The Verge says This is the most secure computer you’ll ever own.
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.
With the release of Firefox 29 you’ll probably notice a few new UI elements. The tabs and main toolbar is very changed, or at least refined. Probably a bit of a shock, but looks good to me!
Saw on the Omni Group News letter that OmniFocus 2 for the Mac (desktop) is available for a public test. You can download a copy and try out this excellent GTD / Todo manager for yourself now.
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”.
From the Leica T first impressions review:
Assessing a camera like the Leica T comes with its own set of problems. The first is suspension of disbelief at the pricing - Leica has become a premium, essentially ‘designer’ brand, but even so the idea of spending £2700 for a mirrorless camera with no built-in EVF and a slow zoom lens is difficult to accept rationally. But exclusivity has become part of Leica’s continued existence, and manufacturing this kind of product in Germany (complete with 45 minutes of hand-finishing each body shell) both contributes to, and helps justify, the high price. The design is - quite deliberately - all about desire over reason.
It is a damn sexy camera, but I couldn’t justify the cost.
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.
Via Engadget: Lytro’s new light-field camera looks like an actual camera, costs $1,599.
“It’s thinner, lighter, and it has a bigger zoom range and a bigger aperture than you could’ve ever gotten conventionally,” said Ng. “We’re doing in software what physical pieces of glass had historically had to do.” Ng added, “To design something like this with a conventional camera would essentially be impossible.”
Looks pretty sexy, and not “OMG WTF is that”. I’m really interested to hear what it does in real life.
Yup, it’s finally out, and this time it’s an LTS. Head over and upgrade or read the Release Notes and look at the features. Don’t forget there are a bunch of additional flavors to choose from.
Here’s the start of the release announcement:
The Ubuntu team is very pleased to announce our fifth long-term support release, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core, as well as Ubuntu 14.04 for Phone and Tablet products.
Codenamed “Trusty Tahr”, 14.04 LTS continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is the first long-term support release with support for the new “arm64” architecture for 64-bit ARM systems, as well as the “ppc64el” architecture for little-endian 64-bit POWER systems. This release also includes several subtle but welcome improvements to Unity, AppArmor, and a host of other great software.
Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS includes the Icehouse release of OpenStack, alongside deployment and management tools that save devops teams time when deploying distributed applications - whether on private clouds, public clouds, x86 or ARM servers, or on developer laptops. Several key server technologies, from MAAS to Ceph, have been updated to new upstream versions with a variety of new features.
The newest Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, and Ubuntu Studio are also being released today. More details can be found for these at their individual release notes:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TrustyTahr/ReleaseNotes#Official_flavours
Maintenance updates will be provided for 5 years for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu Core, Ubuntu Kylin, Edubuntu, and Kubuntu. All the remaining flavours will be supported for 3 years.
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.
New movie trailer for X-Men: Days of Future Past is up:
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.
Ok, Escape From XP is pretty awesome. Kudos to Microsoft for poking fun at themselves.
I got 111,000, how about you?
Popular RSS client Reeder 2 for Mac hits first public beta. You’ll remember Reeder being a very popular desktop RSS reader in the Google Reader days, and it was shut down at that point. Now it’s back with a free public beta available to test out.
Lucy is a bit like the movie Limitless, but not really. Looks really awesome actually, I can’t wait for this one to come out.
Thanks to Jim for the link.
Lightroom mobile was released last night. It’s an iPad app and a webapp, which is run through your Adobe CC account (required). It syncs fairly transparently through the cloud and images appear on the web for display or sharing, or on your iPad for an almost full blown editing experience.
Several aspects are missing from the app. No keywording, colors, or metadata editing, but a basically complete editing experience. Very cool. If you need the other side of the coin, PhotoSmith handles image ingesting, selecting, keywording, adding metadata, and sorting really well, but (as of now) has no editing capabilities. A match made in heaven.
Lightroom Mobile was super easy to setup and install, and as long as you have an Adobe CC account (even the $9.99 photographer bundle thankfully!), it’s free and as far as I can tell un-restricted. A great way to have a portfolio setup on the go and doing some quick and dirty editing.
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”.
HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ Premiere Is Streaming Online for Free. This looks like a better / more dramatic version of Betas which was produced by Amazon (and in my opinion, quit enjoyable).
Dedicated is a behind the scenes view of the making of a video for the Nikon D4s. Regardless of your camera manufacturer affiliation, it’s still a great look at cameras, gear, photographers.
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.
Cameron Diaz’s ‘Sex Tape’ comedy mixes iPads, iCloud and debauchery showing how ‘nobody understands the cloud’. Ok, this was pretty damn funny.
Banned for Life is an interesting story on Medium about an Android app developer who wrote some apps (which wrapped others’ youtube videos in an easy to use app), and got banned for life.
It’s already incredibly difficult to make money on Android. Not having access to the most popular and most easily accessible store would make it impossible to run a successful business. I have used Android since the beginning and I have tried other stores, but no longer use them. It’s just too much trouble for the average user to have to deal with multiple stores. Alternative stores are a good if you are already successful on the Play store and you want to try and supplement your income a bit, but that’s about it.
Interesting commentary about being an Android developer as well. Remember this is someone who chose to develop in Android instead of iOS, so the commentary is a bit damming. Not that you can’t get completely screwed with iOS (app rejections anyone?), and not that he didn’t make apps that were ripe for rejection and just a bad idea. Still, compared to what my “android friends” say (ie: “with Android you make way more money” and “that’s just biased information from apple fanboys” (in regards to pages saying that while Android has a higher marketshare, iOS is kicking ass in the revenue department)), it’s an interesting read.
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.