However—due to various factors—Pebble is no longer able to operate as an independent entity. We have made the tough decision to shut down the company and no longer manufacture Pebble devices.

I heard that they turned down a $700m acquisition a while back, and now they are being sold off for parts. This is especially traumatizing for the people who just got their new Pebble 2 and Pebble Time 2’s (or are still waiting). Part of the challenge with Kickstarter of course, but also not super surprising.

Obviously wish them all the best but it still sucks. Pebble can be argued as the first “real” smartwatch and maybe that was their role in life, not to be the first and stay around forever.

That’s how I ended up talking to “Steve Smith” for 30 minutes. He was a senior investigations officer — the actual person who walks you through how to send them money. I learned that his secret is maintaining an aura of authority. That’s how he optimizes fear. That’s how he gets people to suspend logic, drive to Walgreens, and buy iTunes gift cards to pay the IRS. The scam takes advantage of the most vulnerable people.

Great read.

The KDE Restoration Project was a personal pet project that born around last QtCon and i took as a letter of love for the project that basically formed my professional life.

So this mad-man (or genius, it’s hard to say) has revamped the original KDE 1.0 code for the modern era. A very cool project, and fascinating to see old tech anew. Of course, sometimes our memories of how awesome something was is more powerful than the reality of how awesome it actually was. It’s left for you to decide if that’s the case here or not though :)

‘He’s a very sexually active male reproducer. He’s contributed enormously to repopulating the island,’ said Washington Tapia, a tortoise preservation specialist at Galapagos National Park.

We get answers to questions about what Darth Vader was like as a teenager. What drove him to the dark side? How did he cope with the loss of his mother? How does he feel about the texture of sand?

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.

I started my investigation by installing the “babel-preset-es2015” package. This package allows twenty-something web developers to write a newer, worse version of JavaScript that no one else on their team knows.

The above quote is just about one of the modules detailed, but needless to say it turns out it’s a big, ugly, hairy, mess.

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…

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

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.

The first small piece of the Plex Media Server was committed inauspiciously enough on September 20th, 2008, right after 11:30pm. I was probably tired, and possibly drunk. It was just eight months after the very first pre-alpha release of our OSXBMC media center app, which goes to show you how committed we were to making a server.

So many great memories of one of the truly groundbreaking games, responsible for ushering in basically every FPS since.

“My dad could buy you,” to the Abbotsford, B.C., police officer who responded: “Get him to buy two of me, I could use the help.”

Oh so Abbotsford…

Huge kudos to the team behind this, well done!