somewhere there’s a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she’s dead. And if these people stop, the world burns. Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn’t make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.

(Emphasis mine)