Via Loopinsight: Orcas hunting seal, seal jumps in boat

We were out with the family looking for whales and a pod of 12 transient killer whales were chasing the seal. It ripped towards the boat in a desperate escape and scrambled on the deck. It fell off three times in panic and finally stayed on until the whales gave up after about 30-45 minutes. Most intense epic experience ever.

Via torrentfreak: Feds Seize KickassTorrents Domains, Arrest Owner

The U.S. Government has arrested the alleged owner of KickassTorrents, the world’s largest torrent site. The 30-year-old Ukrainian was arrested in Poland today and is charged with criminal copyright infringement and money laundering. In addition, a federal court in Chicago has ordered the seizure of several KAT domain names.

Looks like our favourite (and most dependent) torrent site may be in a bit of trouble…

The latest interesting Kickstarter out there is The Purpose Hotel, which is a project from great photograher Jeremy Cowart, a crowdfunded hotel with the aim to benefit everyone.

Cool idea, I hope he can pull it off. Here’s a bit more info:

Every once and a while you wonder to yourself “is this a fake headline from the Onion” followed by “this can’t be actually a real thing right?”. That’s exactly what I thought when I saw the headline of “Virginia introduces law to stop 12-year-old girls from getting married”.

Last week, the authorities in the state introduced new legislation that updated rules that had until then made it legal for girls aged 12 or 13 to get married if they had parental consent and were pregnant.

All I can say is that I’m glad that the US, as a world leader and example to other countries, is so progressive.

This one has been making the rounds today… an Epic Star Wars Aerial Battle Shot Using Drones and Creative Camera Work that really is worth a watch. Make sure you watch the 20 minute behind the scenes / making of video as well, lots of explanations about how it was done (not all how you think).

Huge kudos to the team behind this, well done!

This Star Wars - Episode V “The Empire Strikes Back” Homage looks absolutely wonderful!

Discover One of the Most Beautiful Places on Earth

We wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of The Drakensberg before. It almost sounds like a region in Game of Thrones, but it’s not: it’s a mountain escarpment in South Africa, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the subject of the timelapse above, and probably the newest addition to your bucket list.

Well, I’m sure as hell planning a trip here now!

Excellent article - 5 things the media does to manufacture outrage. A more concise dissection of how stupid things are blown out of proportion by the media to get more clicks I haven’t seen.

Not sure how me linking to the article talking about how the media talks about the media talking about things online counts, but whatever, I’m here to amuse.

Great article on Modems, wArEz, and ANSI art: Remembering BBS life at 2400bps by Lee Hutchinson over at Ars Technica. I grew up with this stuff, it was my first exposure to connected computers in a day when a 386 was hot stuff. Good memories in there.

Who hasn’t wanted to drive the Batman’s Tumbler? Well now you can… check out this video:

Pebble Round appeared on the Pebble Smartwatch site today. Basically it’s what you’d expect from Pebble, it’s a smartwatch, using the same colour e-paper display, battery life measured in days, iPhone and Android compatibility, etc.

Looks like they got around the ‘flat tire’ look of the Android round smartwatches by making the bezel wider (probably hiding a square(ish) display behind it that only uses the circle). Also they specifically say “battery life measured in days” and not the “7-10 day battery life” from before (though I don’t remember 100% if that’s how they said it before). Maybe the smaller profile means less battery by a bit? Who knows.

It’s a bit of a surprise to those of us who backed the Pebble Time on Kickstarter, when not everyone has all their rewards yet, but we do get an interesting discount deal (details in the blog).

Ardbeg’s space whisky tastes “noticeably different” from Earth-matured whisky:

The biggest difference was in the tasting, though. In the triangle tests conducted, almost all participants picked out a difference between the space whisky and the mundane Earth-matured control.

As a relatively new Scotch and Whiskey drinker, I’d appreciate Ardbeg sending me a sample to test, please and thankyou.

Mesmerizing Videos of Ships.

I’m just going to say “no” right now.

This video proves everything is cooler in slow-mo:

This Deputy Shows Extreme Poise And Patience When Dealing With An Absurd Human Being.

Some pretty awesome data - Mapping the United Swears of America&utm_content=FeedBurner). Obviously some strong language :)

Things I learned driving a supercar for the first time:

Driving a car like this onto an incline — basically any driveway — is a surgical procedure that requires hyperactive situational awareness and a thought-out stratagem. Driving slowly and deliberately isn’t enough: if you don’t plan correctly, that just means you’ll scrape the undercarriage in excruciating slow motion. (And I don’t want to know what happens if you bottom out at high speed.)

Locked in a Vegas Hotel Room with a Phantom Flex is yet more proof that everything is more awesome in slo-mo, or in this case, super slo-mo.

I know these are really just big ads for gross tasting sugar and caffiene water, but this Red Bull Barnstorming is pretty damn amazing.

Ok, this new talk on time lapse mining from Internet photos is possibly the coolest use of technology I’ve seen in ages.

Living in Canada, at an awesome company with a great family paid leave plan, I didn’t imagine that the good ‘ol USA, so awesome at everything, was so incredibly fucked up. This Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on Paid Family Leave really brings it right up to the front.

Seriously America, WTF?

So apparently personal jetpacks are pretty real now. Watch two crazy people fly jetpacks over Dubai in 4K.

Double the nostalgia… Floppy disks and Nirvana!: HDD and Floppy Music: Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit - YouTube

This ad for the New Peugeot 208 GTi is really nothing short of “epic”.

Happy April Fools’ Day 2015, at least a mini-round up.

Universal Music Hijacks YouTube Videos of Indie Artist

Universal Music Group has hijacked several YouTube videos of Bjorn Lynne, an independent musician from Norway. The world’s largest music corporation is now running advertisements on videos of music tracks Lynne created, and is refusing to correct the mistake.

Seriously a nightmare scenario, combining huge bureaucracy, tons of money, and a real David vs Goliath fight, except I suspect in this case David isn’t going to win.

14 Commercials from the 80s and 90s That You’ll Never Forget. Ahhh…. memories.

Sync 2.0 is out, and looks pretty damn good.

All of the core functionality we introduced in version 1.4 last August still exist in 2.0, letting you securely share folders across all platforms, with visibility into who has access.

A bunch of new functionality has been added, from enhanced user interfaces across desktop and mobile platforms to a new certificates-based security model with even greater control and ease-of-use. Go here to check out all the many new features in Sync 2.0.

#Fury325 test run POV

Holy crap.

Astronomers Watch a Supernova and See Reruns. Man science is pretty awesome.

Pebble is back on Kickstarter with Pebble Time, their next generation smartwatch.

Highlights:

• Color e-ink display
• Up to 7 days of battery life
• Microphone
• Waterproof
• A “timeline” feature (the “Time” in “Pebble Time”) which lets you see what’s coming up and happening.
• Ships in May

I’m pretty excited about this one, but honestly, I’m wondering if I’m going to wait to see what the  Watch looks and feels like. Not because I think I’m getting one, but because I’m wondering if it will simply blow everyone else out of the water or not, and if I’ll feel like I’ve got an old and busted thing on my wrist.

That said, I wear my pebble most every day, so….

The NFL Just Released an Anti-Domestic Violence Super Bowl Ad

The ad makes a powerful point — all without ever showing actual violence. As the camera pans across a wrecked home, a woman can be heard calling 911. In the recreated voiceover, a woman tells the 911 operator she’d like to order a pizza. At first exasperated, the operator then realizes the caller is in danger, using the pizza order as cover while her abuser stands nearby. 

This was a very affecting ad.

Autistic Weather Enthusiast Frankie MacDonald Given His Own Segment On Cape Breton News Show

Frankie MacDonald is a Canadian man with autism who has an insatiable passion for all things meteorological. He even broadcasts his own online weather show and his hugely popular videos led to CBC News giving him the chance to present a segment on their program.

My country makes me proud once again.

GoPro Video Shows Us the Incredible Skills of the NHL All Stars:

Found The Secret Meeting that Changed Rap Music and Destroyed a Generation through a reddit discussion on evil coprorations, where someone brought up that the US privatized prison system is engineered to get as many people in jail as possible.

[…] told us that since our employers had become silent investors in this prison business, it was now in their interest to make sure that these prisons remained filled. Our job would be to help make this happen by marketing music which promotes criminal behavior, rap being the music of choice. He assured us that this would be a great situation for us because rap music was becoming an increasingly profitable market for our companies, and as employee, we’d also be able to buy personal stocks in these prisons. Immediately, silence came over the room. You could have heard a pin drop.

If any of this is remotely true it’s absolutely amazing.

Here’s What Happens When You Install the Top 10 Download.com Apps.

We installed the top 10 apps from Download.com, and you’ll never believe what happened! Well… I guess maybe you might have a good guess. Awful things. Awful things are what happens. Join us for the fun!

Shockingly (not really) download.com is not the useful utility and site it used to be back in The Good Old Days(tm).

Seeing inside a Rolex is a pretty awesome sight. The video is beautifully shot, and shows just why (I guess) you have to pay Rolex an extra arm when you get your watch maintained (or so I assume, having never owned a super-fancy watch).

Also I had no idea how many specialized tools and gizmos there were for watches.

JMAP is a new protocol that is introduced by FastMail as a proposed replacement for IMAP (and friends) for an open standard solution to doing push updates to email.

While I completely agree with them, this is needed, currently there’s no universal solution, etc etc. However it ticks the same box as most “we could stop spam dead” solutions…. everyone would have to adopt it.

Not only that, but it’d have to be added to all the existing (boring, unfun) infrastructure code (like postfix, exchange, etc) to provide the services to all the mobile providers.

Will have to see if it goes anywhere.

Explosion at fireworks factory:

Amazing and terrifying at the same time.

The dude map shows you how men the US refer to their male friends.

Also, merry 2015!

Most insane ski line:

“Sphincter tightening” doesn’t start to describe it.

Liam Neeson will seriously endorse your ‘particular set of skills’ on LinkedIn

LOS ANGELES — It takes a very particular set of skills to get us interested in a movie’s social-media marketing these days, and in this case, 20th Century Fox has acquired them — on the most boring social-media site in the world.

The Terminator Genisys Trailer has been released and holy crap it looks amazing.

I don’t care what you say, this is going to be amazing.

Houdini - Rapid River Whitewater is a great example of, as my buddy Darren put it, CGI’s grown a bit.

The Android 5.0 Lollipop Review.

Where Did the Wilhelm Scream Come From and Why Do So Many Filmmakers Use It? is the best article on the Wilhelm Scream I’ve read so far.

Now I know what I’m looking for, I can’t un-hear it.

Archie’s Press: Vancouver is a fantastic city map that explains Vancouver like I’ve never seen it before (and I’ve lived here all my life). On their products page there are most other major North American cities available.

Honda has a great video (ad) on youtube. Pretty innovative use of the technology and really well done.

So good you have to watch it twice (no really, you’ll see what I mean).

A nice behind the scenes look at the editing and filming side of it.

Drone footage of an aiport shows what you can do it you’re allowed to fly a camera drone at an airport. You can’t in the US and (I assume) Canada, but in Mexico, where this was taken, the filmmaker worked with the airport and tower to make sure everything was safe, and produced a very cool video.

A great time lapse film of the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta 2014. If there’s something that always works well in time lapse, it’s hot air balloons…

AT&T, Verizon Using ‘Perma-Cookies’ to Track Customer Web Activity:

According to Forbes, AT&T is testing a similar code insertion program that will allow websites to track AT&T customers. Like Verizon, AT&T has plans to make the tracking codes temporary as a “privacy-protective measure,” but according to one of the researchers that discovered the tracking, Kenneth White, the codes that AT&T is sending to some customers are persistent.

Marco also has some succinct commentary on this too.

Seriously, this is a horrible breach of trust, and because of the monopoly (well, lack of choice, definitely not a monopoly, that’d be illegal…) many customers have no choice but to deal with this.

Anyone who thinks that 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman is easy and fun should watch this. I had no idea (as a white, middle class male) that things were like this. We suck.

JWZ found an absolutely delightful little video: A Tale of Momentum & Inertia.

Dr. Oz’ ‘Magic Weight-Loss Cure’: Diet Pill Study Was Bogus Researchers Reveal

If you were thinking of trying Dr. Oz’s “magic weight-loss cure” of green coffee bean extract, don’t waste your money. The researchers responsible for the only scientific study backing up the television doctor’s claim released a statement today saying the study was bogus.

Does this shock anyone? Seriously? Anytime you hear ‘weight loss pill’ you can mentally replace that with ‘bogus BS waste of money’ and I can guarantee you that 100% of the time you’ll be correct.

This video shows B.C. grizzly chewing on GoPro camera. Takes a bit, but if you’re watching on a bit monitor and suddenly you have a bear mouth coming towards you…. yowza.

This is a stunning video of a San Francisco Morning. Definitely watch in HD and full screen.

Ana Yang gazillion bubble show

“A bubble show?” you ask? How the heck can that be interesting or exciting? I thought the same thing until I’d watched about 10 seconds of this. Amazing stuff.

A great look at the Tesla D over on the verge. Not only detailing the amazing performance, but also the (basically) driverless driving.

Eventually Tesla is hoping to tune its autopilot system into something that will let people just kick back and be a passenger in their own car. But if the trip through the neon tunnel of terror is any indication, it’s more fun to gun it.

Watching the video midway through the article is definitely recommended.

Elton John Creates Song Using “Lyrics” On Oven Instruction:

This is how you recognize a master, just in case you were wondering.

Least useful hack ever puts Windows 95 on your smartwatch.

I’ll just let that sink in.

When you see the title of Bizarre Russian Dash Cam Videos, you think about the sort of things you’ll see. This has them all. Just what you think. I do recommend if you’re only going to watch one, watch the embedded one below, acts of good samaritans caught on video, though the others are awesome as well, but in a different way.

First of all, the original title is Man Dives Into An Active Volcano With A GoPro, Calls It A ‘Window Into Hell’, but my title is more accurate. There’s no “diving” involved. However, other than that, there’s not much more to say about this, other than “holy poop balls!”

I can see where the Christians got their idea of hell though, looking at this makes me want to convert….

The meaty bit of the video is about 1:45 in, though I kinda seriously wanted to see them go to the top edge and say “nah, we’re just kidding, that’d be crazy”.

Saw the Galaxy Note Edge with an entirely new kind of curved display and it definitely looks interesting. I’m an iPhone guy, but I have to say they pulled a cool trick with the curved LCD. However from my experience with most Android phones I’ve played with, I agree with Thom’s conclusion:

It looks kind of neat, but as always with Samsung, I’m pretty sure their software is going to ruin it and turn it into even more of a gimmick than it already is.

Gorgeous timelapse video of my hometown by Daniel Chen: Vancouver City Lights Timelapse on Vimeo

Vancouver City Lights Timelapse from Daniel Chen on Vimeo.

Found a GLaDOS ceiling lamp that moves on reddit. Holy crap I want this a lot.

The folks at Instagram have detailed The Technology behind Hyperlapse. Hyperlapse is the technology for smoothing out (though it’s much more than that) time lapse videos.

Hyperlapses are a special kind of time lapse where the camera is also moving. Capturing hyperlapses has traditionally been a laborious process that involves meticulous planning, a variety of camera mounts and professional video editing software. With Hyperlapse, our goal was to simplify this process. We landed on a single record button and a post-capture screen where you select the playback rate. To achieve fluid camera motion we incorporated a video stabilization algorithm called Cinema (which is already used in Video on Instagram) into Hyperlapse.

Good news for iTunes podcasters: Adam Carolla just beat patent trolls Personal Audio.

Good news today for iTunes podcasters: Adam Carolla has won in his fight against patent trolls Personal Audio after more than a year of litigation. The outcome likely means that the patent troll will cut its losses with suing other podcasters, something it has been threatening to do with others in the community throughout the case with Carolla.

Hopefully this buries those guys.

This is pretty cool. It’s a project to use GPS and a mini-camera to find out Where Your Cat Goes. Some of the information (as well as the cat that randomly (it seemed) went to a strange house far outside their usual prowling area) is pretty interesting.

Slimmer, reversible next-gen USB Type-C now ready for PCs & mobile.

Following an announcement back in December and some renders that popped up a few months back, today the USB 3.0 Promoter Group announced the next-generation USB “Type-C” connector is now ready for production. That means that PC and smartphone manufacturers can now adopt the standard, which the Promoter Group describes as “the final piece in developing a single-cable solution” for the industry.

Looks good, only thing that worries me is it looks like it’s got the super thin “tongue” in the middle, which means it’s still gone one of the downsides of current USB devices with it potentially being fiddly or prone to breaking. I know a lot of people don’t like the stuff the Apple does, but the lightning cable has similar benefits (reversible, small, etc) without the middle tongue. Time will tell I guess.

Awesome Celebration of Light (the fireworks in Vancouver) video.

3D Object Manipulation in a Single Photograph using Stock 3D Models is a bit complex, but it’s still pretty awesome. Definitely watch the video at the bottom of the post to get an idea about what they’re talking about.

Photo-editing software restricts the control of objects in a photograph to the 2D image plane. We present a method that enables users to perform the full range of 3D manipulations, including scaling, rotation, translation, and nonrigid deformations, to an object in a photograph.

Border Patrol Officer Points Gun at Boy Scout after Events Following the Taking of a Photo:

A boy scout coming back into the U.S. after a trip with his troop to Canada found himself at the other end of a pointed gun when he reached for his suitcase without permission. The situation unfolded when the boy scout took a photograph of a border patrol officer as they were crossing back into the U.S. The officer he was photographing “immediately confiscated his camera, informed him he would be arrested, fined possibly $10,000, and receive 10 years in prison,” Troop Leader Jim Fox said in a statement to KCCI.

The gun was drawn because the child reached into his suitcase “without permission”. I didn’t realize that when you’re waiting at the border / talking to a border guard you need to ask permission for anything.

Seriously, WTF people.

Via The Loop comes this amazing first person race car footage of one car flying over the other.

Yowza.

Listen to Comcast torture Ryan Block and Veronica Belmont as they try to cancel service.

Trigger warning for anyone who’s ever been through this. You will have a raging PTSD episode.

This has been going around the last day or so and I had to link it. The PTSD trigger warning is apt, and I’m four minutes in and feel ready to go into a rage. I can only imagine how many calls to Comcast go like this that haven’t been brought to the Internet’s attention by Internet-Famous people.

Wow…. just…. wow.

Doctor Who Series 8 trailer

Oh my this looks good.

From The Oatmeal: So, I had a call with Elon Musk earlier this week:

Within a few hours of posting my review, Elon Musk tweeted that he’d be happy to help. Earlier this week I got to speak to the man directly, and he promised two things.

… head over to the page for the two things.

This great post on Medium.com is making the rounds this morning: How a password changed my life. I won’t spoil the article, but it’s short and worth the read. Maybe it’ll work for you too?

My brothers to the south just had their July 4 celebrations, and while a lot of the posts and videos coming out are a lot of the same, this one of a DJI Phantom Flying Through Fireworks is probably the coolest of the bunch. Happy belated Fourth of July!

The Best Article Every Day has a book binding tutorial. Neat to see how it’s done, even if you never plan to do it yourself.

Custom Built Oculus Rift & GoPro Rig Lets You Experience Life in the Third Person.

I don’t know what to say about this.

Been a bit of a lax day, and with Canada Day tomorrow, well, here’s some Flowers opening timelapse for you to enjoy.

On the 9to5 Mac site they note that there’s a 25% off Nomad Lightning cables sale going on.

If you don’t know what these are, they’re small charging accessories to let you charge your iPhone (or Android) phone from a tiny charging accessory that’ll fit on your keychain, in your wallet, or not, from a carabiner.

Find out more here.

Fastest guitarist in the world

Wow.

Voltset - World’s Smartest Multimeter for Smart Devices is a device my buddy Jim shared out. Their tagline:

VOLTSET connects to smart devices and turns them into SMART MULTIMETERS, allowing you to TINKER, LEARN and COLLABORATE with electronics

Pretty awesome.

Watching Random People Slap Each Other In The Face Is Weirdly Compelling.

It honestly is, I’m not sure why.

Fascinating post called 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1 discussing how it was possible to do full motion video on the ancient 4.77mhz 8088 and CGA graphics card.

The New OK Go Music Video is an Optical Illusion Tour de Force Shot in a Single Take.

Title of the post says it all. Watch and enjoy, then go and buy some music to support these guys.

Tesla: All Our Patent Are Belong To You

Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

Great news.

Tiger sketch in Photoshop. Holy crap.

Ever wondered what really goes on in your dishwasher? Well, A GoPro Hero’s journey into a dishwasher reveals all!

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

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.

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.

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.

Saw on twitter that @blairbunting, a photographer I follow, has a great page and video up of Flying with the Thunderbirds. Seriously cool stuff, head over and watch the video (embedded below) but only if you have a big monitor and promise that you’ll watch it full screen and in HD.

How to Lie with Data Visualization is a great article with fine examples of what I learned in my university stats class…. “never trust statistics”.

OpenSSL Valhalla Rampage is a great, uhm, rampage through the OpenSSL source code, and ripping it apart a bit at a time. From their site:

Tearing apart OpenSSL, one arcane VMS hack at a time.

The awareness recently on OpenSSL has been a great catalyst to look at some of the “but it’s there and it works” for some of the most used Open Source software.

Your new web profile is here says the twitter blog. The new look is facebook / g+ like, and pretty damn sexy.

Remember to follow me at @alanbailward for random photography and geeking out stuff, and @ufies for a feed of stories as well as random announcements and information.

How Americans Die. Amazing visualizations.

Speaking of bashing Samsung, here’s The Samsung Galaxy S5: When a Committee Builds a Smartphone review of their newest smartphone.

Actually, not like that one. It’s not nearly as good. The iPhone can learn five fingers; the Samsung only three. The iPhone doesn’t care about the angle of your finger; the Samsung requires you to place it perfectly straight every time, aligned with the screen. The iPhone reads your fingerprint with a touch on the Home button; the Samsung requires you to swipe your finger — the full height of your finger across the button.

Not pretty…

While I started reading The Pinnacle of Fitness Failure article via The Verge, I originally figured it was a bit of a hit piece, but as I read more and more, it really sounds like a complete lack of design and set up sense purveyed the entire product.

Here, let me re-word the ludicrous nature of this again: The Gear Fit device can’t actually by default transmit step data to Samsung’s premier fitness app on their premier phone.

I’m not a fan of top 10 lists, but this top 15 list of 15 Amazingly Cool 3D Tattoos has some pretty incredible examples.

The Firefox OS 2.0 UI.

Very interesting read on The Fallacy Of Android-First, if you’re looking at doing development. This is from guys who abandoned their iPhone prototype and decided to go Android-First, and then some time later went back.

And yet, according to Google Analytics, our app has been installed on over 300 different devices since October. In some cases, those “devices” might be different variants of the same device, but bear in mind that, for instance, the Verizon Galaxy S4, the AT&T Galaxy S4, and the direct-from-Google Galaxy S4 are running at least somewhat different operating systems.

Very good read on some of the challenges of developing for both major platforms, and no, it’s not all about “fragmentation”.

Moon | Typeset In The Future is a fascinating look at the typography (and some inner details, as well as spoilers) about the movie Moon (2009). Great stuff for you designer types, or anyone who appreciates little details in a great movie.

Normally these april fools jokes fall flat, but when I saw reddit introduce a revolutionary new way to browse reddit, and it actually works, that impresses me.

Not so much with the facebook friends saying “my truck got broken into and I lost all my camera gear” though. That’s not an AFJ, that’s just silly.

We all learned in elementary school about how water has three states, solid (ice), liquid (water) and gas (boiling). How about this Mysterious Fluid that Appears to Freeze and Boil at the Same Time?

Witchcraft I say!

37 Pictures That Prove Australia Is The Craziest over on buzzfeed.

I think I’ll just hide at home.

Jim at Loop Insight calls it a Harrowing rescue. I call it an OMGWTFHSOMGOMG rescue. Make sure you watch it to the end, it’s not over when you think it’s over.

Microsoft open-sources MS-DOS. Wow.

You can grab the code and re-live the world of single user, single tasking, not having to worry about shutting your computer down, rebooting to “fix” things, or just search through the source code comments for naughty words.

Gulf Photo Plus 2014 Shootout Video is Live. I wish I could express how excited I am that this is posted.

How to Build a Maze:

Our objective here is to create a perfect maze, the simplest type of maze for a computer to generate and solve. A perfect maze is defined as a maze which has one and only one path from any point in the maze to any other point. This means that the maze has no inaccessible sections, no circular paths, no open areas. 

If you’re bored today, here’s something to pass the time.

My Experience using a Bitcoin ATM:

In my opinion, the current state of Bitcoin ATM machines are a stark reminder of how raw bitcoin is at the moment. It is simply not ready for normal consumer use yet.

Oh wow: Dji Phantom flies into Volcano

Behind the Scenes of Obama’s “Between Two Ferns” is a great look at how they got the president to play along and really embrace doing the show. Pretty amazing.

To find out exactly how it happened and what it was like to work with the Commander-in-Chief, we spoke with Scott Aukerman, host of IFC’s Comedy Bang! Bang! (the third season premieres on IFC on May 8) and executive producer and director of “Between Two Ferns.” He talks about how the White House let them get away with basically everything, how the president was easier to work with than some celebrities, and what it was like to give notes to the most powerful man on earth.

The Next Web: Facebook revamps Pages on the desktop with new one-column Timeline design to match user profiles

The biggest change is that the Timeline for Pages now puts all posts into one column, just like on user profiles. As a result, posts will appear the same on your Page as they do in the News Feed.

Looking forward to this. I’m still waiting for the March 2013 announced new timeline look though too.

Remember you can follow UFies over on Facebook as well, if you’re interested in that.

Most of what I know about Bill Gates is from the Dark Days of the Linux / Windows battles of the late 90’s and early ’00s. Reading through the list of stuff he’s done I have to say he sounds like a pretty kick ass guy. Though I don’t know about his kids ‘making their own way’ with only the $10m…..

Flying the world’s fastest plane: Behind the stick of the SR-71 is an amazing writeup about flying one of the most awesome planes built, ever.

Newsweek has found The Face Behind Bitcoin by, shockingly, looking him up.

“I don’t think he’s in any trouble,” I say. “I would like to ask him about Bitcoin. This man is Satoshi Nakamoto.” “What?” The police officer balks. “This is the guy who created Bitcoin? It looks like he’s living a pretty humble life.”

Turns out Satoshi Nakamoto is the guys real name.

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - A tediously accurate map of the solar system. I’ve linked to items like this before, and I will again I’m sure. It’s fascinating to see just how tiny we are in the universe.

A really interesting look at Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface from someone moving from an iPad

Basic things that should really not be complicated are borderline impossible on Windows. For example, how do you create a bootable clone of your hard disk, so that you can boot from an identical external USB hard disk in case the internal disk goes belly-up? On a Mac, you just download Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper17 and run it. In case of emergency, connect the external disk, start the Mac, hit Option, select the external disk, you’re done.

Also:

That’s not an isolated example. Finding software for Windows is a nightmare. Windows users sometimes complain that Mac software is expensive. Maybe it is, but on the plus side, it generally tends to work, and typically doesn’t fill your computer with adware and browser toolbars and background processes that install weird buttons in the toolbars of all of your freaking windows.

It’s definitely not a Windows 8 / Surface hate-fest, or an iPad love fest. He finds lots wrong on both sides of the fence, with the conclusions reached fairly interesting.

Now that Radio Shack is shutting down, you may want to reminisce by going through an archive of Radio Shack Catalogs from 1939 to current.

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!

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.

Holy shit.

Gary Wozniak (Woz’s son) takes us on a thrilling skeleton run.

I honestly had no idea that they were quite this crazy.

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

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.

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!

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.

Ok, this commercial for lego Star Wars microfighters is really good.

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.

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!

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.

Fascinating to see just what’s changed and what hasn’t in the last 87 years.

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.

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.

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.

To quote MacSparky, you have to respect a blogger who can keep you interested for 1,500 words on charging of your batteries.

After more than 60 years, Alan Turing is given posthumous pardon of gross indecency charges, here’s the PDF document from the Queen, reversing one of the most offensive things done, where after breaking codes for the allies during World War 2 Alan Turing was prosecuted for being a homosexual, including chemical castration.

Enough? No. A start? Yes.

Comparing the newest Apple, Nokia marketing spots makes us weep for humanity. Sure it’s a biased source (9to5mac), but seriously, watch the ad and tell me what it’s trying to tell us. One thing that Apple has always (mostly) done well is show in their ads what they want the buyer to feel, show an advantage of the product, etc.

This one is about a creepy babershop and has only the barest connection to the product.

Oh, and showing the tablet rotate a square image a) shows how much lag their is in the rotation and b) why do you rotate a square image!

Saw today that Bangladesh set the record for the largest human flag. I was in Dhaka this May for work and took lots of pictures and had a great time with the people, so a big congrats goes out to the country!

How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the Web is a great writeup on the challenges (some more expected than others) of surfing the web on, in this case, an original Mac Plus.

I’d love to see the equivelant for a windows machine. IE: Windows 3.0 (or 3.1?) and see how it does.

The new version of Instagram today introduced Instagram Direct, a way to send pictures directly to people. Kinda like DMing an image via Twitter, which was just allowed a couple of days ago as well.

Instagram direct is in Instagram 5.0, which is available on Google Play and the iOS App store today.

Epic DUI Prank. I realize it’s making a point, but still, maybe something a bit more “legal” and less “youtube pranky”. Still, ballsy.

Kids, don’t be dumbfucks and drink and drive, k?

Hongkiat has a nice list of Design Resources For Christmas if you are needing to do some rebranding for Christmas.

Today 500px (my favorite photography site online) announced an evolution of it’s marketplace, called 500pxArt.com:

500px Art offers 28 options for base materials, styles, frames and multiple sizing options to choose from. Payment processing is available in over 20 currencies and shipping is world-wide (your most requested option is here!). As a dedicated site, 500pxArt.com is accessible to anyone looking to purchase and sell exceptionally beautiful photographs.

Site looks awesome. Remember that you can of course follow my work there at 500px.com/AlanBailward

If I was a southern bell I’d be fanning myself furiously and saying “lawd, lawd” at this list of Award Winning Sandwiches (With Recipes).

Three helpless deer rescued by hovercraft. Pretty cool.

Seeing the Go-Pro strapped to a MiG-31 “Foxhound” video for an old school fighter jet nerd like me? Epic.

Fascinating look from MailChimp about What Does Your ISP Say About You? Not only does it tell you a lot from your email, but shows what type of user users what ISP and what browser. Point of fact: people still use AOL, AND the AOL browser.

Seriously people?

512pixels has some excellent thoughts On the failure of Healthcare.gov. I too am a web developer and even in the small scale sites I’ve dealt with have these issues, and I can only imagine that on a site like healthcare.gov the issues would be multiplied a bazillion-fold.

Instead of trying to repeal the law, if the government should be spending time revisiting how it purchases and deals with IT. If that can’t happen, more than just healthcare will suffer in the future.

It’s sad that the over-legislation of everything government-oriented means that reasonable and sane things, like having affordable healthcare for everyone get lost in a complete clusterfuck caused by horrible contracting, bad project management, and what I can only imagine is the farthest possible thing from “agile” that you can imagine.

Good buddy and sometimes-contributor Jim sent me this wired article on a Drool-Worthy $99 Kit Lets Kids Build Their Own Computers. It’s a kickstarter for the Kano, a kickstarter campaign to build a computer that’s as easy and fun as lego.

It’s already at $1,000,000 of it’s $100,000 goal, and based on the video, well worth it.

Who wouldn’t want to follow Starwars on Instagram when the first pic is a Darth Vader selfie?

io9 proclaims that China’s Chang’e-3 rocket launch is one of the sexiest you’ll ever see. And they’re right!

The Chinese National Space Administration has successfully launched its Chang’e-3 lunar probe to the moon. If all goes well from here, it’ll be the first Chinese spacecraft to land on an extraterrestrial body — and the first rover to land on the moon in four decades.

As someone who as a kid had more than one book on paper airplanes, I had to immediately back the Smartphone Controlled Paper Airplane by Shai Goitein on kickstarter.

Seriousoy, how f-n cool is this?!

Found on the net is this Star Wars concept video (nothing official or to do with Episode VII, just a fan film): The Apprentice.

That said, it’s a really friggin’ good fan film.

So what happens when you’re a child and a victim of terrible things, and don’t feel safe in your own house? Turns out the simple solution is you have a tough-as-nails biker gang hanging around you to protect you.

She never feels safe, even with her parents just downstairs. The unruly-looking mob in her driveway is there to help her feel safe again. They are members of the Arizona chapter of Bikers Against Child Abuse International, and they wear their motto on their black leather vests and T-shirts: “No child deserves to live in fear.”

Seriously, how amazingly cool are these bad ass mofos?

If the man who hurt this little girl calls or drives by, or even if she is just scared, another nightmare, the bikers will ride over and stand guard all night. If she is afraid to go to school, they will take her and watch until she’s safely inside. And if she has to testify against her abuser in court, they will go, too, walking with her to the witness stand and taking over the first row of seats. Pipes will tell her, “Look at us, not him.” And when she’s done, they will circle her again and walk her out.

I want to be part of a gang like this. It seriously brings a tear to my eye just reading the story.

“Are you afraid?” No, the boy said. Pipes says the judge seemed surprised, and asked, “Why not?” The boy glanced at Pipes and the other bikers sitting in the front row, two more standing on each side of the courtroom door, and told the judge, “Because my friends are scarier than he is.”

Very cool pair of videos that Jim found on the Loop. First is a great viral video called Miss Ping, and then the second is the Miss Ping video demystified where it’s all dymistified.

Ars Technica has a great article, Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2 all about the rise (kinda) and fall, and everything in between of this ill fated OS (of which I was a great supporter and really thought was better in the pre-Windows 95 days.

Fan made comic: Batman: The Deal.

Wow. Amazing.

Day One (the iOS and Mac app) has a nice Journal Series which is more about how and why to keep a journal or diary than about their (excellent) app. Good read.

Thomas Hawk has his First Impressions on Flickr’s New Book Publishing Service.

BBC Brings the great news that Monty Python is going to to reunite for stage show.

All of the surviving members of comedy group Monty Python are to reform for a stage show, one of the Pythons, Terry Jones, has confirmed.

Epic.

So to me this approaches the “Going too far” zone. Quantifying my dogs: Four weeks with Whistle’s canine activity tracker. Basically it’s the fitbit for your puppy.

Really world? Have we reached the hipster phase where tracking your own steps is old and boring, you have to track your dog too?

The Belle-V Ice Cream Scoop by Belle-V Kitchen on kickstarter is really the only innovation in the ice cream scoop industry I’ve ever seen, and I’m a big fan of ice cream. Seriously cool. They’re over halfway to their kickstarter goal too, lets make this happen!

Somehow I missed posting this last week when I saw it…. don’t watch on a bit monitor full screen and high resolution if you get vertigo at all, bit if you do, this Backflip Over 72ft Canyon, plus the rest of Kelly McGarry’s bike run is insane to watch.

Sad news today on the Everpix Blog that the photo storage and sharing service is shutting down :( I’ve followed Everpix for a while now and really thought they had “made it”. They were well loved by the photography community.

Some more information about the shutdown over in this Verge article.

The upside is that the guys involved are talented, so you know whatever they create next will be awesome. Best of luck in the future gentlemen.

Really incredible heart-warming bond with two conservationists who rescued a lioness in Africa. Super cute pics.

She is now a beacon for hoped success of the Modisa Wildlife Project, founded in Botswana, Africa, by Mr Gruener, from Germany, and Mr Legarth, who is Danish, with the hope of saving the lion population.

Via this reddit story.

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.

Mind-Bending Ad Uses Anamorphic Illusions & Forced Perspective To Fry Your Brain.

Very well done.

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.

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!

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.

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.

In the latest blog post, it’s announced that Godaddy has bought Media Temple.

Hmm… not sure how this is going to end.

Great talk by Maciej Cegłowski, inventor of Pinboard at this years XOXO. Very funny and insightful.

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.

• Smartphone connectivity and control
• Smoke and CO detector
• Voices tell you what’s going on
• Easy to shut it up if you burn a pot roast (no more jumping up and down waving a towel)
• Motion detectors light up to help you find your way at night
• Sexy design
• Will talk to your Nest thermostat in the event of a CO detection
• more….

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.

Web History, a timeline. Very cool.

Popular Science] explains [Why We’re Shutting Off Our Comments(http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/why-were-shutting-our-comments):

Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television.

Via Daring Fireball.

Unicode and UTF-8 explained in 10 minutes, on the back of a napkin.

A fantastically good explanation of just how it works, why, and how damn good it is compared to other systems.

How many megapixels do you need?

So how many megapixels do you need? Here’s the shortest answer we can muster: for most purposes 3MP is plenty, but you might want to shoot at around 8MP for the crispest possible details. 8MP is a sensible minimum for big prints and 4K TVs, and even higher resolutions allow you to crop photos without sacrificing quality too much. However, make sure that very high resolutions are matched by an equivalent increase in sensor size. 

Just to prove we’re not all about Apple, or Linux, or Windows, or mobile, or Movies, here’s FreeBSD 10′s New Technologies and Features.

Via OSNews.

Yesterday Evernote introduced a Referral Program:

Today, we’re launching a new program to say thanks for spreading the word. Now, whenever you invite your friends, family and coworkers to Evernote, you’ll earn points that you can use towards Premium subscriptions, monthly upload limit increases and more.

Basically if you’re an evernote user, you can get access to premium features by getting your friends to sign up to evernote through a referral link. You collect points which you can redeem against a ton of interesting stuff.

As an evernote user, and someone who is a huge fan and has written about them a lot in the past, I’ll encourage you to now go and sign up and check out the benefits of Evernote.

Not only do you get bonuses, but if you sign up through a referral link like this one, you’ll get a month of Evernote premium and all the benefits associted with it. Hard to say no at the deal.

Map of Europe: 1000 AD to present day.

NASA Spacecraft Embarks on Historic Journey Into Interstellar Space

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from our sun.

Which is more awesome/freaky:

• Voyager is only two years younger than me
• Something that we meat bags built is in intersteller-freakin’ space

I’ll go with a little from column A, a little from column B…

Tim Ferris, author of the “4” series (4 Hour Body, 4 Day Workweek, and 4 Hour Chef), has released the audiobook (and more) for his latest book The 4-Hour Chef for free on bittorrent.

I am today releasing the audiobook of The 4-Hour Chef…for free.

He goes into some of the reasoning behind things in the blog post.

bsolutely Insane Live-Action ‘Mirror’s Edge’ Parkour Video](http://www.geeksofdoom.com/2013/09/08/because-awesome-absolutely-insane-live-action-mirrors-edge-parkour-video):

Awesome. Big screen required.

Yahoo’s Logo Reveals the Worst Aspects of the Engineering Mindset from the Glog is a dissection of the thinking process in a very geeky way.

If there is one sentence in the entire blog post that tells the whole story, that is it. This shows that not only does she lack an understanding of design — which is fine, it’s not where her strengths lie — but that she also doesn’t know it; that designers consulted were unable to disabuse her of this ridiculous notion; and that the final result pleased her, when it is obviously flawed in this regard.

Either I’m missing something, or The New Yahoo! Logo is not exciting enough to save the company. Did anyone else wait breathlessly for the new and final logo to be announced?

When your product gets people to start blogs called How the fuck did the Q10 ship? you’ve made more than a small mistake.

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.

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.

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.

Fantastic old school documentary video from the 60s about The Apollo Guidance Computer.

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.

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.

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.

• Why is the lady putting the 3D virtual object down carefully? It looks silly.
• The part with the lego would be worth the $667 price tag.

As with any technology like this, I’ll believe it when I see it.

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.

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.

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 :)

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?

The Tumblr Porn Crackdown Is Here:

Oh, did the users screech and holler when Marissa Mayer’s purple people-eater bought Tumblr for $1 billion about how she was going to take away their nudie pictures forever. Ads were swiftly thrown into the Tumblr dashboard and now, a few months later, the crackdown on Tumblr porn has begun. “Tumblr welcomes free expression, but we have to be sensitive to the millions of readers and bloggers from different locations, cultures, and backgrounds with different points of view concerning mature/adult-oriented NSFW content,” the Tumblr team says on a page explaining the new guidelines that appeared today.

Via The Atlantic Wire.

Of Beards and Men is a kickstarter project for a photo book of, well, bearded men. Great looking images, support this guy!

Note: I am in the process of growing an epic beard.

View of Niagara Falls from a remote helicopter…. you’ll want a big screen (and enable HD) for this one:

The Verge asserts that AT&T’s Next phone upgrade plans are a huge ripoff.

Shocked?

No, I didn’t think so.

Jon Negroni writes his grand unifying The Pixar Theory:

Every Pixar movie is connected. I explain how, and possibly why. Several months ago, I watched a fun-filled video on Cracked.com that introduced the idea (at least to me) that all of the Pixar movies actually exist within the same universe. Since then, I’ve obsessed over this concept, working to complete what I call “The Pixar Theory,” a working narrative that ties all of the Pixar movies into one cohesive timeline with a main theme. This theory covers every Pixar production since Toy Story.

This blew my mind.

Lego Super Star Destroyer Timelapse from TWiT.

Oh god I want this.

I’m not exactly sure how the New Rogers $35 Connection Fee will “bring me more value”, but if it’s that awesome, I can’t wait to get in on it, especially at the bargin price of only $15.

*sigh*

Astrid Says Service Shutdown Date Set for August 5, 2013

[…]When we built Astrid, we sought to help as many people as possible become happier, healthier and more productive - and we certainly hope we helped you. Thank you again for your support.

Another victim of acquisitions…

Samsung Acquires Media Box Company Boxee For $30 Million.

In what’s likely an effort to bring improvements to its Smart TV software, Samsung has reportedly just acquired Boxee, a company which specializes in creating home media center devices, for the tune of $30 million.

Hopefully they can make it so you can actually reboot a boxee box through the menu, which it seems you can’t do right now.

I don’t care if you’re a Canon person, a Nikon person, or a Pentax person, the Nikon Symphony is just awesome!

So what’s more awesome than watching parkour? How about a Point of View parkour video?

Definitely don’t watch this full screen on a huge monitor if you get queasy or motion sick ;)

9-5 Mac says that the Facebook phone experiment is over as AT&T clears stock and nobody else steps forward.

AT&T had earlier denied that any plans had been made to discontinue the handset, but there had seemed little doubt about the handset’s future after the carrier dropped the price from $99 to 99 cents. Even Facebook itself went as far as telling users that the  front-end could be switched off …

Hardly shocking, if it’s true.

The Sony SmartWatch 2 has been unveiled:

[…] The Sony Smartwatch 2 has officially been unveiled, sporting a new design, new interface and a cornucopia of new features. Specs include a 1.6-inch (220 x 176) touch display, NFC for easy pairing with your Android phone, Bluetooth 3.0 wrapped inside a dust and water resistant (IP57) aluminum body with a design reminiscent of the Sony Xperia Z. Sony will also include a stainless steel wrist band with the Smartwatch 2, but users will be able to personalize the device with any standard 24mm strap.

John over on Venture Beat writes that Google has added a stunning ‘Street View’ of the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa:

At 2,717 feet, 160 floors, and almost a kilometer in height, the Burj Khalifa is the tallest manmade structure in the world. Now you and I can tour it without ever visiting Dubai, courtesy of Google Street View. But with heights like these revealing the city of Dubai, the sea, the interior passages of the building, and the highest pool in the world, Google is going to have to find a new name for “Street View.”

I think that if you click on this link you can start the street view journey. Or just search for “Burj Khalifa” on google and go in through the normal maps interface.

We were wrong:

Let us be 100% clear: Content promoting or glorifying violence against women or anyone else has always been prohibited from Kickstarter. If a project page contains hateful or abusive material we don’t approve it in the first place. If we had seen this material when the project was submitted to Kickstarter (we didn’t), it never would have been approved. Kickstarter is committed to a culture of respect.

Fourth, today Kickstarter will donate $25,000 to an anti-sexual violence organization called RAINN. It’s an excellent organization that combats exactly the sort of problems our inaction may have encouraged.

Well worth the full read, and good on Kickstarter for coming out and laying it on the table. Sucks they didn’t act fast enough to stop the funding for this project, but they have done what they can I think.

Pretty fascinating story of Inside Digg’s Race to Build the New Google Reader.

Remember how Google is killing Google Reader at the end of this month? Well, there haven’t been a huge number of updates on alternatives yet. Feedly updated to use their own cloud recently, and today Digg posted a Digg Reader Update:

Over the last 90 days, the Digg engineering team — all 5 of them — has been heads-down building an updated take on the RSS reader. For our first public release, in time to (just) beat the shutdown of Google Reader, our aim has been to nail the basics: a web and mobile reading experience that is clean, simple, functional, and fast. We’re also introducing a tool that allows users to elevate the most important stories to the top.

The biggest challenge in getting a “new” Google Reader alternative is not a good web interface. It’s important, but it’s getting that and a backend interface that’s supported by all the third party clients. IE: Reeder, Mr. Reader, and the tons of other iOS and Android feed readers that need a backend. For example I use Reeder on the iPhone and Mr. Reader on the iPad, and both have to use the same backend system or I’m screwed in my daily feed reading.

Sigh. I’m still hoping that Google will change their mind and keep Google Reader around for another few years.

Saw this morning that IFTTT has launched a 500px channel. This lets you add 500px as a source or target for any If This Then That recipes that you have.

Passed on via facebook: Free Lynda.com Course: Black & White with Photoshop and Lightroom

Lynda.com has a free post-processing course, Black and White with Photoshop and Lightroom, now through June 21 from Photoshop Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes. 

The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald

Amazing song.

Google Explains Why They Killed Their RSS Reader: It’s Your Fault. I disagree. I’ve been reading in Google Reader since it came out. Consistently. Daily. Hourly.

Google wants people to move away from the old “passive” model of sitting down and reading nows. Instead they’d like us to take an “active” approach, such as having artificial intelligence services such as Google Now tailer news and alerts based on our search preferences.

I read this as “we need to push people to Google Plus, and if they don’t have an RSS reader maybe they’ll use it more.”

:(

Feedly is listening and posts about their next moves in the Google Reader issue.

But we still have a long way to go. We have been turning to the community to finalize the roadmap for the rest of this year - thanks for the 3,500+ ideas and the tens of thousands of votes you casted on uservoice. This is what it looks like:

[…]

We have been working behind the curtains with the developers of Reeder,Press, Nextgen Reader, Newsify and gReader as design partners for our Normandy project[1]. Today we are excited to announce that you will be able to access your feedly from all these apps before Google Reader retires and that the access to feedly API will be free. More details soon.

Honestly I’ve still got my head in the sand about Google Reader going away in less than a month, hoping that they’ll change their mind. I’ve played with a few alternate feed readers, but the issue is that without a single dominant backend to sync everything. I use Reeder and Mr. Reader on my iOS devices, and the web, all backed by Google Reader. I’ve played with Feedly but it looks (to me) too…. “magazine-y” for my taste. My big worry is that feed readers will adopt a backend that had a crappy web experience, and as a user of multiple Operating Systems, I’ll end up getting a crappy experience when I’m not on Mac or iOS.

Saw this across my facebook feed this morning: Patrick Stewart’s Touching Response To A Fan’s Question:

While at Comicpalooza, a girl asked Sir Patrick Stewart a question about what the most important thing he’d ever done besides acting was. His answer was his work with campaigns against violence toward women, which led to this impassioned answer and wonderful gesture.

I had no idea that Big ice cubes were a thing now…

I’m not sure when the current fetish for huge ice cubes started, but I’ve been noticing it for a few years now. And when I say I’ve “noticed” it, I mean I’ve seen people touting huge ice cubes on the internet—in real life, the ice cubes I come across are the same size they’ve always been. Perhaps my circle of friends is hopelessly old fashioned.

Apostrophes and when to use them over on Slate says that they arent needed anymore.

One hundred and eighteen miles north of London, in the town of Boston, England, there lives a retired newspaperman named John Richards who is experiencing an unusually rotten spring. Richards is the founder and chairman of something called the Apostrophe Protection Society. His world, at least as related to the tiny mark that denotes possessives and the omission of letters from certain words, appears to be crashing down around him.

• Total apostrophes count in the article on how they arent needed anymore? 45
• Total apostrophes in this article: 0

Via Staticred.

Just a quick plug for my buddy John who just launched his Wonderful Colorful House iPad app.

The trip started about 15 years ago when I made up a bed-time story for my daughter, Gabrielle. It was about a kid in the great white North, Tullik, who hated cold and hated white, and who was looking for a better — more wonderful — home.  She loved the story, and asked me for it repeatedly, and suggested that I write it down.

Launching an app is hard, and huge kudos go to him for the launch!

Of course, he never reads ufies and eshews it as a source of news and breaking stories, so realistically, he’ll never see this :P

From my buddy @jtstrocel comes this amazing story on Gizmodo of an Incredible Full Scale Lego X-Wing Is the Largest Model In History.

Seriously, how cool is this.

BBC News - Coffee addiction: Do people consume too much caffeine?

I’d read this but I’ve only had one and a half cups since I got into the office an hour ago.

(I really wish I was just joking about that)

Speaking of awesome people, check out Chris Hadfield’s Post-landing Interview With NASA.

Flickr’s new stuff:

• A terabyte of storage
• A new look

Looks very pinterest-y, with a look similar to google+ and the “masonary” photo layout. Looks good so far, hopefully it’s more than a coat of paint and they’re going to really drive Flickr to be a great site.

Celebrating the fact that the new Star Trek movie is out this weekend, here’s a list of Star Trek Science mistakes from Slate.com.

The problem is distance. Unless Delta Vega were a moon of Vulcan (and in the original series Spock says his planet has no moon), the planet would be way, way too far away to see as anything but a point of light in the sky. And that’s if it’s in the same star system; from another star, even Vulcan’s star might be too far away to see (also, Delta Vega is established in the original series as a remote planet, the location of a dilithium mining station).

Possibly the coolest page you’ll read today: 3-D Scans Reveal Caterpillars Turning Into Butterflies.

Science!

I missed that Yahoo! acquired Astrid, a popular cross platform todo list manager.

Of course, as things like this go, they’re sunsetting it. No more premium subscriptions, and the team is joining the Yahoo mobile team to work on their apps.

If you’re not happy about this, you can also check out the Wunderlist Astrid import to pull your todos into the Wunderlist app.

This Is the Most Detailed Picture of the Internet Ever (and Making it Was Very Illegal):

Why would you need a map of the Internet? The Internet is not like the Grand Canyon. It is not a destination in a voyage that requires so many right turns and so many left turns. The Internet, as the name suggests and many of you already know, is nothing but the sum of decentralized connections between various interconnected computers that are speaking roughly the same language. To map out those connections and visualize the place where I spend so much of my time may not have any clear use, but it intrigues the pants off me. 

Beautiful Steampunk Link Cosplay by Molecular Agatha

Hong Kong giant inflatable rubber duck

Why do I feel like singing the rubber duckie song?

Robotic Insects Make First Controlled Flight

Need to add a Science category.

Any FYI from njabl.org that they’re shutting down their DNSBL.

March 1, 2013: NJABL is in the process of being shut down. The DNSBL zones have been emptied. After “the Internet” has had some time to remove NJABL from server configs, the NS’s will be pointed off into unallocated space (192.0.2.0/24 TEST-NET-1) to hopefully make the shutdown obvious to those who were slower to notice.

So grep through your mailserver configs for “dnsbl.njabl.org” and comment it out lest any issues pop up.

Great set of images from a 100 year old time capsule. Most interesting I think was that they included a player for the gramophone recorded greetings, knowing that technology would have progressed past wax cylinders in 100 years. I wonder if our “current” time capsules include the power and adapters needed to play / use whatever “modern” tech we’re including in it. How far up the chain do you go? A hand crank in case power standards have changed in 100 years?

The Verge posted their Samsung Galaxy S4 review, with a final score of 8/10. Mostly good, though Gruber points out a few interesting bits in the review (ie: the display being horribly over-saturated but still getting a 10/10) as well as a snipe at the easy mode.

Still, if you’re ready to upgrade and in the Android camp, this sounds like the phone to get.

Nice selection of Roof Topper Photographers on the 500px blog. Definitely something not for the weak-stomached :)

Twitter rolls out #Music app for iPhone and web, with iTunes, Spotify and Rdio integration. Interesting, I’m not sure it’s for me, and how it’s not Just Another Way To Advertise. I can definitely see this as a way to move in on the ‘myspace music’ mindspace that I think still exists, and maybe a bit on band’s facebook pages as well.

We’ll see how this goes.

Great article on Charlie’s Diary: PSA: Ignore the news

[…] publicly available news media in the 21st century exist solely to get eyeballs on advertisements. That is its only real purpose. The real news consists of dull but informative reports circulated by consultancies giving in-depth insight into what’s going on. The sort of stuff you find digested in the inside pages of The Economist.

First, there’s photographic evidence and rumour. Then there’s some initial information—immediate numbers of dead and injured, scary photographs. But the amount of new information coming out tapers off rapidly after the first hour or two, and gives way to rumour and speculation.

Seriously, once you start noticing the pattern you’ll see that this happens with everything. I even saw a 30 minute long video posted by a “friend” on facebook today about how the Sandy Hill massacre (you know, a bunch of children killed by a nutcase) was in face perpetrated by the government (and covered up) to help ban assault rifles and continue on the world government. Or something. The 10 minutes or so I could stand of the video (think tin foil hat folks) was basically piecing bits and pieces of news from different networks and different times and you could just tell that they were grasping at straws and using what kids were telling the news right after it.

Anyway, it was disgusting and you should stay away from the 24 hour news stations. Seriously, you’ll be happier. De-friend stupid people on facebook as well.

No More Voices is a very cool project.
Things to do with your voices will explain it a bit more.

Everyone has them, those nagging voices of fear and doubt. They only get loud when you do things that matter. And since we’re going to do a lot of things that matter, we can expect some voices headed our way. So what do we do?

Stuff like this is awesome. Contribute. Create.

Saw this this morning: “Firefly” Hat Triggers Corporate Crackdown. The short (and slightly wrong) version is that ThinkGeek got the official license to make the hats commercially, so Fox started cracking down on the homebrew DIY folks selling the hats on Etsy etc.

“The irony of it is that it’s the fans of the show who have propelled the hat into the iconic symbol that it is. The hat itself had only a few measly minutes of screen time in one episode— an episode that Fox didn’t even air.”

My response:

Dear Fox:  Screw you.

I got my hat from a facebook friend who has made over a hundred of them and I will continue to support her and not ThinkGeek in this case.

Update: ThinkGeek has responded, including the promise to donate all proceeds from the Jayne hat sales to charity. Good on them.

This Is How Google Glass Really Works over at mashable.

Nice review of different types of headphones: Regular Audio Human

As the cables hanging from my ears drag across the wool coat I’m wearing, the scratching sound races up the cords with perfect, annoying fidelity. If I happen to be eating peanuts while wearing these headphones, I hear the death cry of each and every peanut I consume.

Via DF.

Just a happy dog to start your morning!

(Also me testing the connectivity of the UFies.org Facebook Page) :)

Les Chevaliers du Ciel is cut together footage, and looks awesome, and is all (as I understand) real fighters, no CGI.

Over at Inspired By Apple an amazingly reasonable post shows the craziness of tech bloggers while remaining completely rational (despite the blog name). Case in point (emphasis mine):

But plenty of LOLs at the yawning, Silicon Valley-sized gulf between the techbloggers (“OMG! Facebook will steal YOUR SOUL AND YOUR CHILDREN AND YOUR PRECIOUS, PRECIOUS, PERSONAL DATA!”) and, well, everyone else (“It’s a phone. With Facebook. And Android. And it looks like an iPhone.”) I might be wrong, but I don’t think people actually care that much.

Georgia high school to host first integrated prom, via this reddit story.

Seriously, what the hell Georgia? This sort of crap is why the rest of the world thinks you’re a bunch of backwards hicks, and why the US gets looked down at by other countries. Not because you deserve it, but because stories like this get out and all people see is this sort of stupid, backwards behaviour instead of the good people, great deeds, and amazing advances in science, medicine, and technology that you make.

But seriously, congrats on having a prom that lets both white and non-white students be in the same place, that’s really awesome of you.

Note: based on comments on reddit (and if you don’t read the story) it seems that the school doesn’t have an official prom, so it’s up to the community to do it, which makes it a private event, which lets them keep the black people out invite whomever they want.

Still not convinced this isn’t yet another April Fool’s Day joke however.

Introducing Home at the Facebook Newsroom explains just what it is:

Our answer is Home. Home isn’t a phone or operating system, and it’s also more than just an app. Home is a completely new experience that lets you see the world through people, not apps.

This Tokyo Roppongi Gigapixel image is amazing. Not only for the view itself, but for the fact you can read street signs at the far end of the shot. Wow.

Via RiceHigh.

How Far is it to Mars? is a great look at just how amazingly vast space is.

Holy nostalgia trip batman! Watching Forging He-Man’s Sword I was instantly transported back to watching the TV show as a kid.

Thanks to my buddy Jim for the link and the trip back down memory lane.

Over at the RDio blog: Introducing Vdio:

The first thing you’ll notice about Vdio is that it’s designed to solve the “what to watch” problem. It’s not just that we’ve got amazing content, but that the experience is now geared to get you from searching to watching faster. We’re introducing the notion of Sets — playlists for TV shows and movies — so anyone can make and share lists of their favorites, making it easier than ever to discover new stuff. Or, you can just check out what your friends are watching in the moment and jump in. Beyond that, Vdio has the beautiful design and social features that people love about Rdio, with plenty more to come.

First of all, cool idea, levering the “what to listen to” technology towards video. Secondly, horribly name to pronounce…. Is it just “video” or “veedeeoh” or “veedio”?

Only available in the US and UK right now of course :(

Via @brian_pearce.

Firefox hits 20 and is now allowed to drink in Canada and the UK, but not in the US yet.

Top new features are a new download manager (looks a lot like the one from Safari) and per window private browsing (like in Chrome). Both awesome additions.

Luke and Leia Had Sex says The Good Men Project.

A couple years back, I was watching Star Wars and several things became apparent to me. I’ve since explicated these revelations to a number of other people, and all of them have been persuaded. Now, to help ruin the childhoods of that many more people, I offer for posterity my proof that Princess Leia had sex with both Luke Skywalker and Han Solo after the battle of Yavin.

Via JWZ.

Well, Google Nose (in beta of course) is the first of the April 1st pranks I’ve seen so far.

Coming to your senses: go beyond type, talk, and touch for a new notation of sensation.

Remember, for the next 24 hours or so, don’t believe anything you read on the Internet.

The Chromatic Typewriter is a very cool modification and new medium for art. Or something like that. Easiest to just click the link and enjoy. Also check out http://www.tyreecallahanpaintings.com/enter.

Found via reddit.

I know cracked.com is normally where you go for 7 hotties from the 80s or 4 mindblowingly cool video game moments, but their 5 Mind-Blowing Facts Nobody Told You About Guns is actually pretty damn intereting. For example, here’s some info about the clock tower sniper, discussing the profile of a mass murderer.

Except Whitman didn’t just “snap.” In the last months of his life, he experienced terrible headaches and violent urges he couldn’t explain. He went to a doctor, who turned him away, and in his suicide note he even suggested that they look at his brain to figure out what had suddenly changed. Sure enough, when they opened him up, there was “a tumor the diameter of a nickel” pressing on his amygdala, the part of the brain that “is involved in emotional regulation, especially fear and aggression.”

Anyway, it’s not really pro or con for guns, but more just “about” them (though I’m sure your own beliefs will color what you think the article is about. A good read regardless.

Credit goes to long time UFie RoundTop for the link showing up in my news feed originally!

Forward is pretty mind-binding.

Full screen, high resolution recommended.

Interesting read on The dire state of Wordpress:

The kind of rewrite I’m talking about would require a fundamental rethink of the entire platform. We’re talking thousands of man-hours for no direct financial reward. If Automattic were to do this it would require a shakeup of their business model, given they don’t make any money directly from the WordPress codebase.

OK, don’t let the thumbnail of Biting Elbows - ‘Bad Motherfucker’ (Insane Office Escape 2) fool you, it’s not about boobs, it’s about pure awesome. Just watch it.

I want options, but I also want a good experience. In Checkboxes that kill your product Alex Limi goes through some simple checkboxes in Firefox that will, in a couple of clicks, make the browser completely unusable, and for anyone not just a little technical, completely “break” the internet.

It’s a fine balance you need when you design a software product to give people options, but not too many, resulting in them shooting themselves in the foot. For me, KDE is one extreme (every option exposed) and GNOME / mac are close to the right mix (for me), but sometimes going too far towards the “too few options” direction. Some people whine and cry about removing options, but if you’re pissing off 1% of your users and making things easier and better for you and 99% of the rest of your users….

The video is called Phantom Flex Highlights but really should be simply “stuff blowing up shot by high speed cameras”.

Thanks Staticred for the link!

Dropbox says Welcome Mailbox as they acquire the very cool new Mailbox.app which has some new and interesting ways of dealing with mail (if you use gmail). They say:

After spending time with Gentry, Scott, and the team, it became clear that their calling was the same as ours at Dropbox—to solve life’s hidden problems and reimagine the things we do every day. We all quickly realized that together we could save millions of people a lot of pain.

Very cool, though I’m interested to see what the business model is here. I get a bit nervous sending all my email through someone else’s servers when I’m not paying them for the app or service. One might wonder what they’re doing with all the data to make money.

iFixit has a full Pebble Teardown if you’re wondering what’s going on inside your new smartwatch.

Saw this this morning: Trojan Horse Hidden ‘Beautify’ Photoshop Action Reverts Women’s Bodies to Un-retouched State. Viral marketing at it’s best of course. While I’m all for people being satisfied with themselves, young girls not being pressured by the media, etc, blaming “photoshop” is just silly. So much of what people consider “unphotoshopped images” these days are really just “bad pictures”. You can do a ton to change perception with just a pose, good lighting, and a pretty model before you start doing massive body alterations with the liquefy filter.

But lets call this what it is, a viral marketing add to get you to buy beauty products from Dove. Altruistic as they are, their goal is to get you to give them money in the end.

Twitter discontinuing iPhone, Android, and Air versions of TweetDeck.

Twitter has announced that it will be discontinuing several TweetDeck apps in favor of the web client. The Android, iPhone, and Air-based desktop clients will all be affected; the apps will be removed from their stores in early May, and stop functioning soon after. Facebook integration will also be removed.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. The clients haven’t gotten any more than a handful of updates recently, and twitter is definitely more interested in having users use their (controllable, unable to remove ads and promoted tweets on, able to push “partner content” on users from) web platform.

I’m not hugely sad about this, I haven’t used TweetDeck in ages. However I do see this as the harbinger of things to come for the also unloved desktop Twitter official apps.

I don’t say “holy crap” to lego creations that often, but when I saw Lego Hogwarts I did indeed say “holy crap”.

Hard to describe in the title, but you’ll want to check out some great images by muradosmann on Instagram of his girlfriend yourleo.

Found via this reddit thread.

Comparing low-distraction readers over on Unclutterer and looks at the top few, with pros and cons.

Each has its own pros and cons, but which is the best? Everyone has their preferences, but I took a look at three options and picked my favorite. Here’s what I found while comparing Safari Reader, Instapaper Text, and Clearly:

Awesome Video of What It’s Like To Be In Lightsaber Duel Between Darth Vader and a Jedi.

The Stunt People created a short first-person perspective video on a GoPro camera in which you start as Vader himself fighting a Jedi, and then eventually transition over to the Jedi’s perspective. The results are pretty awesome…if you can get past this all going down in what appears to be an office building or something. They pulled it off in a half hour, what do you want?!

What are you waiting for? Watch it now!

App.net today Introduced a free tier, allowing anyone to take part in the twitter-like service.

The free tier has some significant limitations:

• Have to get an invite from an existing (paid) user
• Limited to following 40 users
• 500mb of file storage
• 10mb max file upload

There are incentives though, if you invite someone and they invite others, you both get additional file space.

This is an interesting play, but I’m not sure if it should be seen as doom and gloom: “App.net is struggling for users and has resorted to giving the service away” or exciting: “App.net is livening up the ecosystem and bolstering their position as a social network.”

Either way, if you want to through me an invite at @arcterex I would love you forever :)

Amazing 320-Gigapixel London Panorama Breaks Record for Largest Panoramic Photo. Pretty sure I can see my house in there, and I live in Canada!

World’s first 3D printing pen smashes Kickstarter goal in a few hours via The Verge. I somehow missed this. It looks like the absolute coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

Anyone else getting one?

I’m not sure if this is new or not, but it’s new to me! A new style Looney Toons animation… same content, but modern animation.

So the summary of the Tesla vs. The New York Times story is that the NYT wrote a story about a test drive in a Tesla electric car and how they ran out of juice at the wrong times, had issues, etc. It’s worth the read. However, read it with a big grain of salt, because it wasn’t 100% true.

Tesla responded because they have all the data from the drive and so they know exactly what happened on the drive, and their facts definitely didn’t match up with the reviewers, not only some little details, but some big details.

I have to agree with io9 when they say that The “Hobbit Hole Litter Box” is even more beautiful than we imagined.

We didn’t even know we wanted a Hobbit-themed litter box until we heard it existed. Now we can’t imagine our without it. We’ll be sure to let you all know when this bad ass box is available for purchase.

Could not agree more. TAKE MY MONEY!

Kinda big news from Opera Developer News this morning, they posted that they are going to move to WebKit for the rendering engine for Opera.

The short answer is that it shouldn’t affect your day-to-day work. Keep coding to the standards, not to individual rendering engines; test across browsers - Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer; use all vendor prefixes and an unprefixed form in your CSS and JavaScript. However, it remains important to keep the following in mind:

(Via Reddit).

The reasoning they give is:

The WebKit project now has the kind of standards support that we could only dream of when our work began. Instead of tying up resources duplicating what’s already implemented in WebKit, we can focus on innovation to make a better browser. Opera innovations such as tabbed browsing, Speed Dial and data-saving compression that speeds up page-load, have been widely copied and improved the web for all.

This is interesting. On one hand, I agree with the top reddit comment about how it’s got to suck for the people who have been working on the Opera rendering engine since 1994. It was the first “alternate” engine that I used and had, and still has, some pretty awesome stuff, and it’s still (I believe) one of the fastest browsers, and has some great performance on low end machines.

On the other hand though, maybe the market has spoken and crowned WebKit the third browser engine and said there’s just no place for another engine. In reality I think this is the better way. Web developers have enough to deal with writing cross platform compatible code for:

• Mozilla rendering engine
• Webkit (Safari, Chrome)
• IE
• Old versions of IE
• Opera
• Mobile
• Three different operating systems
• All the minor differences between different versions of all the above

I dislike redundancy, so I applaud this move. While I love openess and choice, having 18 different media players, all 3/4 baked and none complete or fully tested is a far worse thing (in my opinion) than having 2 or 4 really awesome media players that have full communities and momentum behind them. Sounds like Opera is up with this too.

Of course, really respectful web developers will still have to support Opera (which is pretty standards compliant already, so it’s not a huge deal) for a few years, as I hear there’s a fairly vocal Opera user group out there :)

How the Star Wars Kessel Run Turns Han Solo Into a Time-Traveler.

You’ll hear any reputable Star Wars fan point it out eventually: Han Solo’s famous boast that the Millennium Falcon “made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs” may have sounded impressive, but from an astronomical perspective, it made no sense. A parsec is a unit of distance, not time, so why would Solo use it to explain how quickly his ship could travel?

Just read it.

How to Hang a Sweater, for the hipster in your life.

i found your mitten. Just click on it, it’s cool. Then head over to I Found Your Mitten.com.

The 2013 Sony World Photography Awards at In Focus from The Atlantic.

Wow. Some amazing work in here.

The Instagram Blog announced that there’s now an Instagram Feed on the Web.

Today, I’m very excited to announce the launch of a product we’ve been wanting to build for quite some time now. Since our launch in October of 2010, we’ve focused on building a simple app that has inspired creativity while capturing everyday moments through the lens of your mobile phone. In fact, our focus on building out a mobile-only experience is a unique path that we’ve chosen for many reasons, the most important of which is that Instagram, at its core, is about seeing and taking photos on-the-go. However, to make Instagram even more accessible to our growing community, at the end of last year we started to expand to the desktop web, giving you the ability to see profiles from instagram.com. To continue that path, as of today, you can now browse your Instagram feed on the web - just like you do on your mobile device. Go to instagram.com and log in to your account to give it a try.

So no more mobile only. Interesting…

Note that this is only your feed, not the ability to upload images. Looks good though.

Accuvant LABS Blog has a cool analysis of the Evasi0n Jailbreak’s Userland Component.

The latest jailbreak is out, and it’s time to dissect it and document all the exploits and techniques it contains.  These days, jailbreaks are so well tested that it’s easy for people to forget all the complexity that goes into them.  There are numerous exploit mitigations in iOS userland, such as sandboxing, ASLR, and code signature requirements that make jailbreaking incredibly difficult.

Via Daring Fireball

First-Ever Incredible Footage of a Thought Being Formed via Gizmodo.

A team of Japanese researchers has achieved something incredible: they’ve captured, for the first time ever, a movie which shows how thoughts form in the brain.

Tapbots Makes Netbot a Free Download to Spur App.net Adoption.

Cool stuff, I love their twitter apps, and Netbot is really just tweetbot with a grey skin. Course, you’ll need the $36/year app.net membership to use it. However, the scheme of making the best app.net client free is a good scheme, I wish them good luck.

Found via Jeffrey at Faded and Blurred is the brilliant short film Voice Over. It’s subtitled, but well worth the watch.

Fairly good look from gigaom: BlackBerry 10 smartphone launch gets a few cheers, a bunch of jeers and a lot of meh. I particularly liked the “feature parity to 2010” tweet :)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I think that BB10 is a nice looking smartphone OS, and their new hardware looks good. But to be a plausible third player in the market they have to not only keep current BB users, attract new smartphone users, but also maybe pull some users from iOS and Android. That’s a tough road, especially when the behemoth Microsoft isn’t even in double digit market share after 2 years.

Great interview with Kim Dotcom. He obviously has an axe to grind, but I think that anyone who doesn’t think that the Megaupload takedown was amped up because of the RIAA/MPAA and their ties to the government is deceiving themselves.

Kudos to my buddy Jim for the link.

For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II. They were discovered in 1978, and it’s a fascinating read of a real life “unaware of the rest of the world” story.

That was in 1936, and there were only four Lykovs then—Karp; his wife, Akulina; a son named Savin, 9 years old, and Natalia, a daughter who was only 2. Taking their possessions and some seeds, they had retreated ever deeper into the taiga, building themselves a succession of crude dwelling places, until at last they had fetched up in this desolate spot. Two more children had been born in the wild—Dmitry in 1940 and Agafia in 1943—and neither of the youngest Lykov children had ever seen a human being who was not a member of their family. All that Agafia and Dmitry knew of the outside world they learned entirely from their parents’ stories. The family’s principal entertainment, the Russian journalist Vasily Peskov noted, “was for everyone to recount their dreams.”

Just imagine how terrified you’d be if someone appeared after you hadn’t seen another soul in decades, with strange devices and technology. Other details like how their language diminished into “blurred cooing” and how they had no replacement for metal (and how cooking became more and more difficult) are fascinating.

Something to think about the next time you think of leaving all technology behind and just living in the woods :)

Ok, this is the most awesome thing I’ve seen in a while. The sound of the dialup, pictured shows in both audio and visual forms what’s going on when a dialup modem connects.

The full size image is pretty awesome, and really shows what’s going on. Huge kudos to Oona Räisänen for putting this together.

I spent 4 years doing tech support Back In The Day(tm) supporting a dial up modem pool at the local Real Estate Board, and more than one time I asked the end user to put the phone at the back of the computer so I could hear what the modem was doing. I can still tell if hardware error correction fails or not.

Just discovered MySQLTuner, a very nifty little perl script that will (read-only) analyse your MySQL install and suggest different configuration changes to make it work better. Going to be using this a lot I think.

MySQLTuner is a script written in Perl that allows you to review a MySQL installation quickly and make adjustments to increase performance and stability. The current configuration variables and status data is retrieved and presented in a brief format along with some basic performance suggestions.

The Verge has a Pebble smartwatch review, for you kickstarter backers frothing at the mouth for your watch to arrive.

… and I use the term ‘songwriter’ loosely. I’m not going to embed the video, but here’s a link to Tweenchronic-Skip Rope for ridicule. Seems that the writer of Rebecca Black’s “Friday” and “Thanksgiving” is at it again.

To quote Ralph on Hollywood Babble On, “aren’t the rappers shooting each other still?”

I made it through about 12 seconds of this before I had to turn it off. I cry for the children of today.

X-Surface: Don’t believe everything you read is the story of how a guy basically just faked a new Microsoft X-Box rumor and how the collective tech press took the bait hook, line, and sinker.

Note that the high journalistic integrity of the UFies.org staff prevented us from putting any such story up.

Course, I’m waiting for the guy pranking the media with a prank about pranking the media.

Prank-prank-prank.

Mozilla is Announcing the Firefox OS Developer Preview Phone!

Developer preview phones will help make the mobile web more accessible to more people. Developers are critical to the web and to Mozilla’s mission to make the web accessible to everyone. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide use Firefox to discover, experience and connect to the Web. A web based on open standards and open technologies. We couldn’t have done this without web developers. Now we are working on bringing the power of the web to mobile, through Firefox OS, along with all the power of open standards and an open community, and once again, we’d like to invite web developers to join us.

‘Every empire crumbles’ by John Moltz is a fantastic read. Make sure you read the punchline.

Apple is losing its hip and unpredictable edge as it risks being left behind by the very technology it helped to proliferate…

Definitely a good look at how people look at Apple’s position in the market.

You know those friends who still have a tiny bit of doubt about the moon landings in 1969? The ones what whip out random things about carvings on rocks, or shadows not lining up, and how scientists that were involved died mysterious deaths? Yea, we all know at least one.

Found while surfing through FlipBoard while waiting for friends to show up at dinner is this great video of Why the Moon Landings Could Have Never EVER Been Faked: The Definitive Proof

This video is so good, so incredibly brilliant, solid and simple, that you will want to paste it all over your Facebooks and Twitters just to piss off all the IMBECILES who still claim that the Moon landings were faked.* The reason is simple: the technology to fake it didn’t exist.

The video is good enough to embed right here for your watching pleasure.

Kim DotCom’s new site Mega has launched. Torrentfreak has the story: Brilliantly Secure, But Not Anonymous. Main site is down right now sadly.

Kim Dotcom response to the Record Labels saying that the Only Way to Stop Piracy is Suing File-Sharers.

Of course, what they should’ve done - a full 10 years ago - is outlined in Dotcom’s Tweet.

I won’t spoil the tweet, but he’s boiled it down to 140 characters (and no one will listen). It’s what we all know already, but something ignored by the “old media”.

Got to see a MaKey MaKey in person last night, thanks to one of the guys at the FV.rb meeting last night.

MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything inbetween[…]

Basically it’s a circuit board with a USB connector to plug into a computer, and it acts as a keyboard. It has several connectors (wsad and up down left right, plus a few others) that when they’re connected, translate into that key being pressed.

This kickstarter project was overfunded by about 20x, and for what it is, I think it’s pretty damn cool.

Very interesting read on Why Programmers Work At Night from Business Insider. I always figured it was because it takes me about 8 hours to properly wake up in the morning.

The Next Web points out that The new Myspace is now open to the public. Now the big question is “will anyone care?”

Via iPhone in Canada: Facebook Launches Graph Search Beta (It's Not a Phone):

What is Graph Search? Graph Search is a new way for you to find people, photos, places and interests that are most relevant to you on Facebook.

What is Graph Search useful for?
Graph Search will help you instantly find others, learn more about them and make connections, explore photos, quickly find places like local attractions and restaurants, and learn about common interests like music, movies, books and more. All results are unique based on the strength of relationships and connections.

What can I search for?
With Graph Search, you can search for people, photos, places and interests.

Very interesting.

Video of Apollo Robbins Pickpocketing from the New Yorker:

In this video, Apollo demonstrates some of his tricks and techniques, using Green as his victim.

Well worth the 6 minutes to watch it.

Well, it got over 34,000 signatures, but sadly, the Whitehouse Responded for the petition to build a death star, and This Isn’t the Petition Response You’re Looking For :(

Some of their (faulty, IMHO) reasoning is:

• The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.
• The Administration does not support blowing up planets.
• Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?

That said, there’s a lot of good stuff in the response about the current state of technology that’s good to see. Kudos for to the white house for responding.

Meowbify by Mobify lets you put in a site and get back the site, but with cats.

“I can’t tell the difference between Ufies.org and the meowbified version!” — an unnamed friend.

You can also hack the source yourself if you need to.

Qualcomm’s insane CES 2013 keynote in pictures and tweets, and the video below.

When having Big Bird come out during your keynote isn’t the weirdest thing in your key note, you’re doing something… uhm…. something. Seriously, go through the tweets and pictures then watch the video, I can’t believe that this isn’t a parody.

Just watching the video made me feel uncomfortable. I love how there’s no applause or laughs at the carefully crafted breaks (at least they didn’t show up on the edit).

Amazon Prime Launches in Canada, Unlimited 2 Day Shipping for $79 Per Year. Nice, finally some of the conveniences coming to the great white north.

Now when will the full selection of electronics and other gear be available as well…? :)

Jon Stewart: If You Can’t Vote For This, ‘Then We’re F*cked’ | Mediaite. Color me naive, but I didn’t think that this would be an issue. Also, who doesn’t love a good Jon Stewart rant?

Go ‘murika?

Via forgetfoo comes HulaCam at Burning Man 2012.

Hope you don’t have a weak stomach for spinning things. Also note there are (covered) boobies in the video, as it seems most women at Burning Man go as close to topless as they can.

Notch.me is an interesting new way to visualize your health. It connects with a variety of online services (RunKeeper, FitBit, etc), and creates cool visualizations of the data it can pull from there.

Starving polar bear attacks BBC cameraman in pod in Arctic Norway. Seriously, you approach someone in that contraption and what the heck do you think is going to happen!

The perspex ‘ice cube’ the photographer was housed in for much of the filming was ‘pretty much bombproof’. But there was a risk it could get brittle when very cold - making the task of filming the polar bears even more perilous. He said: ‘There’s no doubt polar bear cubs are the cutest animals in the world and even the adults have an aesthetic which isn’t threatening.

Trust the BBC to remain calm while a 9’ tall man eater is a sheet of perspex away from eating you for dinner.

The Big Picture has a set of powerful images of the outrage over the recent Indian rape victim’s death.

Number 21 got to me.

I’m all for bitching about the cold and snow as the next guy, but this video of Snowboarding In Downtown Montreal has got to be the coolest thing I’ve seen lately.

Time to get out the excuses for rolling a tear while at work while you watch this story of a Man with Iron Man costume makes autistic boy’s Christmas wish come true.

Cameron, a 13 year-old boy with down syndrome, had his Christmas wish come true thanks to the kindness of a guy with an Iron Man suit and the internet.

Via Hollywood Babbleon.

Pretty amazing video called The Birth Of A Tool. Part III, with John Neeman making a knife out of Damascus steel (from scratch).

http://www.flickr.com/holidaygift

Capitalizing on instagrams issues, and no doubt their increased attention from yahoo. Good on them.

LEGO® Back to the Future DeLorean Time Machine.

Awesome.

Via here.

Saw on C|Net via reddit this morning that Facebook is testing a $1 fee for inbox access. Note that this isn’t for you to send a facebook message to your friend, this is to allow others to message you even if you’re not connected (remember that on facebook only your friends can send you messages).

Translation: “We’re going to allow big companies to pay us a wheelbarrow full of cash to spam you to hell and back.”

This combined with the recently announced auto play video ads coming soon, might be time to drop Facebook. I thought they were making a ton of money already, but I guess greed begets greed begets more ads.

Want a bit of a tearjerker? Watch this 2012: What Brought Us Together video on youtube.

2012 Year in Pictures: Part II from The Big Picture. Don’t forget to hit Part 1.

If you’ve been all angsty about the new Instagram terms of service, you’ll want a look at Instagram vs Flickr, however they (Instagram) wants you to know that they’re listening to your concerns.

Also lets be honest, no one is selling your crappy pictures of a latte no matter how artistic they are.

First of all, dammit, I missed this, I was just talking about CaH and even went to the page to show a friend and saw the “pay what you want” as I scrolled by, but never really registered it. Apparently they had a ‘pay what you want’ event and here are the Cards Against Humanity Statistics for what people paid, what they made, and what they did with the money.

Via reddit where we also are shown how envelopes are addressed when you pay $0.

Boston.com’s The Big Picture has 2012 Year in Pictures: Part I. Great stuff.

RIM’s getting ready for their new line of devices and OS by Sending Out Media Invites for a BlackBerry 10 Event Set for Jan. 30.

Earlier today, Rogers announced they would be offering BlackBerry 10 in the new year and noted the Rogers Reservation System will let you reserve a device if you want one.

Very interesting to see how RIM and Blackberry does in this new smartphone world we live in.

Pinokio is basically the Luxo Jr. lamp from Pixar, brought to life.

TAKE MY MONEY I WANT ONE OF THESE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk, via my buddy @milesforrest on twitter.

What I saw on twitter was yet another comment from an open source “elite” - a person of high visibility with a project that is well known by tens or hundreds of thousands of people - making fun of someone else trying to contribute. Again. And again. And again. Over and over. And it makes me very very sad.

Great story on How Obsessive Fans Built a Better Han Solo Blaster. If you like this, you’ll love Adam Savage’s Ted talk about obsessions and building.

Chasing Ice movie reveals largest iceberg break-up ever filmed. Looks like these guys had no idea what they were about to catch on video.

2012 Year on Twitter, cool to look around and see what’s been going on on twitter this last year.

The AMA (Ask Me Anything): I am Jón Gnarr, Mayor of Reykjavík. AMA. If you don’t know why this is completely cool, you’ll want to read the 12 reasons why Jon Gnarr is the world’s most interesting mayor.

Saw that Amazon Kindle Ebook Store Quietly Launched Canada recently.

Amazon has quietly launched the Kindle Store in Canada over the weekend. First spotted by the Digital Reader last Friday, Amazon’s landing page revealed the debut of the Kindle Store to allow Canadians to purchase ebooks with their local account, instead of going through a US portal.

Nice that we now start getting at least a tiny bit of the US gets in terms of Amazon content. You can hit the kindle store directly here.

Fascinating view (through tweets and commentary) of An iOS user migrating to Android via Storify. Really interesting to see the pain points and the places where iOS has fallen down.

The Register has a great look at the development of OS/2, with all sorts of interesting little tidbits.

Microsoft developers on the OS/2 team were promised a week in Hawaii if they got the thing finished and, of course, had share options. IBM tried to compete with a trip to the Azores, which wasn’t quite as good. It was irrelevant anyway because Big Blue’s HR vetoed our prize on the grounds that IBM rules prohibited that many IBMers being on the same aeroplane.

Just discovered the Consultant’s Canary, a nice little script that will print out a report of, well, pretty much everything on a mac system. Very helpful for debugging questions like “why is my my friend’s computer running so slowly?”

Great imgur album of a 7’ Serenity Model done in Lego. Reddit discussion here.

Fascinating set of Internal Videos Show Why the Microsoft Kin Cratered:

Given Microsoft’s slew of new releases that break from the past, like Windows 8, Windows RT, Surface, and Windows Phone 8, these Kin videos seem worth a second look to see why the company so badly needed to start over from scratch. Also? They’re kind of hilarious.

Really interesting to see “real people” using tech gagets.

Via a facebook link is a kickstarter project for a Self-Cleaning Fish Tank That Grows Food. Now I’m not a fan of mushrooms at all, but anything that lets me have green things, fish, and not have to do any work to do cleaning? I’m in.

Check out their video below.

Only big downside is $50 shipping to outside the US? Boo!

Commentary from Marco on What happens when a Twitter client hits the token limit. Remembering a while back when Twitter seemed to go thermonuclear on client apps, but left a lot of questions about what exactly “work with us” would actually mean.

The real rule, if Twitter was honest and direct, is simple: “We don’t permit anyone to exceed the limit unless we feel like it.” But even then, it would be stupid for anyone to build a business on Twitter with such unstable footing. And if your plan is to stay under the 100,000-token limit, you’d be a fool to believe in the safety and longevity of that exemption.

I wonder what happens when a higher visibility client like TweetBot hits the limit? I’m going to guess the same thing.

App.net here I come…

Full story.

I’m pretty sure a large part of this video / song is parodying itself, and I pray deep down in my soul that the singer and songwriter know it’s horrible, terrible, and an indicatino of the fall of wester society. I present for your consideration Nicole Westbrook’s “It’s Thanksgiving” Is the Most Blatant Rebecca Black Rip-Off Ever.

Why, dear god why.

Via forgetfoo: - Racist, Or Just Dumb? I’m going to go with “yes”. Gotta love the flippant attitude towards human life, just because she doesn’t agree with his politics. Go America.

Extreme Rube Goldberg.

Yowza.

Ok, my birthday is coming up and I just found the perfect gift for me: Romo - The Smartphone Robot for Everyone. Sure you need a second smartphone to control your smartphone controlled robot, but that’s a small price to pay for a freakin’ personal robot (especially one with that cute a face).

Fascinating look Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown, via my buddy Staticred.

Instead, volunteers couldn’t get the system to work from the field in many states—in some cases because they had been given the wrong login information. The system crashed repeatedly. At one point, the network connection to the Romney campaign’s headquarters went down because Internet provider Comcast reportedly thought the traffic was caused by a denial of service attack.

Sounds like a cluster-fuck of presidential proportions (pun intended), but also one that could have been avoided with more time, testing, and all the other things that IT people ask for but rarely get.

To take a break from the Apple loving, Microsoft hating, and random tech stuff and here is a great post from Laughing Squid of Reginald the Kitten Getting Blown Dry in Slow Motion After a Bath.

Seriously, the cutest thing I’ve seen all day.

NASA - Spot The Station is a site where you can sign up for email and text alerts when the ISS is above you.

NASA’s Spot the Station service sends you an email or text message a few hours before the space station passes over your house. The space station looks like a fast-moving plane in the sky, though one with people living and working aboard it more than 200 miles above the ground. It is best viewed on clear nights. For more information on the International Space Station and its mission, visit the space station mission pages.

All this time I thought I needed to be a skydiver or a racecar driver to get good use out of a GoPro, but turns out all you need to be is a cat owner to make good use of it.

Via facebook, check out the Miniatur Wunderland which is a huge model railroad installation. Seriously, this is enough to give model railroaders a heart attack.

Instagram has taken a page from Microsoft an has Announced Instagram Profiles on the Web.

Sadly they aren’t available to everyone. Mine looks like this:

Quite possibly the coolest use of lego I’ve ever seen: LEGO Milling Machines from my friend Fozbaca.

Special mention to the milling machine… wow!

Nice open leter and rant: No One Cares About Your Decision to Leave Apple Products and No One from Apple Will Read Your Poorly-Written Open Letter.

It is an odd relationship with a few companies now share with the so-called “tech press” where rants and complaints aren’t presented as stories, but often as these silly open letters to Apple/Google/Amazon/etc.

Great read regardless.

A DIY Block I Apollo Guidance Computer Replica. Not a bad sunday afternoon (times 4 years) project.

Apparently Kim Dotcom is avoiding “Unsafe” .Com, Picks Me.Ga for New Megaupload. Nothing there but a splash page right now. Interesting to see what results.

I don’t think that his assertion that .com are any less safe or unsafe. If it’s hosted on US servers, I assume that a three letter agency will be able to grab the server, and regardless of it’s domain, if it’s deemed as something against Big Brother, I presume that a three letter agency will be able to sneak into all the main DNS servers and block the domain or TLD.

Is Twitter Wrong? is a great tumblog of the various images you find on twitter (and around the net) to see just how accurate it may (or in most cases, may not) be.

Think you built cool stuff with Lego? Well, via gizmodo is The Most Insane Lego Machine I’ve Ever Seen.

Wow.

Cool stuff from my buddies over at 500px… they have teamed up with Blurb to allow you to produce photo books directly from your 500px account.

Great news everyone! We’ve teamed up with Blurb to make your upgrade experience even better. Now when you upgrade to Awesome or Plus membership you get a complimentary Blurb gift code - $25 worth for Plus upgrade and $50 for Awesome upgrade. That’s like getting a membership for free :)

Square Canada Launches With Free Mobile Card Readers. If you’re not familiar with Square, it’s a personal point of sale system that lets anyone with the reader and an iPhone to take credit card payments. Think Craigslist transactions, friends that owe you money, etc. Glad to see it’s finally hit Canada.

Ever think your dreams aren’t big enough? I certainly think that now after seeing The Full Scale Millennium Falcon Project, a project to build, you guessed it, a full scale copy of the Millennium Falcon.

Hat tip Geeks of Doom.

Tis the season for the lists of things like the 10 Most Creative Matching Costumes for Halloween.

Anatomy of a Hoax is a great look through how someone created a non-existant phone, the Sony Nexus X, and brought it into the world (virtually) and “got” pretty much all the major tech publications, wasting about 1500 hours collectively. Very interesting to see just how little work is required to put a hoax like this out there.

As far as I know, nothing of any notable significance occurred on Monday, October 15, 2012. The social web was still abuzz from the spectacular achievement in human ingenuity from the night before, brought to you by Red Bull and science. People continued to predictably politick and Rainn Wilson did an AMA. However, for an infinitesimal segment of the human population, October 15th was marked by a frenetic search for answers fueled by an anxiety that can only come from leaked photos of an up-and-coming piece of shiny new tech.

Glad it’s not just hitting Apple fans with fake new hardware :)

In the article Outlawed by Amazon DRM, probably the worst of all cases of DRM is exposed. This is the sort of thing that gets your Open Source friends will use as a prime example of why DRM is bad, and quite frankly, they’re right.

The short version is a friend of the author had her Kindle wiped and her Amazon account closed with no explanation and no recourse. Talking to Amazon was like talking to a brick wall in terms of either a) getting it reversed or b) figuring out why.

Not cool Amazon, not cool at all.

Torrent Freak has the explanation of this blog post from The Pirate Bay. Apparently as Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, it Becomes Raid-Proof.

Makes sense to me.

“The communication between the load balancer and the virtual servers is encrypted. So even if a cloud provider found out they’re running TPB, they can’t look at the content of user traffic or user’s IP-addresses.”

Great list of 11 Wonderfully Out There Sci Fi Tattoos. That’s body art I can get behind.

Mapping The Entertainment Ecosystems of Apple, Microsoft, Google & Amazon is really a look at what countries are available depending on where you get your content from.

Most of the big sites and writers seem to be based on the US, and forget that their favourite music/tv/movie provider may not be available to everyone. The Amazon tablet might be the best thing in the world, but as a Canadian I don’t have access to any of it’s movies, TV, or music content. Ditto with things like Google Music. This might be part of the Apple success, while people in the US can turn their nose up at the company (or not, depending on which side of the fence you’re on), and wonder why the world loves Apple so much, looking at the charts it’s easy to see why. The music coverage of Apple vs the rest is pretty amazing, and that combined with them being able to launch new phones simultaneously in 20-30 countries on launch day is pretty impressive.

However once you get down a bit farther into Apps and eBooks, things get more even. Still a very interesting look at the world’s access to “content” when you’re not in the US, also known as the center of the Universe.

So Forgetfoo found a nice counterpoint to the parachute jump from space: Ejecting From A SR-71 At Mach 3.2.

I don’t think the chances of surviving an ejection at Mach 3.18 and seventy-eight thousand eight hundred feet were very good. However, g-forces built up so rapidly that my words came out garbled and unintelligible, as confirmed later by the cockpit voice recorder.

Yowza.

A Space Shuttle on the Streets of Los Angeles from The Atlantic.

Man what I would have given to be in LA when this was happening.

Found a non-region restricted and not taken down copy of the Helmet cam showing Red Bull Stratos skydive from space.

Sphincter clenching.

It’s finally done and you can now watch the Supersonic Freefall From Space over at mashable.

All this to advertise your energy drink? Really?

Think you’re hardcore into Lego? Check out this Incredible LEGO Batcave Built Out of Over 20,000 Pieces. Wow. The little 12 year old in me just sang a little happy song.

Fascinating talk from Derbycon 2012 on Rescuing the Prince of Persia from the Sands of Time, and the story of what happens when you have an old floppy disk with original source code from the late 80s.

Earlier this year, Jordan Mechner, the creator of such games as Karateka, The Last Express, and Prince of Persia, was sent a box of old material from his father’s closet. In it was the original source code to Prince of Persia for the Apple II, a 1989 game he’d sold after years of work. The only problem was, he had no idea how he could rescue it from the fading floppy disks. In a fast-paced storytelling atmosphere, computer historian Jason Scott talks about how that source code was rescued, what it means to bring something lost back from the shadows, and what lessons can be learned from the process.

Note: there is swearing and this guy has an epic beard.

Kudos to the Linux Outlaws for pointing to the link.

Tiny Cameras Mounted to Birds Capture What Life is Like With Wings, another awesome video from the BBC. High def and full screen is the only way to watch this.

A soldier and his squirrel. Definitely the cutest thing you’ll see all day.

Very interesting read: Is Your To-Do List Killing You?, basically advocating ditching todo lists completely.

I’ve spent the last 10 years using to-do lists, and you know what? I’m absolutely EXHAUSTED from them. It’s time to stop using them.

I understand that for some people starting a to-do list can be beneficial (especially if you happen to have chaotic organisational skills). To-do lists can certainly help focus and structure the insanity … for a while at least.

I’m going to switch to starting each day by just doing what I feel like I want to do. That can be a bit scary and overwhelming initially, but eventually I believe I’ll get used to the sudden mental freedom.

I’m not sure if something like this would work, however I know I have a Todo list on the front page of my iPhone with 7 undone items that has been staring at me and guilting me for the last year or more.

I’m not a very manly man, not into rebuilding engines or chopping down trees, but watching and listening to the video of an F1 Car in the Lincoln Tunnel I have to admit it turned me on in a very manly way.

Instructions for viewing:

• Buy 30”+ monitor
• Set to full 1080p view
• Hit the ‘fullscreen’ button
• Use good speakers or headphones

As The CD player turns 30 this is a nice look back.

Wow, 30 years. I didn’t know just how crazy expensive it was when it first came out, but then again, I suppose any new technology is stupidly expensive when it first comes out (case in point, iPhone version 1, the first BluRay players, the first DVD players, the first personal computers, etc).

Chalk art by David Zinn is pretty awesome. No, not the same old set of ‘3d street chalk art’ either.

The Big Picture has some great images Revealing more of North Korea. A very cool look, and not slanted (as previous “revealing insights” have been) in the “hey look at how there are pictures of Dear Leader everywhere and these people are living in the past”. Just a bunch of normal people doing normal things in normal looking places.

TorrentFreak has the story about Megabox, teased by Kim Dotcom. It seems to be a new music sharing / production / something service with the goal of kicking the asses of the old school music industry.

Kim Dotcom is determined to put the major music labels out of business with Megabox. At the same time he promises to give artists full control over their own work and a healthy revenue stream. Today Dotcom released a video on the making of Megabox which unveils some of the service’s features. The video also shows “The Black Keys,” “Rusko,” “Two Fingers” and “Will.i.am” as exclusive artists.

From the video it definitely looks very cool, I can’t wait to see what results!

Valve’s Epic Gift from Weta Workshop - via Forever Geek.

Seriously, that’s friggin’ awesome. I’d sell my firstborn for something like that.

Creative guy Ze Frank has outdone himself again, with the help of over 2000 people. The 2601 People Wrote This Song episode is truly a masterpiece. Video is embedded below.

Just a reminder that today (Sept 19) is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Ensure you be talkin’ like that. Or something.

Nice to see reddit making some minor modifications in honor of it.

Seagull Steals Camera, Films Itself Flying Off Into the Sunset via Petapixel.

French tourist Nathalie Rollandin came across a camera-happy seagull recently. She was visiting the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, when she set her GoPro camera down while its was recording. Before she knew it, the camera was being carried away in the mouth of an artsy gull. Once the bird was a safe distance away, it set the camera down and recorded some beautiful footage of itself flying away into the sunset.

Wonder if all gulls are as artistic as this one? :)

How cool is this, you can use Google Street Maps to go on a walking tour inside the TWiT cottage. The This Week In Tech guys have got one sweeeeeet setup.

I’m not convinced this isn’t a cunning PR move by GoPro Inc., but even if not, it’s impressive. The gopro freefall from 12500 feet without case is due to it being bumped at the door of the plane by a skydiver, and then it filmed it’s own freefall to the ground, where it survived just fine.

From the YouTube description:

bumped my head on the door frame on exit unclasping the latch on the box. The camera popped out on exit at 12.500 and fell straight down onto the landing area at the DZ and was recovered by a fellow skydiver. It even caught our landings. Not one scratch on the body or lens. Still can’t believe that I got it back and that it is totally fine. A buddy the same day who is one of our camera flyers had the same thing happen but with his SLR….not the same result. I’m definitely a gopro fan for life these little guys are bomb proof

Maybe you make fun of people new to the country for “only” having to pass the drivers test in their country, so the question is, Can you pass the Chinese driver’s license test?

I’ve been driving for 20 years now and I got 4 out of 10.

So Flightradar24.com is the coolest thing I’ve seen so far today (granted, the day is young). It’s exactly what it sounds like, a mashup of google maps and flight tracking in real time, allowing you to see as planes move across the map (I assume this is all projected data based on departure / arrival times and not true “real time tracking”). Very cool. Want to freak out? Zoom out over Europe and see how England basically disappears completely under a mass of aircraft.

Found on Reddit: NBC’s ‘Today’ Skips 9/11 Moment Of Silence For Kardashian Interview.

At 8:46 AM, in New York City and at the White House in Washington DC, there was a moment of silence to remember when the first plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In New York, the NYPD, FDNY, Port Authority Police and the families of the victims were present, while in Washington the President and the First Lady led the moment.

The cable networks all carried it, with ABC’s “Good Morning America” and “CBS This Morning” carrying it as well. The only national general news program to not carry the moment of silence was NBC’s ‘Today,” which, in an odd bit of counter-programming, opted to air an interview with “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” star Kris Jenner, who talked about the new season of the reality show, and her breast implants.

Sounds like a good use of time to me.

Great stuff over at Geeks of Doom: Interview with Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols On Uhura’s Groundbreaking Kiss With Captain Kirk.

It’s hard to imagine that after only one season of playing the now iconic character, Nichols actually considered quitting the show because she felt Uhura didn’t have enough to do. “I thought she was a glorified telephone operator in space,” she once said, before she was famously convinced to continue doing the show by none other than Dr. Martin Luther King himself. “Dr. King was a big fan of the show,” Nichols told me. “He felt it was important that children of all races see an African American female appearing on television as an equal.” “Meanwhile, the NBC guys keep talking to the director about how the station affiliates in the South might react, which just made us all the more tense.”

In the end they were asked to do a kiss and kissless version, and William Shatner to his credit, apparently sabotaged the kissless version, forcing NBC to air the (at that time, 1968) completely shocking and unheard of act of a white man kissing a black woman on TV.

One can only hope that this sort of fear is long gone, or will be soon, and we (the collective viewership and media moguls in general) can start worrying about things that actually matter.

An aside, my favorite story about Nichelle Nicols is her influence on Whoopi Goldberg, found here (at almost the bottom of the page) upon seeing a woman of color on the TV in a position of power.

Whoah, leave the office for a half hour for a quick walk around the block and come back to a full on battle between Instapaper and 9to5Mac, relating back through a few different posts and disagreements between @marcoarment and 9to5 Mac, which as one reader notes seems to have turned into a bit of a shit storm.

For the record, I think it’s a whole lot of misunderstandings all around and while I’ve never met Marco, I love Instapaper and respect him for what he does not only in his blogging but his other projects as well.

Update: Seems everyone has calmed down now.

My “TAKE MY MONEY” moment of this morning happened when my buddy Aryk send me the link of A DeLorean Hovercraft Appeared At Last Night’s Giants-Rockies Game.

Our friends over at Productive Outs let us know about this, one of the more astounding things of the many bizarre ones we’ve seen in McCovey Cove. It’s a DeLorean DMC-12 hovercraft, live and in action.

Via autoblog.

The Verge: Nokia’s new PureView ad is amazing, too bad it’s faked. The commercial, designed to show you how the optical image stabilization in the new Nokia smartphone works, uses a professional film crew.

Update: We spoke with a Nokia spokesperson who agrees that the PureView ad is misleading. They stressed that it was “never the company’s intention to deceive anyone,” but only to demonstrate the benefits of optical image stabilization. Nokia says it’s now looking into updating the original video with a footnote so that it’s clear that the images are simulated, and the original Nokia Conversations blog post that announced the video has been updated with the following text: “the OIS video, above, was not shot using the Lumia 920.”

To be fair, the fact that any ad on TV demonstrating anything isn’t “fake”, done in completely controlled conditions, or is all CGI should be of no surprise to anyone. Biggest advantage of HDTV these days is that you can actually read the fine print like: “screen sequences shorted”, “images simulated”, “lashes enhanced in post production”, etc.

TL;DR - don’t believe anything you see or read.

Something cute to break up your day. You’ve probably seen the .gif of this before, but I haven’t seen the lion hug video in raw format before, or heard the story behind it.

On the Wolfram|Alpha Blog there’s news about their Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook, which requires you to connect the WA app to your facebook account and then it number-crunches down all your facebook history. Pretty amazing to see.

If you’re not viewing this full screen on a huge 27” or large screen you’re missing out: MARS Curiosity Rover first Color 360 Panorama.

This has been passed around a bit over the last couple of days. The Facebook Timeline of a photograph is a fun look back through history, all the way back to 1000 AD.

Make your own lava, then pour it onto ice. Yup, exactly that. Very cool.

President Obama’s doing an AMA on Reddit today, invites the people to pose their digital questions. In case you wondered why the site was down.

ForgetFoo has a video of the Google Fiber speed test.

Uhm… “wow”.

Saw on the Diaspora blog that Diaspora* Will Now Be A Community Project.

Today, we are giving control of Diaspora to the community. As a Free Software social project, we have an obligation to take this project further, for the good of the community that revolves around it. Putting the decisions for the project’s future in the hands of the community is one of the highest benefits of any FOSS project, and we’d like to bring this benefit to our users and developers. We still will remain as an important part this community as the founders, but we want to make sure we are including all of the people who care about Diaspora and want to see it succeed well into the future.

Or if I were to translate “we have no idea how to make this work so we’re making it open source. Rings a bell somehow.

I have the best of hopes, but honestly Diaspora didn’t have a hope from the start, they got a metric shit-tonne of money (that’s how I measure things) because everyone hated facebook, but just couldn’t deliver. They had some interesting ideas, but no hope of “beating” facebook.

RIP Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon. First man on the fucking moon. Seriously, assuming you’re not a conspiracy theorist who thinks it’s a sound stage, how epic is that? In honor of this, LIFE has republished their Apollo 11: To the Moon and Back edition.

Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon, died on August 25, 20012. In honor of his life and career, LIFE.com is republishing the page spreads — and, in effect, the entire issue — of LIFE magazine’s famous August 11, 1969, special edition, “To the Moon and Back.” For millions of people who witnessed the Apollo 11 mission, watching on television or following it on the radio as humanity improbably, marvelously, actually walked on the moon, the event perhaps did not feel quite real until, more than two weeks later, LIFE published its definitive account of the epic journey.

The New Furby Review: Absolute Horror.

If you’re not five years old, and dumb, exposure to the Furby is about as bad as smallpox spores. The gimmick quickly wears off, and it’s then a constant, gnawing source of aggravation. It’s like a device designed specifically to annoy. In that sense, it’s sort of brilliant, in the same way a crossbow is a brilliant way to shoot an arrow through someone’s neck.

The Oatmeal asks Now what?.

I know I’ve said this before, but to everyone who donated: THANK YOU. THANK YOU SO GODDAMN MUCH. WE ARE GOING TO BUILD A GODDAMN TESLA MUSEUM.

I say “wow”.

If this video of Curiosity landing on Mars in High-Res (downward view from the rover itself) doesn’t bring a slight tear to your eye you are dead inside. DEAD.

This movie from NASA’s Curiosity rover shows most of the high-resolution frames acquired by the Mars Descent Imager between the jettison of the heat shield and touchdown.

Seriously one of the most awesome things I’ve ever seen.

To the Velociraptor in Melbourne all I can say is “oh wow that’s great”.

Some other content here from this reddit thread.

With reviews like this, why is Apple bothering to go after Samsung? Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 Review: An Embarrassing, Lazy, Arrogant Money Grab.

On the software side: Samsung desperately wants to develop the next version of Android themselves, but they lack the technical ability, vision, ecosystem support, and design chops to make it happen. They want to add features, and maybe even have a good idea or two, but they just can’t execute those ideas in a way that makes them good. Split screen, for instance, needed to be a core OS function, but it’s clearly a hack that was tacked on at the UI layer. It’s a bunch of tricks that look like split screen, but you’re never really running 2 apps at once.

OMG so much better! Four Clicks to a Less Annoying YouTube.

You know what’s awful about YouTube videos? Sure you do! Annotations are awful. Because more often than not, they’re less “annotation” and more “HEYDIDYOULIKETHIS?!!? SUBSCRIBE NOW BUY ON ITUNES!!!!!” Most of you probably click off annotations (and to a lesser degree captions) nearly every time you watch a YouTube video. Do yourself a favor and turn them off for good, right now.

The Verge has a good story on the twitterpocolypse that’s ongoing now that twitter announced it’s new 1.1 API, and has a good take on the story:

Twitter has been broadcasting for quite some time that it would be making changes to the API that developers use to access it for apps and today the company is finally beginning to detail what those changes are. First and foremost, developers who create apps that perform traditional 3rd party Twitter client functions (like Tweetbot) will be limited to 100,000 users total before the developer must get “permission” and/or “work with [Twitter] directly.” Current apps will be able to continue to function as normal, however once their “user tokens” double whatever they are today, these new restrictions will apply. Essentially, once any 3rd party app hits its user limit, the developer will need to have a “come to Twitter” moment at which something will happen, and the most likely scenario is that the app simply won’t be able to take on more users.

In essence, twitter wants to control the twitter experience for the end user, and cut out 3rd party developers who create new clients who may or may not mimic the current UI, or may make it better. Of course, they also want to make sure that the display is strictly controlled, as noted by Gruber in the display guidelines. This will of course mean that twitter won’t be letting any clients that do things like say, remove “promoted tweets”, slim down the rapidly-getting-bloated web UI, or do things like create a better twitter UI.

In their rules for the number of clients, they are also essentially limiting the max amount of money that a developer can earn making a twitter client (100,000-200,000 * $), making it unattractive to pour development efforts into a twitter client, and of course that’s a good thing for twitter.

A bold move, lets see if anyone but the geeks and developers care or not. Interesting that they do this right on the heels of paid twitter alternative app.net getting funded.

Dear America… the people who put out this sort of Government “Run Hide Fight” Videos are part of the reasons that you are mocked. This video seriously sounds like something out of the book 1984. I’m not as offended by the implication that people “taking suspicious pictures” are terrorists as the idiocy of it all.

I say fight back against the idiocy. Report everything. See someone leave their car to run in and get a coke? Report it. See someone wearing jeans on a day when the temperature is over 20C? Report them. See someone you’ve never seen before near your building? REPORT THEM.

Sigh.

The oatmeal is on a mission: Help me raise money to buy Nikola Tesla’s old laboratory.

Do it.

Another awesome panorama from Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 2. Also works on your iOS device with gyroscope support.

Pretty neat data visualization of Grubers posts over 10 Years of Daring Fireball.

Via, unsurprisingly, Daring Fireball.

Saw this nice long post on resolution and displays at Daring Fireball and didn’t realize until I read Shawn Blanc’s post that it was a ten year anniversary for John. Congrats for the years of great posts, sarcasm, and not feeding the trolls!

I can’t help but say something along the lines of “10 years, yea, that’s not too bad I guess” :) Of course, I have a feeling that Mr. Gruber has done a hell of a lot better with his ten years than I have with my 13….

The Mars Curiosity Rover sent back today a great panorama of the martian crater.

According to Join.App.net, this kickstarter-like-funded, paid twitter replacement has met (and exceeded by $246,000 as of this writing) it’s funding goal of $500k.

The big question now is, will it take off and be successful, or will it be a small island of folks in an island corner unto themselves? Can’t wait to see.

Ars Technica interviews Allan Odgaard, TextMate author who showed up in the spotlight yesterday for open sourcing TextMate 2.

Ars Technica:

Lead TextMate developer Allan Odgaard’s decision yesterday to open source the code for the long-awaited version 2.0 was met with a lot of criticism. Ars readers chimed in via comments, our Open Forum, and Twitter, questioning Odgaard’s motives and slamming his current choice of GPLv3 license. We spoke to Odgaard hoping to clear the air on the matter, though he wasn’t very confident that his explanations would “affect public perception of the project.” However, he was adamant that his decision to open source TextMate 2.0 was not a sign that he was giving up on the now six-year-long endeavor to build a new version from scratch.

Pretty awesome if you’re into model building and want a 1:1 scale Aston Martin.

Good news that Pinterest is finally out of invite-only mode, and you no longer have to wait for an invite to get on the site (not that it seems to have taken that long for people).

For those of you who haven’t joined Pinterest yet, this means you can sign up without waiting for an invite: all you have to do is go to Pinterest.com to get started. In addition to using your Facebook or Twitter login, we’re also opening registration so you can sign up with just your email address.

Looking forward to seeing how well the site handles the no-doubt huge influx of new users.

Pretty interesting to see that the Kim Dotcom raid video has been released.

While it's not a new image from the Mars Curiosity rover, this MARS Greeley Haven 360 Panorama is still pretty damn impressive to see. I can't wait to see what comes from the newer tech and better cameras :) From the 'about this image':

This is the latest panorama released by NASA July 2012. It was assembled from 817 images taken between Dec. 21, 2011, and May 8, 2012, while Opportunity was stationed on an outcrop informally named 'Greeley Haven'. on a segment of the rim of ancient Endeavour Crater.

Read more: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-196.

Via my buddy @brian_pearce.

Guy spends two years building amazing life-size, working WALL-E

Ever since he first rolled into our lives back in 2008, we’ve loved WALL-E, the lovable trash compactor robot at the heart of the Pixar film of the same name. He’s cute, he’s loving, he’s brave, and he’s just plain neat. Too bad he’s only a cartoon, right? Well, not anymore.

No other comment but: TAKE MY MONEY

Suidobashi Heavy Industry, via JWZ.

Shut up and take my money!!

Gizmodo has the story of how David Pogue Has Lost His iPhone. He announced it via a tweet several hours ago) and Gizmodo has been scouring as much information as they can, posting shots of the house where the phone is from google maps, contacting police, etc.

New York Times technology writer David Pogue has lost his iPhone. He has posted a screenshot of where it might be on Lockerz.com, though. Won’t anyone help him find it?

Friggin’ fascinating. Best of luck getting the phone back.

Interesting Flowchart for those of us not completely into wine.

In the Digg Blog, Welcome to Digg v1 post, they talk about the new Digg.com, what they set out to do and accomplished.

On July 20, we announced that we were turning Digg back into a startup and rebuilding it from scratch in six weeks. After an intense month and a half, we managed to get the new Digg up and running on a fresh code base and infrastructure. We now have a solid foundation on which to build, and we expect to build fast. Yesterday, we previewed the new Digg applications for web, iPhone, and mobile web and today we’re happy to share Digg v1.

The new new digg has a google plus / pinterest vibe going on, combined with a minimalist, almost Windows 8 feel. The question is, is it enough to re-launch digg as “relevant” or has it now lost any forward momentum at all and will revert back to a once great, but now struggling to reclaim it’s glory, website.

Time will tell. I loved the pre-new Digg v4 and I have hopes that the new new digg will do as well!

Depending on how you look at it, this cool video called “Sight” is either a terrifying view or the future or geek nirvana. I say sign me up!

Passed on from $boss: PEOPLE ARE AWESOME 2011.

If you want to feel inadequate about your athletic skills, this is the video to watch.

Great timelapse of the Contruction of the Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics.

Great conversation about email the the long term viability of online resources such as FourSquare and Facebook. Emails to My Unborn Daughter is not the “Dear Sophie” google ad that you might be thinking of, but instead a real person who has been sending emails to his son for the last 5 years.

For the past five years, I’ve been writing emails to my son. Shortly after he was born in 2007, I created an email account in his name so I could write to him throughout his childhood and then turn the account over to him when he was of age. Upon opening the account for the first time, he’d be greeted with an archive of his childhood as seen through his father’s eyes.

Ever wonder how it looks when light moves? Well, Ramesh Raskar has developed a camera that lets him do Imaging at a trillion frames per second. Another amazing TED video.

My buddy Khensu pointed out that tomorrow is Sysadmin Day! While I joked that sysadmins consider the normal day to day abuse as love, seriously, take a second to appreciate that without the neckbeard you keep in the basement you wouldn’t be able to:

• Play your silly clicky games on facebook
• Download your porn
• Surf reddit all day instead of doing your real work
• Do the research you need and get answers to the questions you need answered when you are doing real work
• Get on the internet at all
• Not have your computer full of viruses and adware because you love clicking on every attachment that comes into your inbox
• Restore your files when you answer “yes” to “delete this really important file” and then “yes” to “are you really really sure you can’t undo this”
• Remove 17 or the 18 extra toolbars installed in your IE
• Not cry (out loud) when you insist that you have to keep using IE

So don’t hug them, we don’t like human contact, but a bit of love for your resident sysadmin is always appreciated!

Here are some other links to all things Sysadmin Day.

Sometimes appreciation could be a donation to help keep the servers running, say, by paypalling with the link to the right to the guy running this server, alan@ufies.org…

So you heard that Yahoo has a new CEO. Thomas Hawk wrote an open letter and then someone put up Dear Marissa Mayer.com, asking her to make Flickr awesome again.

This morning Yahoo responded with flickr.com/dearinternet:

Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb.

On July 19, 1957, five Air Force officers and one photographer stood together on a patch of ground about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. They’d marked the spot “Ground Zero. Population 5” on a hand-lettered sign hammered into the soft ground right next to them.

Not sure what’s bigger, their balls or the tumors no doubt growing in their brains… :)

Here’s your dose of super-cuteness for the day, from Interspecies Friendships is Evolution Of A Friendship. Seriously, almost too much cute to take all in one.

Also glad to see that my cats aren’t the only ones that drink out of water glasses.

Well, I wasn’t expecting to see this, but I was browsing r/askreddit today and found this thread asking people about how long it’s taken for “Karma” to kick in (ie: getting asked for a job by someone who used to bully you).

I was really surprised and encouraged to read the top comment by Dave McElfatrick, author of the Cyanide & Happiness cartoon, talking about how he was violently bullied and now draws an amazing online cartoon (with todays strip being completely relevant).

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

His TL;DR:

TLDR: Bullied at school, wanted to kill myself, somehow used how it shaped me for good and now draw a hugely popular online comic for a living, thanks to kind people like you. Basically, fuck bullies.

I love it when karma comes around. Still waiting for mine though :)

Digg and Betaworks, together for the low price of $500,000.

Yea, I don’t think the future looks too bright for Digg.

In other news, Digg is still around.

My buddy Aryk pointed me to this video from Australia’s Got Talent: George & Noriko who are buskers who play…. “fusion music” is about as cloase as I can describe it. Really it has to be seen to be believed:

You can see more of them here in the finals.

Great article from Jeff Atwood: Coding Horror: Betting the Company on Windows 8

I’d argue that the last truly revolutionary version of Windows was Windows 95. In the subsequent 17 years, we’ve seen a stream of mostly minor and often inconsequential design changes in Windows - at its core, you’ve got the same old stuff: a start menu, a desktop with icons, taskbar at the bottom, overlapping windows, toolbars, and pull-down menus.

How to fix the patent mess, an excellent editorial by Thom Holwerda over at OSNews.

Software patents will not be granted under any possible circumstance; software is code, code is written, writing is protected by copyright, and that’s all the protection it needs. All existing software patents will be declared invalid. This will not be done ‘actively’ (i.e., there will not be groups of clerks sifting through granted patents), but rather, ‘passively’; software patents are simply declared invalid, so if someone brings them to court, they will be tossed out immediately. Within 15 years, the system will be purged of all software patents either by the courts, or simply by patents expiring.

Wondering what the whole deal with the "God Particle" is? The Higgs Boson Explained has a pretty good explanation about what it is and why it's important.

Happy Canada day to my fellow Canadians! Hope your day is full of fun, fireworks, beer, and whatever you have planned!

40+ Inspiring Book & paper Sculptures. Amazing.

Great post from Alien Skin with a list of Flickr Enhancing Goodies, some of which are really cool.

Great post on Moving from OhLife to Day One if you happen to be doing this like I am. OhLife is a nifty online journalling tool, and Day One is a nifty cloud-synced Mac desktop/iOS journalling tool. If you happen to want to go from one to the other, here’s a nifty little perl script to help you do it.

Drobo CEO Tom Buiocchi is the guest blogger this week at scottkelby.com, and speaks regarding Scott’s I’m done with drobo blog post and the data problems that led up to it.

As I mentioned on the phone, my apologies and it should not have happened. By the way, if any of your readers (or their readers or colleagues or friends or whatever) experiences what you saw on your video, just contact us or ping me directly (tom@drobo.com) and we will take care of it immediately.

Tom responds well. I almost wish that my now-several-year-old Drobo version 1 was having massive issues so that I could call them up and see if I got similar love. Of course, it’s stubbornly hanging in there, though has been relegated to backup only, due to it’s slow transfer speed (caused by the USB2 connection) compared to my less cool, but gig-e connected DNS-323.

Brickworld 2012 Guided Tour - for all you lego fanatics.

In a shocking turn of events Gizmodo’s IKEA TV Review turns out not so good.

Uppleva, Ikea’s magical TV-cum-entertainment center meatball, won’t be arriving in America until next year. Fortunately, we’ve got an early review from friends in Sweden. The bad news: it’s really bad.

Anyone shocked by this? Anyone?

YammerSoft: What the industry thinks of Microsoft’s rumored Yammer buy by my buddy John at VentureBeat.

Although nothing is certain until cash is in the bank, Microsoft’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Yammer looks pretty much like a done deal. VentureBeat asked some industry analysts and experts what they think this deal will do to Yammer, Microsoft, and the enterprise social networking industry as a whole.

In other news…. people still use Yammer?

Epic Rap Battles of History puts up Gates vs Jobs.

That’s pretty awesome, whether you hate Microsoft, Apple, both or neither.

Saw this morning on the Meetup HQ Blog that for their 10th anniversary they’ll send a winner to any meetup anywhere, which I have to admit, is pretty cool. Who wouldn’t want to attend the Atlantis Photo meetup or the Martian Capital City Rails meetup?

Just RSVP and attend a local Meetup happening between now and July 15th, and you are automatically entered to win. We’ll cover the cost of the winner’s hotel and airfare up to $5,000. You can enter up to five times by going to five different Meetups — but of course, you have to RSVP and attend the Meetups to win. Get all the rules below.

You can see the full details on their blog post. Lucky for me I’ve got a weekly Fraser Valley Ruby on Rails meetup, so I’m set :)

Nice collection of Cheatsheets Wallpapers for Web Designers and Developers including everything from Lightroom to Drupal to HTML5. Here’s another post with Adobe suite app cheatsheets.

Before I watched this Whyte & Mackay Whisky video I had no idea I was drinking my Scotch so, so wrong.

Bonus: You get to find out the origin of the term “on the rocks”.

Great article on The Verge: Scamworld: ‘Get rich quick’ schemes mutate into an online monster. Fascinating stuff.

Cool deal, if you’re looking for image scanning services, you can get a deal with ScanCafe through 1000memories which gets the price down to $0.19/scan for 1000+ scans. Included is saving the images to your 1000 memories “shoebox” account.

I’ve written about 1000memories.com back when they updated their site in April.

Thanks to my buddy Bryan for sending me over this video of Mister Rogers Remixed. Great stuff. Funnily enough I never watched Mr. Rogers as a kid, but the more I learn about Fred Rogers the more I admire him.

Images of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II over on The Big Picture. The old girl is still looking great!

Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS @ The Verge.

In an effort to return the company to its glory days, Hurd had just finished trimming as much fat as he possibly could and he knew that HP’s cash cow — the printer business — wouldn’t last forever. He was looking to grow businesses that had a future, and he understood that mobile was a keystone to that strategy. And Bradley may have had a soft spot for Palm — he’d left it several years prior to join HP, so he had a healthy understanding for the company, its challenges, and what it had been through.

Nice to see someone has gotten around to making a Zombie Apocalypse Google Map. Gonna keep an eye on this, and head north to Alaska where it’s cold, far from Florida (you had to know that this shit would start in Florida), and is full of crazy Americans with guns. Just sayin’.

I’m not sure if I really see the difference, but the Twitter blog posted today about Twitter rebranding the blue twitter bird.

Starting today you’ll begin to notice a simplified Twitter bird. From now on, this bird will be the universally recognizable symbol of Twitter. (Twitter is the bird, the bird is Twitter.) There’s no longer a need for text, bubbled typefaces, or a lowercase “t” to represent Twitter.

Great 7 minute video from PBS on The Culture Of Reddit. As a reddit user I was hoping for more in depth (ie: dwelving into some of the awesome users like Shitty Watercolour or Reactiononmy_nub, but it’s still a pretty great look at how this awesome website is as awesome as it is.

Good info linked from my buddy John Koetsier about new #NewTwitter and metrics used to determine site speed, and what they’re doing to improve it.

Canadians Can Buy Nest Learning Thermostat For USD $249. Yay!

Once again Vancouver photographer David DuChemin makes me want to sell almost everything I own, pack my bags, leave my life, my job, and everything I know behind and take a camera around the world.

I really really want to do this, and have no idea if I ever will be able to.

His post this morning, Objects of Beauty is a great look at his life. That bastard :)

For some strange reason neither Google or Samsung has provided me with a demo version, so I’ll leave you with the Samsung Galaxy S III review from The Verge.

Alex Kenjeev Paid His Student Loan In Cash - Business Insider

“I just plopped the bag down (on the counter),” he said. “They also didn’t know how to handle it. At first the manager didn’t want to accept the money.” 

Via this reddit post.

SpaceX Takes Flight:

After experiencing its fair share of setbacks, SpaceX has finally done it. At 3:44 a.m. EDT, the company successfully launched its Dragon capsule into low Earth orbit atop its towering Falcon 9 rocket. In doing so, it has become the first private company in history to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station.

Via my buddy Jim.

Very exciting.

You now can hear in his own words what happened to the show.

Via this update where Brooks Review broke the non-story story.

The Talk Show has moved! One of my favorite podcasts from 5by5 has moved (without explanation so far from either @gruber or @danbenjamin) to Mule Radio and have the premier episode What If the Dolphins Had Thumbs posted.

If you’re looking for the old episodes, head over to the Talk Show on 5by5 to catch up. One enterprising user picked out (what might have been) the awkward goodbye from Gruber on the last show.

Really wish there was some explanation about this, Gruber was a staple of the 5by5 network and the “new” Talk Show sounds (from the first few minutes anyway) similar to the old show. I’d expect at least a note about what happened from one of them, even if the parting was bad.

Sigh

Dropbox announced some details of Dropquest II: The Future is Now:

Many of you were around for last year’s Dropquest, where we sent y’all on a magical journey through Dropbox and the interwebs. Wordokus were solved, music puzzles were deciphered, origami cranes were folded, and dragons were slain. All in all, nearly half a million Dropquesters were rewarded for their craftiness, skill, and effort. That was well over a year ago, and since then we’ve been holding our cards and toiling away to craft a Dropquest successor worthy of the first.

The awesome site Ars Technica reveals version 7.0. Great look, kudos to the team.

Make Your Car Sound Like A Race Car, via iPhone in Canada.

Ever wish you owned an exotic supercar? Now you can with XLR8! Pronounced as “accelerate”, XLR8 is a super cool iOS app from 2XL Games that makes your car sound like an exotic supercar as you drive (via FSM). The universal app for iPhone / iPod touch and iPad uses your device’s GPS and accelerometer to track your speed, braking, and cornering and convert that data into the sounds of a gas-guzzling V-8 through the speakers of your car (requires audio connection). The app even lets you unlock engine sounds produced by Ferrari, Lamborghini, a NASCAR vehicle, and a Ford GT40 via in-app purchases.

I know it’s completely useless, but I’m so tempted to spend the $0.99 on this.

Interesting post on ZDNet on how little adoption the new .xxx TLD has gotten. You’d think that these would be now a hotbed of porn, but it seems that only about 133,000 adult domains were registered under .xx, and of those only 27,555 are actually developed. I know that 28k is a lot, but compared to the rest of the domain world, that’s nothing. Expected for something like a .bob or .arcterex domain, but .xxx?

Remember that cardboard camera from IKEA that was floating around not that long ago? Well, someone wrote up a Review of it.

Wow, RIM has got themselves in the news a bunch this week. First claiming responsibility for the “Wake up” stunt, then releasing news about BlackBerry OS 10 (impressions here), and now they have said To Developers: We’ll Make Sure Your App Earns At Least $10K In Its First Year. Techcrunch says it like it is:

Translation: the apps can’t completely suck. Sorry fart app devs, that means you.

It’s a good proposition for a company desperate to get high quality apps like those on iOS and Android, because I think that good apps do matter (just look at the flack that Microsoft has gotten over the crappy Metro apps included with Windows 8 Dev and Consumer previews). However the question really is, who is going to hitch their wagon to that sinking ship?

5 signs that you should hire a programmer on the spot over at the More Than Coding blog.

Good stuff there, both for prospective employees and employers.

JWZ found the most amazing glass bottomed bathroom you’ll see today.

James over at RainGeek has the FanExpo Vancouver Gallery Part 2 gallery online. You can find part 1 here.

Virtual Apollo Guidence Computer, a collection of scans, documents, etc from the NASA space program.

Here you’ll find a collection of all the AGC, AGS, LVDC, and Gemini spacecraft computer documentation and software that I’ve managed to find whilst working on Virtual AGC.

Amazing resource. Via this reddit thread. Debugging something like this would have been a bitch.

Great “making of” video from Miss Aniela of one of her projects: From Pixels to Vogue: Making of Surreal Fashion by Miss Aniela. Great stuff if you’re into photography and skills in Photoshop work.

Great time lapse of video every week from Birth to 12 years in 2 min. 45. Not a new concept, but a cool implementation.

Awesome article by Jeff onBooks: Bits vs. Atoms, all about how eBooks are better (and worse) than physical books.

More specifically, so many beautiful ideas have been helplessly trapped in physical made-of-atoms books for the last few centuries. How do books suck? Let me count the ways[….]

One thing missed in the ‘how much do they cost’ section is the reason my… uhm… “frugal” parents gave for buying physical books. You can get them for a quarter at a garage sale, which pretty much nukes even the best (legal) price for an ebook out of the water by about 2000x.

Geek Legend writer and directory Joss Whedon posted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit today: I am Joss Whedon - AMA. Awesome.

Great post by Mr. Fry called Four and Half Years On about his time with the iPhone, and some reflections of smartphones in general, not all with kind words.

In mid to late 2007 the Redmond Behemoth had just come up with Windows Mobile 6 for Pocket PCs, as they charmingly called their absolutely fucking dog of an operating system. Pardon the language, but nothing else will do. CEO Steve Ballmer and others at MS were the first to admit it when they launched Windows Phone 7 a year and a half ago […]

Awesome article on Coding Horror on Preserving The Internet… and Everything Else, all about the Internet Archive and what it does and how gargantuan the task is.

The cool site 1000memories has updated their site. See the blog post with more detail.

If you’re not familiar with 1km (as I like to call them), it’s a “shoeboxing” site where the idea is you are over at Aunt Martha’s and see some old family photos in an album. You don’t have time to do a full proper scan of them, but you have the shoebox app on your phone and whip it out, take pictures of the images (and if you have a decently new phone and good lighting conditions, these probably will be adequate, and the app helps with nice intuitive cropping and filtering). Images are stored forever through a partnership with the Internet Archive. More info on the 1000 memories.com about page.

Wind Map. Via Daring Fireball.

Very sad set of images of the Decommissioning of the Space Shuttles.

End of an era :(

The Tricorder project. Presented without comment. You know you want this. NOW.

50 Creative MacBook Decals and Stickers via @moo.com.

I’ll take the portal one please!

I have to admit I was sceptical of this Student-created “Bing Automatic” app concept (which essentially uses data you’ve already written or the context of your browser or document or selection to auto-search for you)… then about halfway through I thought “wow, that is pretty cool”.

First and foremost, “Bing Automatic” is a completely conceptual idea envisioned by what appears to be a team of marketing students for a college coursework assignment, so apply a generous coating of salt. I’m not even sure if Microsoft’s Bing team has seen this.

Of course, as described in the concept video, it’s a privacy nightmare waiting to happen, and frankly I think that Google should take this idea and run with it, as they have been pushing the “we’re a decision engine too” idea.

Still, ignoring the multitude of privacy problems with this, if it were to work and be created as shown, it’d be a pretty cool program (and frankly the search engine behind it is completely irrelevant, so it could be Bing, Google, Ask, Wolfram Alpha, etc.).

The Most extensive full face transplant to date has been completed after a marathon 36 hour surgery.

The face transplant recipient, 37-year-old Richard Lee Norris of Hillsville, Virginia, was injured in 1997 in a gun accident. Since that time, he has undergone multiple life-saving and reconstructive surgeries. Due to the accident, Mr. Norris lost his lips and nose and had limited movement of his mouth. Mr. Norris first came to the University of Maryland Medical Center in 2005 to discuss reconstructive options with Dr. Rodriguez.

Wow, looking at the before and after images (slightly disturbing) show what an amazing age of medicine we live in today.

Via this reddit thread.

Shared out by my buddy James of RainGeek fame, here’s 5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women. Not sure I agree with them all, but it’s a compelling argument, especially #4, concerning the comments made about fucking supreme court justice Elena Kagan, the fourth female Justice1 (I presume by other women, but that’s just how I read it).

Trailer For Hammond’s New BBC America Show “Crash Course” from Finalgear.com.

If you haven’t heard, Richard Hammond is hosting a new show on BBC America called Crash Course. It’ll premiere Monday, April 16th at 10/9c immediately following the US premiere of Top Gear season 18.

Oh hell yes. Thanks Aryk!

Cool video about what things would look like if the earth had rings like saturn.

So there’s a kickstarter project out there to build full motion Real-life Battlestar Galactica Viper simulator.

OMG I want this so much. Amazing that this is being built by juniors in high school. When I was that age I wasn’t even thinking about girls, I think I was probably still more concerned with riding my bike or something like that. Really glad to see these guys have almost doubled their required $2,500 goal.

Via Raingeek.

What it’s like to be a jump rope. Very cool video.

You can now watch the World’s First Flying File-Sharing Drones in Action. These are similar to The Pirate Bay’s LOSS (Low Orbit Server Stations).

I’m still not convinced this isn’t an April Fool’s Joke.

Twitter Advertising: Promoted Tweets on mobile: more options, starting today.

We recently began testing Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts on iOS and Android devices to make it easier for brands to reach consumers anytime, even when they are on the go. As with the launch of Promoted Tweets in user timelines on Twitter.com, we started by showing them in the timeline only for those users already following the advertiser. Since we began testing three weeks ago, reactions have been positive. Starting today, we are expanding this test, enabling brands to target Promoted Tweets to mobile users that share similar interests with their existing followers. 

Read: “we’re gonna start spamming you”.

Oh great.

I try not to pimp my own stuff here a lot, but I did write up an article on Managing Photography using Evernote over the weekend. Have a read and let me know what you think, and even if you’re not a photographer, model, or creative in anyway, Evernote is an awesome product and everyone should use it!

Amazing shot of a Red Bull dude about to skydive from really high up.

Pilot Felix Baumgartner of Austria seen before his jump at the first manned test flight for Red Bull Stratos in Roswell, New Mexico, USA on March 15 2012. In this test he reach the altitude 21800 meters (71500 ft) and landed safely near Roswell.

Badass is right.

Scientific Proof That Women Hate Beards from Gizmodo.

The results were conclusive. Women—both Europeans and Polynesians—said that the men looked significantly more attractive when clean-shaven. They also reported that bearded men looked older and of higher social status. When men were asked to look at the same photographs, they reported that bearded men looked more aggressive.

Sadly without mine I look like a chubby 12 year old boy.

Battlestar Galactica Roller Coaster at Universal Studios Singapore. I need say no more (other than I’m not sure exactly what makes this awesome roller coaster a “BSG” roller coaster and not just an awesome roller coaster…).

Via RainGeek.

So say we all.

Macgasm reports that Oink is dead. Oink is a social network / recommendation app for the iPhone that was the first product from Kevin Rose’s startup incubator Milk.

Kevin Rose told All Things D, “We started Milk Inc. (the company behind Oink) to rapidly build and test out new ideas. Oink was our first test and, in preparing to move onto the next project, we’ve decided to shut it down to help focus our efforts.” Clearly that’s PR speak for “no one was using our application, and it’s not profitable.” Had Oink been profitable, there’s no way they would be closing down the application and service so quickly. It just wouldn’t happen. Don’t let the PR speak fool you, Oink was a major disappointment.

I used Oink a tiny bit and while it was an interesting take on checkin/social networking, it just didn’t do it for me, and it sounds like it was a similar story for the rest of the users. Hopefully we’ll still see good stuff come from Kevin and his gang.

Fascinating set of images of Undressing a Sony NEX Camera and revealing the innards of a modern digital camera.

George Takei has a nice fireside chat with Tennessee Lawmakers on some of the ridiculous stances on homosexuality that are going on.

Personally I’m offended that this sort of thing is still being discussed.

As the tech people know, as a fundraiser for the new studio, TWiT sold bricks with your choice of inscription on them. Now we get our first look at the The TWiT Brick Wall Of Honor via some pretty cool Gigapan images.

Waldo The Movie. I’d watch the hell out of this.

Via Laughing Squid.

Check out this snazzy Portal decal for your iPad from MacGasm.

If you want to cry for the sake of humanity check the comments on Justin Bieber’s Instagram account.

Shooting Time Lapses In Pennsylvania? Have A Reason Or Get Busted apparently. Great video showing both unreasonable cops (hopefully the exception not the rule) and a reasonable photographer (again, hopefully the rule not the exception). Sadly it turns out even if you’re in the right and know the law it still doesn’t mean anything when you’re up against the ones who can arrest you and have the guns. Related to the recent strobist post.

Not sure if it’s too little too late, but today the Flickr From your Contacts page has a “justified” setting. More details on the flickr blog.

Ze Frank has hit his goal of $50,000 on kickstarter to bring back The Show. If you don’t remember the most awesome The Show, you can hit the archives and catch up.

Congrats to Ze and don’t forget if you want some of his…. “unique” rewards, there’s 9 days to go still in the kickstarter campaign.

Nice little Behind The Scenes video of The Lies Behind the Lens looking at photographers shooting those before and after images for things like diet pills etc.

Check out this clip from, “Bigger Faster Stronger”, where photographer Rich Schaff explains how some companies hire him to take before and after photos on the same day, for misleading supplement advertisements. Is this why some photographers get into photography? Is this even legal? I mean, how far are you willing to go to make a buck? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to disparage shooters who make a living doing this type of work but is this the kind of thing shooters actually aspire towards? Why did you get into photography? Is there anything you won’t shoot? What would it take for you to hang up your lens? I’d really like to hear answers to some of these questions from our readers. So please leave your comments, thoughts and rants below.

Short story (and you, my audience, are smart people so you know this already) - the camera lies not only through “legal” means (lighting, posing, etc) but also through good old photoshop. Some of the before and after images were even taken on the same day. So yea, don’t be stupid and believe advertising :)

Fox Business News Accuses ‘Arriety’ and ‘The Lorax’ of Brainwashing Children.

Joining Dobbs to discuss the insidious liberal plot to use popular forms of entertainment to educate and enlighten the leaders of tomorrow are three right-wing radio show hosts. Wow, what a shining panel of “experts.” After Dobbs and his sniveling yes men finished laughing and shaking their heads at the latest antics of liberal Hollywood they all went over to Lou’s house for a sleepover with Rick Santorum.

Seriously America, it’s this sort of bullshit that makes the rest of the world laugh at you.

Ok, so this is an old link, but at the end I called over my coworkers to watch the video of a Pilot losing a wing at an airshow.

Details of the new features over at Techcrunch: 500px Rolls Out New Browsing And Sharing Features - Plus A Market

» Time in the 10,000-Year Clock

Keeping time for 10,000 years isn’t tricky just because its hard to build a really durable clock. It also forces us to recognize and account for changes in things we normally think of as immutable, like the length of a day.

Via JWZ.

Everything is a Remix Part 4 has been released. If you haven’t watched the previous 3 episodes, you should, right now. It’s a fascinating look at how ideas and things are created and transformed, from music to lightbulbs.

Canada Kiss Map, powered by google maps.

Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers is the story of the day.

Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path. Now I don’t remember having given permission to Path to access my address book and send its contents to its servers, so I created a completely new “Path” and repeated the experiment and I got the same result - my address book was in Path’s hands.

The reasoning behind it is obvious, those notes you might get saying something like “your friend blah blah has joined Path, would you like to friend them?” is only possible if they know who your friends are. Even so, not cool without disclosure. Course, I’m sure that there are a ton of other apps that do this exact same thing, just we don’t know about it.

The bigger question is do they do anything other than this…

Note that the CEO of path has replied with their reasons.

All requests to btjunkie.org now to go a “goodbye.html” page.

This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!

TorrentFreak has more details, basically the legal actions against other sites prompted them to shut down, even though they were never directly involved in any sort of legal action. This is too bad, they were my go-to site for any sort of file sharing for years now, and it’s sad that all the BS lately has prompted their shutdown.

The Pirate Bay blog explains why they have moved from .org to thepiratebay.se. Hint: blame the US.

I know it’s a bit intense for first thing on a Friday morning, but wow, holy crap. Title of the story is: I broke my neck skydiving. This is the video I was taking when it happened.

Note: Probably best not to watch this if you’re planning on going skydiving for the first time :) …. very intense at the end.

The second Adobe Photoshop CS6 Sneak Peek shows off background saving and new performance improvements with the liquefy filter. The first sneak peek we brought you was back in january (I know, soooo long ago :)

Pretty amazing: Using Hipstamatic on iPhone, Talented Filmmaker Vitùc Creates Stunningly Mesmerizing Stop Motion Film.

This film reaffirms why I believe the iPhone is the single most amazing tool ever - in the palm of your hand you have a digital darkroom with an astonishing array of inspiring post-production tools. In one device you have a camera, post-production editing suite, and music production studio. If you hit a creative mental roadblock, you can relax with a game of Angry Birds.

Via The Digital Convergence Podcast where even someone not interested in video can get pretty enthralled :)

I think I’d try one just to say I did.

Doesn’t that look like a disgusting thing? It’s so disgusting it becomes good! And actually, if you think about it, the Alien Brain Hemorrhage Cocktail seems rather complicated to make. That is, if you base it on the looks of the drink. (Then again, I am no bartender, so I really have no idea.)

Simple story about How Reddit Saved an Orphanage in Kenya. I am proud to be part of this, giving $50 I didn’t have. The results and seeing the pictures of the results made it all worth it though.

While the initial goal was $2,000, TheLake posted an update: “Over $9,000 and I’m in a state of shock.” The next update showed Reddit users contributing a total of $11,000. Donations continued to pour in through the organization’s website, Longonot Education Initiative, was upgraded to a Pro account for two years from its host, Weebly. The company also donated $10,000.

$65,000 in two days. Amazing.

Wow is right: Yosemite Time Lapse. If you don’t have a huge monitor to see this on you’re missing out.

The New Vimeo looks damn sexy.

Interesting timing that MegaUpload Shut Down by the Feds and the Founder Arrested the day after the internet protested about governments getting too much power to do things like, say, take down websites in other countries.

Just sayin'.

Apocalypse Later, Surf Now, An Apocalyptic Surf Music Video. Not much to say, other than needs to be watched full screen and in high def :)

Super trippy to watch: The Mind-Boggling Upside-Down World Beneath the Surface of a Frozen Lake

Making Love to WebKit via Daring Fireball. Pretty amazing use of CSS magic.

Wow.

Thanks to JWZ for linking to the I believe I can fly video, embedded below. Best watched in high def and on a huge monitor.

Those guys be crazy!

JWZ points to Wipeout Quantum!, using the cool (literally) quantum levitation from a while back in it's completely natural application: slot cars.

Photoshop CS5 simulator built with HTML 5, CSS 3 and Javascript. I'm honestly blown away by what can be done with modern code. I admit I'm by no means a Photoshop expert, but this pretty much matches what I see when I use it!

Color me there! Now I just need a 3D Printer. And to play Minecraft. Looks awesome though :)

Articles like Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time make up for 10 of the "tweet choir".

[...] 4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that's mysterious -- clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the "now." Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds. (Via conference participant David Eagleman.)

According to mashable the spnKiX motorized shoes are now a reality, thanks to their kickstarter campaign. The fact they raised $71k astounds me, if only because I find it hard to believe that that many people are potentially going to be actually using these things in real life. I can't wait.

Also I hope the flying cars are coming soon.

Have the "new new" Facebook timeline but don't have the photo chops to put up a super-awesome cover image? DB is giving away a few Free Facebook Cover Images to get you started with an epic cover image for your facebook timeline.

Tasty story my friend @curtismchale sent over to me: Former Employee Sued for $340K for Taking 17,000 Twitter Followers With Him

A man in California is being sued for $340,000 by his former employer. What did he do? This isn't a case of bringing home the stapler from his cubicle. After resigning from the company, he took his Twitter followers with him--all 17,000 of them.

Scary stuff.

Nice pointer from Forever Geek on how to Geek Up Your Twitter Profile with an online app called InstaBG, which will pull in images from your Instagram feed and dynamically update your twitter background image.

You can pull down your own images, by category, by tag, or anything from your feed. A very cool setup and a neat app in need of further investigation.

So to kick off 2012, and in an apology for it being so quiet around here over the holidays, check out the video below of Rollerman, a French Daredevil With a 31 Wheel Roller Suit.

Or as I'd call him, a crazy mother....

Nice article from Vanity Fair on Does Airport Security Really Make Us Safer?.

Bruce Schneier's exasperation is informed by his job-related need to spend a lot of time in Airportland. He has 10 million frequent-flier miles and takes about 170 flights a year; his average speed, he has calculated, is 32 miles and hour. "The only useful airport security measures since 9/11," he says, "were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can't break in, positive baggage matching"--ensuring that people can't put luggage on planes, and then not board them --"and teaching the passengers to fight back. The rest is security theater."

The Icon Handbook is a great site with all sorts of information about the new book from Jon Hicks. Also of note is the awesome scalable website (try resizing the browser window down to smartphone width and watch how everything resizes and rearranges appropriately).

A great Doctor Who Timeline / Infographic over on Forever Geek.

Wowza, the Lego Production Factory in Billund, Denmark looks a lot like nirvana to me.

Nice collection from Best Article Every Day. Some are a bit lame, but some (such as the Art of Flight one embedded below) are epic, and require 1080p and large monitor playback.

7 Awesome Bits of Tech That Just Freakin' Disappeared.

It got me thinking about awesome technology that we somehow ditched. The airship? Awesome. Slide rules? Awesome awesome. Mir Space Station? Boss-level awesome. And now just thinking about wristwatches with calculators makes me suffer a sense of short-term nostalgia (as in Douglas Coupland's Generation X).

Here are some of the coolest features and products that we've lost along the way to 2012.

Nice article.... Unsurprisingly a lot of the cool tech was killed by larger industries such as the RIAA and MPAA as it would make people happier and give them less money. As usual.

Cool, Shaw is launching WiFi Trials in Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton. Course, you have to have an @shaw.ca email account (and who uses those?). Still, free wifi is nice, and better than all the "free" wifi that pops up unprotected and then gets you to pay for it when you join. Here's a list of more info and hotspot locations.

Thanks Aryk - Eight Ferraris in $4M pile-up.

Eight Ferraris and a Lamborghini -- plus a Toyota Prius -- were among the vehicles involved in the crash, which witnesses said happened when a speeding car slid across a wet road surface.

All I can say is "oh my".

Called: It's time.

Via Daring Fireball.

But Wait...There's More is a great article over on the Farnam Street blog (great design btw, check out what happens when you resize your browser thinner to smartphone width). You'll never look at infomercials the same, or advertising in general.

Must be I do everything with credit cards (or just don't get an opportunity to see $100 bills that often), but looks like Canada's new plastic $100 bill is all tricked out.

Watch out counterfeiters: Canada is planning to abandon paper money.

Looks sexy, someone want to send me a stack of these... for journalistic purposes only of course ;)

I honestly have no idea what DC SHOES: KEN BLOCK'S GYMKHANA FOUR; THE HOLLYWOOD MEGAMERCIA is, but holy crap it looks awesome. Like someone sprayed a special effects department all over a video. Or something.

Wow.

Take The 2011 InfoWorld geek IQ test, see how geeky you actually are.

Some pretty awesome Back to the Future photos (ie: re-creating a photo from years ago) by Irina Werning.

A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design, by a UI guy on the Microsoft Office vision of the future video from a few weeks ago.

Great article from Jeff Atwood on Bias Lighting over on Coding Horror.

The one thing that we can't abide is direct overhead lighting. Every time the overhead light gets turned on in this room, I feel like a Gremlin shrieking Bright light! Bright light! Oh, how it burns!

Next time you think you or anyone else has too much time on their hands, check out Project Ratway and think again.

First look at Oink, Kevin Rose's app for rating stuff.

Found the Sick Trailer for the New GoPro HD Hero2 over on F-Stoppers. Makes me realize just how boring a life I lead, and I'm hoping that if I were to get one of these little helmet mounted cams I'd spend my day base jumping, flying in a plane, swimming with sexy girls, and travelling to exotic locations.

That said this video needs to be played at 1080p and full screen on the biggest monitor you have.

Brazilian police car rams smugglers' airplane, via jwz.

Your moment of "OMG that looks like it was out of a movie" for the day.

The Twitter Blog has the scoop on Twitter Stories, a way for people to tell a story behind a single tweet. Similar to Storify it looks like. Has potential though, looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Via Daring Fireball again, the BlackBerry Future Visions 2 leaked video (apparently) is embedded below:

My god, could they make the future look any less boring? Setting up role based authentication?! Hazzaa! That's exciting! OMG you can use your own (blackberry) device?! The future is here now! Facetime Video communication between smartphones and desktop!? What brave and unbelievable future is this now!!

Seriously, a "future vision" video that has a large chunk dedicated to what happens if your phone is stolen and the smiling IT guy doing a remote wipe of it? Where's the excitement, where's the coolness? I know that it's probably more like the future than a lot of other of these "future vision" videos, but yea gods, give it a bit of life!

Course, those who manage large infrastructures full of people in suits carrying blackberries are going to be very excited about this :)

Great infographic via Forever Geek: Star Trek Is Just Around the Corner.

Just wanted to say that I just became a backer of the MobileMount a Suction Cup Mount & Kickstand for Phones/Tablets on Kickstarter. They are within $200 of their goal of $20,000 and I'm more than happy to say that based on what I've seen, it's a nice little project that will fix the "man I wish I had a way to have my phone GPS work while I'm driving" thing. It's just a mount (not power/audio), but for a mere $25 pledge, there's no way to lose. Grab one yourself!

Update: And 20 minutes later they hit the $20,000 goal, though I doubt somehow I was a huge amount of help :) Looking forward to getting my MobileMount though :)

The Wunderkit show is about to start from 6Wunderkinder, the company that produces the excellent cross platform task list application Wunderlist. Wunderkit is to help organize as and it appears that the task list is the first step towards this. Information on the page is a little light, but looking at the screen shots it looks likes a fully formed task / calendar / collaboration and note taking system (probably).

When you sign up for the beta you get a special code (ie: www.wunderkit.com/9JYWOq) which when others sign up with (please and thankyou) will bump you up in the waiting list a bit.

Michael Winslow gets the Led out.

The first 28 seconds are like, oh, I've heard this before yawn zzzzzzzzzz WHOA, WHERE THE HELL DID THAT GUITAR NOISE COME FROM??!

Uhm.. Wow.

From the Huffington Post: 'Rome Sweet Rome': Reddit Thread Gets A Movie Deal. Here's the original thread that spawned the movie (someone started writing a story in the comments in response to the question of "could a team of modern day marines destroy the Roman empire?").

If you're a child of the 80s you'll definitely want to check out The Ultimate 80's Tribute video. Amazingly awesome.

Via a coworker a story on slashdot about Searching For Mark Pilgrim as the notable author of the "dive into mark" and "dive into html5" sites has apparently committed infosuicide and deleted all his online presence, sites, twitter, etc, in a move similar to what Why the lucky stiff did in 2009.

Nice lesson in typography for those who don't know their kerning from their serifs. Like me.

A look at Whatever Happened to the iPad Rivals of 2010?

Spoiler: If you like happy endings, you should stop reading now.

Very impressive video of Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs shared by my friend James over on his google+ stream.

Sounds like Google Analytics has added Real-Time Traffic Data, similar to Woopra.

Real-Time reports are available in the new version of Google Analytics, and administrators with Analytics accounts will get Real-Time reports. Google turned the new feature on Thursday for "a number of you," John Jersin, product manager at Google Analytics wrote on the Google Analytics blog.

It hasn't shown up on my analytics dashboard yet, has it for anyone else?

Flickr has introduced a shared photo viewing system called Flickr Photo Session as well as an Android App.

Update: Thomas Hawk has his own take, probably more realistic than the story told by the Flickr video.

Awesome gentleman builds homemade flying contraption powered by eight motorcycle engines. Not much more to say than this. Thanks to my coworker JS for passing it on.

512 Pixels points to the 'Kindle Fire' story over at TechCrunch.

Fully customized Android, $250-300, shipping second week of November, Amazon app store, etc, etc. Could be cool for sure, definitely interesting.

A coworker pointed me to the Pixel Qi display technology and lamented Amazon not utilizing this in their tablet. Pixel Qi allows switching from "normal" LCD mode to a low power, sunlight readable setup (sort of like e-ink, but not). Unfortunately while they did get an investment from 3M recently, I haven't heard of them. The tech looks awesome though, hopefully we'll see it utilized in some e-reader/tablet hybrids soon.

The Macromates blog has been updated with the first (I think) news about the next version of the much loved Mac text editor Textmate. What's Next says there will be a public alpha release this year, before Christmas (for registered users).

I really wonder how much of this is in response to the (apparent) slew of users dropping textmate for BBEdit and Vim as it has appeared that work on the much anticipated 2.0 (talked about as far back as 2006) was never coming and people were jumping ship to an editor that is being developed and doesn't have the danger of a) not supporting newer OSs and b) muscle memory being "wasted" on software that is EOL.

Via Shawn Blanc.

Great set of images of Skydivers over on the Flickr Blog this week. I particularly love the last one and the user of what I assume is a flash attached to his foot :)

Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of netflix, posted a letter on the netflix blog called An Explanation and Some Reflections regarding the whole streaming / DVD split mess that they've been dealing with over the last few months.

It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming, and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology. I'll try to explain how this happened. [...]

Hit the link for the full story.

Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of great videos of slow-mo base jumping. Hard to describe more, other than "awesome".

I Want This Fountain In My House. I can't disagree Forever Geek, I can't disagree.

Unsurprisingly there's differences in what people believe in terms who believes about climate change.

Holy cow. This is a straightforward factual question, and the correct answer is something in the neighborhood of 98%.1 But even among Democrats, only 42% think that most climate scientists believe global warming is happening. It's even worse among the other groups.

It wouldn't be so bad if America wasn't so polarized politically, and so influential in the world.

Kudos again to Gruber.

Kudos to Shawn Blanc for pointing out ifttt (if this then that), a pretty cool website service that simplifies some pretty complex interactions. It's hard to explain so hit the previous link, or check out their blog for more information about the beginnings as well.

Credit this morning goes to my boss, John, for pointing me to NiceKicks.com with a story about some shoes that Nike is apparently going to be announcing today. Normally I'd say "you realize I don't care about shoes right? Mine have holes in them [sadly this is a literal and not figurative statement] and you can tell by the rest of my appearance day to day that I can't care less about fashion."

However he then pointed me to the link.

"Welcome to Los Angeles. If my calculations are correct, over the next 24 hours you are about to see some SERIOUS SH*T!"

The images and contents of the box that the reporter got indicate that Nike may be announcing a "back to the future" shoe of some sort, either in throwback style or (pleasepleaseplease) the self-tying shoes from the movie.

Other resources is the gizmodo story.

Discovered RWPike's Photo Manipulation and Caricatures through Google+ and Rodney Pike. Fantastic work turning images into caricatures.

Awesome essay on The Straight Dope about What would it be like walking around on a cube-shaped planet?

The Biggest History Mindf**ks. Collected from an ask reddit question.

Stocking Is the New Planking. Duplicating stock photography images.

Fantastic.

Laughing Squid links to a great video on The History of Copyright Law.

Very sweet Minimalist Business Card Design with URL, twitter and email all in one. Nice!

Evernote's developer conference is over and they have a nice list of their Developer Competition Winners, some of which are pretty awesome.

It took me entirely too long to realize that this article was from The Onion.

Sure, of the 40 Unhealthiest Coffees there are a ton of >1000 calorie drinks, but I call it looking delicious!

So it's been a slow monday, just something about Motorola being bought by Google. Way more important though is a series of super-cute images of an elephant who befriended a sheep.

Cool social experiment with a starbucks card online for you to use. It started off with $30 and more than $3000 has been charged to it, with people filling up the card as it gets low. There's even a twitter feed to show the current balance.

Nice find by Aryk - World War II: The American Home Front in Color, with some amazing shots in full color.

I'm pretty sure this is just part of the "demand media" generation we live in, but articles like How to Love the Taste of Water: 8 steps (with video) over at wikiHow just baffle me. What's next, "how to breath in 14 easy steps" or "walk or drive, a handy decision tree infographic for your iphone for those though decision making times."

Awesome: Achieve Ultimate Butter Distribution in Your Movie Theater Popcorn with a Straw.

So doing this when I can afford to go to a movie again....

Well, an artists rendering anyway of the Largest Water Reservoir In The Universe.

Astronomers have discovered a reservoir containing 140 trillion times the amount of water in all the Earth's oceans, making it the largest mass of water ever detected in the universe.

Great cartoon on Why Your Newspaper is Dying.

Via Aryk - Top Gear: the motoring show in quotes (by the producer).

All I can say is Oh. My. God..

Via this reddit thread. I think the only caveat is that the builder didn't build it "by hand" (or at least didn't mine all the materials).

When Forever Geek says that this Robot Mouth is the Freakiest Thing You'll See Today he's not kidding. Cool to see how your throat works, but geez, some things are supposed to be a mystery.

The bigger question is how long till someone uses this for.... "other" purposes....

I'm not a big Lady Gaga fan, but I'm a huge Howard Stern fan, and her ‪solo piano performance of "The Edge Of Glory" on yesterday's show was fantastic.

Time has a gallery of Babes of the '80s: Then and Now. Interesting to see who has and hasn't aged since they were the hot babes of the movies of my youth.

Super cool VR view of the Space Shuttle Discovery cockpit.

Thomas Hawk does a cool Google+ vs. Flickr vs. Facebook vs. 500px vs. Twitter comparison.

I will try to compare, the best I can, the attention that the same photograph received from each of these sites over the course of 24 hours. If as a photographer you are looking at photo sharing sites, in part, as a way to promote your work to a wider audience, the engagement your photographs receive online may be of interest. This case is very specific and of course everyone's circumstances will differ, but this is my experience.

A compelling argument on How the Duke Boys ripped off George Lucas.

Fantastic photo-essay on The History of the Space Shuttle by Alan Taylor at The Big Picture. Via Shawn Blanc.

Saw a great pic on reddit of this great Millenium Falcon guitar. Epic.

BTW, happy Fourth of July to all my American readers! Make sure you celebrate by blowing lots of stuff up ok? :)

Turns out that numbers make beautiful music. Someone used some simple rules to turn the numbers of Tau into music.

Pretty cool use of timing and video in a nifty little video called A Guy, a Girl, and 3 iPhones.

Great gallery on Flickr: Cats Unimpressed by Bathing. Via Forgetfoo.

Windows Phone Tattletale is a nice site for WP7 users to point out retailers that are either ignoring or downplaying WP as a viable alternative and directing people to Android or iPhones. Via DF.

Another great video in the series, Everything is a Remix Part 3 is out. The next time that someone complains that Apple copied the Android notification system, or that Windows copied the Linux virtual desktops, or that Ubuntu is trying to be both Apple and Microsoft (I've done all of these things BTW), watch this, and realize that pretty much everything is a copy of something, and it's more about how you put these copies together that makes things interesting.

My buddy Nigel has a nice post up on the Wall of Forgiveness in Vancouver in the post-riot days. Lots of messages from people asking forgiveness, etc.

Also here's good info from Darren on the story behind the kissing couple. Lastly a collage of the people helping clean up (FB album here for those FB-inclined).

Watching this 1950′s Instructional Film on How To Dial a Telephone it reminds me a bit of the "your TV will now be all digital" commercials of not that long ago. Cool to see how similar old and new tech problems can be.

Fans of the TWiT podcasts will have been hearing about the new TWiT studios for a while, and Leo today posted a walkthrough video and images for you to admire. Looks good!

A comparison of Apple iCloud vs Google vs Amazon Cloud Drive vs Dropbox vs Microsoft SkyDrive from Pocket-lint.

awesome people hanging out together - Great tumbler to follow.

Awesome photography by Angus R Shamal.

Minimal Mac introduces Hopefully Sunny, a simple site that will mail you a weather forecast every day. Only zip codes though, so once again Canadians get left out. Eh.

Very cool idea though.

A bit off topic for normal fare, but both Vancouverites and Bostonians (Bostonions?) know that tonight game one of the Stanley Cup Playoff starts. Some great pics of Canucks Pride Around BC were collected on the Vancouver Blog Miss 604.

Go Canucks Go!

Shared by my buddy Rob is this Very Large Telescope HD Timelapse Footage.

Tell me you wouldn't kill to have one of these 6 Killer Star Wars Beds. Thanks ForeverGeek.

After the kerfuffle a while back about flickr accounts being deleted without warning or chance of retrieval, the flickr blog has responded with their new policies and procedures.

Very cool set of 6 Unusual City Maps. Locals vs Tourists based on flickr. Red is a tourist area, blue are the locals.

My boss at work passed on this Top Gear interview with Ranulph Fiennes. Amazing stories and this guy makes tough guys and superstars go "whoah, this guy is tough". Just a few notes:

• Thrown out of the british SAS (tough buggers to start with) for blowing up a movie set
  
• Circumnavigated the globe a few times
  
• Climbed Everest to get rid of his vertigo
  
• When he realized that Everest was just walking slowly uphill he figured that the north face of the Eiger was a better match
  
• Did 7 marathons in 7 days a few weeks after triple bypass surgery
  
• Cut off the frostbitten tips of his own fingers in the garden shed
  
• Considered for the role of James Bond
  

Not sure what else you can do to be defined as "all around tough ass adventurer".

Ironic that a site with an article 20 Reasons Why Your Website Design Sucks is the same site that pops up one of the "web 2.0 popups" (overlay asking if you want to sign up for a newsletter or some crap). Factor that in when you read the article. Via Forgetfoo.

When they say that this is possibly the most useful video you'll ever watch in terms of saving you time in your life, they're not kidding. The shirt removal video alone is worth the price of admission.

The 'bonus' video of the greatest proposal ever though, don't let your girlfriend, wife or fiance watch that lest they be very jealous and ask "why didn't you do something like that for me? Don't you love me as much as he does her?" (might be just me projecting though).

I've always been fascinated by people who are skilled in art, and this "how I drew it" video over on myextralife.com is pretty awesome (though the video quality for the first half or so isn't the best resolution). Well worth the 7 minutes for sure.

That's one of the videos that was posted on Vincent Laforet's Blog related to how small and easy high quality video is getting. Completely recommend watch that first video in high quality on a big screen. Not for the faint of heart though!

Uhm.... wow.

Amazing animated gifs via Shawn Blanc.

From the horses mouth, the Amazon team goes into just what led to the Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS Service Disruption not that long ago.

Just heard about TeeFury where they sell one geeky themed t-shirt for $10 every day until they sell out. Check out the archive for some of their previous designs. Via Forever Geek.

I'm not a big car person, but this video was pretty awesome.

For the love of all that is good and kind in this world please tell me that this is a spoof.

Please.

please....

TomTom user data sold to Dutch police, used to determine ideal locations for speed traps. More or less evil than the Apple "Locationgate" debacle?

Friend of mine on Facebook pointed me to the Expo 86 anniversary party at Science World. If you're a 30-something Vancouverite you definitely remember Expo 86 and should get in on this. Live 80s music, Expo 86 Films, etc.

Great video from Adobe: It Gets Better. Beautiful and true all at once.

My personal note to people who have nothing better to do than make fun of / insult / torture / oppress people because of their sexual orientation: "Grow the fuck up, this world has way more screwed up things to freak out about than man on man or woman on woman love".

That is all. Merry Friday.

Video shows young girl receiving full pat-down, drug test from TSA.

Dear USA, you disgust me sometimes.

Many thanks to loyal UFies reader Zacsek for passing on this note:

I recently received these links, and I thought of sharing them with you, maybe they are interesting enough that you will post them: different sorting algorithms illustrated with traditional folk dances from Transylvania.
I think it's an awesome display of culture and worst case performance of the algorithms :))

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmPA7zE8mx0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZQPjUT5B4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROalU379l3U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns4TPTC8whw

Definitely worth the link! Thanks for compiling the selection for me!

Now this is an inspirational project I can get behind! AT-AT for America via Forever Geek.

Yay! I'm back and ready to post up a storm... well, at least a minor drizzle, but it's starting up again! Lets start up with Dear Coffee, I Love You, a blog all (all) about coffee and coffee related things. Via Shawn Blanc.

I'm not all that good at organizing things, but if you want to help support Japan in the crisis that I'm pretty sure you've heard about, check out the Vancouver Japan Relief Walk of Hope:

We encourage all participant to wear their red and whites, to show off the colors of both countries flags. Having a huge network of photographers, Christopher and his team will be covering this event from many angles and perspectives, capturing the true spirit of giving in action. Opportunities for direct donations can be made along the walk and also at the final destination where a team of volunteers will be meeting the arrivals. This Campaign will continue even after the Walk of Hope has completed.

This will be a great photo walk for Vancouver photographers looking to help out and have fun day, and you'll help a good cause. I'm looking forward to this big time! I know there are at least a few of UFies.org readers in Japan and while I don't know you I hope you and your families are safe, and I hope that I can support in this small way.

I'll repost this again as time gets closer, but again, please do sign up and donate!

7 ways the cable company's trying to screw you. My response.... "only 7?"

Given the speed with which companies shift names, it's not unlikely that the new Quebecor arena will be renamed something else within a few years. And, once again, we'll all feel like idiots when we can't remember what to call that big ugly building thingy where the dudes on the skates hit that rubber thingamajig.

Sadly because of the monopolies these companies have, and the gobs of cash, there's not really a lot you can do about it, because even if you (eg) cut your cable, you still need an internet connection to download your TV shows (assuming you don't just quit cold turkey of course) and guess who you give money to for that.... the cable company, and with caps and net neutrality coming down, you'll be ending up giving them even more money.

Cool news that Microsoft shut down the spam behemoth Rustock, reducing worldwide spam by 39%. Can't say that I've noticed it, but it's good to know. Sadly I'm sure another network will pop up to take it's place, however it does feel lately that spam is moving off of email and onto IM/Mobile more.

Pretty awesome YouTube - Chatroulette Love Song. Best line in it is the "I'm so glad you're not a naked guy".

Via Best Article Every Day.

Thanks for wiebedj for reminding me that today (3/14) is Pi Day! May your radii be merry and your circumferences be bright. Or something like that.

Pretty cool video of how some Found Lost Pictures of New York Blizzard found their way home. Via this reddit story.

For a good cause and everything, and pretty damn funny. James Bond Dresses as a Woman for International Woman's Day. Sorry but Daniel Craig just doesn't pull that dress off. :)

I wasn't sure what to expect when I clicked on the Daring Fireball link entitled Evocative Photos of Star Wars Toys, but after looking at Avanaut's Photostream, that's exactly how I'd describe them too. Fantastically executed shots.

More proof that with a bit of ingenuity and imagination you are never in the "nothing to take pictures of" zone.

Update: An article on his setup and how he creates the images in Gizmodo.

Very awesome Traditionally Animated Superman Film, complete with a pretty cool explanation of the how and why at the end.

Pretty great visual of the BSG Timeline. Found via Laughing Squid.

Seen on There, I Fixed It.com, possibly the most awesome bookshelf design ever. Want!

OK little boys and little boys who have grown up, you will want to look at the 2012 Lamborghini Aventador. Truly a pinup I'd put on my wall. Check out this shot to see just how sleek it is. Thanks to H at work for passing it on to me this morning.