The Stillwater brewery teamed up with Dan and David Thiesen, co-owners of the fair’s Ball Park Café, to create the beer. It will have a warm tan color, like the exterior of a mini donut, and a sweet, malty taste. As an added touch, it will be served in a glass with cinnamon and sugar on the rim.
This just might be crazy enough to be good!
22 past and present “Saturday Night Live” cast members — and one who almost made it — tell how they auditioned for the show.
Chevy Chase:
We had our cast and were back at [Studio] 8H, and there was a little room nearby with a long desk which could act as a stage. Lorne asked everybody to go up there and do something. At the end he said, “Chevy, get up there and do something.” So I made up some strange story about Gerald Ford. It was pretty clear that I was a funny guy. I was taller than everybody, and very handsome.
Heh. Lots of wonderful stuff here.
30 Rock was a great series. So much to love about it. Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, incredible supporting cast. The pilot, which first aired October 11, 2006, had a lot of those elements, but Rachel Dratch was jarringly miscast as Jenna Maroney. Here it is. Enjoy.
Uber is a car service with a kick-ass iOS app. Launch the app and a map appears showing all the “black cars” in your area, with the time until the closest one can get to your location. Tap a button, the car is instantly dispatched. When the driver gets close, they’ll call and/or text you to let you know the car is near. You rank the drivers (1-5 stars) and they rank you, too. Terrific experience, just a bit more expensive than a cab, but much more convenient and incredibly reliable.
The fact that they are raising so much money is a sign of both the maturation of this space, and of its competitive nature.
The size of our devices are stuck at something of a bottleneck. We can’t exactly make them smaller because they’re so reliant on large, easily visible displays. So, the industry makes do, and makes the devices thinner, which reduces overall size without compromising display size. One object standing in the way of even thinner laptops is the hinge, and Apple might have found a way to remove that from the design equation.
Yesterday, a new patent application was published that describes “flexible segments” that interlock to form a rigid material. The material used isn’t some kind of top-secret new wonder metal only found deep within Apple’s subterranean volcano lair, but rather a process that can take rigid material — such as plastic or metal — and can cut it in such a way to create the flexible segments. The flexible segmented hinge could bend at various degrees, but that depends on the segments being cut in different patterns.
Intriguing.
Scorching new ad for Apple’s upcoming Mac Pro. Do I want one? Oh, yes.
Making the storage and access of data more convenient, artist Anthony Antonellis implanted an RFID chip into his hand that can store data which can be wirelessly accessed by a smartphone.
The chip is the size of a grain of sand and only holds about 1K of data, but it does work. Antonellis can use his smartphone to store data on the chip and retrieve the data as needed. The technology requires him to actually touch the implant with his phone, as the antennae’s reach is about 1 cm.
From Eadweard Muybridge and George Méliès to James Cameron and Phil Tippett, the history of movie effects is basically the greatest bedtime story never told. Except it’s a yarn so full of dragons, dinosaurs and mimetic polyalloy killing machines sent back from the future that you’d never get any sleep after hearing it. As Life Of Pi and Avatar amply demonstrate, there are many chapters still to be written and innovations still to be forged, but whether in-camera, matte, prosthetic, CG, or just lovingly modelled by a man with a passion for Plasticine, effects have brought magic to the movies since the silent era. In a unique celebration of the art, Empire asked the people who make them happen to pick their favorites.
Each one of these really brings a new appreciation to the effort involved and the incredible effect achieved. The closeup of Davey Jones from Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest, for example, really gives a sense of how breathtakingly realistic the effect is. Love this.
Will Apple build a TV set? The answer is complicated. This article does a good job laying out all the parameters.
One alternative being considered is that Apple could essentially become a cable company itself. Under that scenario, sources say, Apple would launch what is formally known as a virtual multichannel video programming distributor. MVPD is the catch-all term for pay TV services, whether delivered over cable lines, satellites, or otherwise. A virtual MVPD would offer such content entirely over the internet. Intel, Google, and Sony are known to be preparing virtual MVPDs of their own.
Just as happened in the music space, companies like Apple act as a disruption to an existing business model. In this case, the disruption to the TV space has been going on for a long time. A new studio system is evolving and, in many cases, succeeding. Netflix broke through with “House of Cards”, creating and distributing content completely outside the traditional mechanisms.
However Apple’s television service is formally regarded, it will still be seen as disrupting the TV industry. In its talks with content companies, say sources, Apple notes that it has nearly 600 million iTunes accounts and is good at getting people to pay for content. It made similar claims when it negotiated with companies in music and publishing, and it has indelibly changed those industries.
This is getting interesting.
Chief among the affected services is iMessage. Here’s a link to the Apple System Status page so you can check for yourself.
This phone call was taped on April 30, 1973, the same evening H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman had resigned. Reagan was calling Nixon to offer his condolences.
Terrific speech given to incoming Georgian Tech freshmen. Gotta love this kid’s enthusiasm.
This is a lovely bit of design. Student Mugi Yamamoto created a compact printer which is placed on top of a stack of paper.
When printing, “Stack” slowly moves downwards and swallows the pile until no paper is left.
Really nice.
Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano blogs about his near death by drowning, in his helmet, on a recent space walk.
…as I turn ‘upside-down’, two things happen: the Sun sets, and my ability to see – already compromised by the water – completely vanishes, making my eyes useless; but worse than that, the water covers my nose – a really awful sensation that I make worse by my vain attempts to move the water by shaking my head. By now, the upper part of the helmet is full of water and I can’t even be sure that the next time I breathe I will fill my lungs with air and not liquid.
Riveting.
A man who hacked into Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page to expose a software bug is getting donations from hackers around the world after the company declined to pay him under a program that normally rewards people who report flaws.
Wonder why Facebook is not paying him under their bug bounty program.
This interview was done in 1990, before Star Wars Episodes I-III were created. Pretty interesting stuff.
…the beam entered the back of Bugorski’s head and came out around his nose. Shortly after this happened, Bugorski’s left half of his face swelled up beyond recognition. He was taken to the hospital and studied as this was something that had never been seen before and so they closely monitored him thereafter, fully expecting him to die within a few days at most.
Yikes!
Computer scientists say they found a way to sneak malicious programs into Apple’s exclusive app store without being detected by the mandatory review process that’s supposed to automatically flag such apps.
The researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology used the technique to create what appeared to be a harmless app that Apple reviewers accepted into the iOS app store. They were later able to update the app to carry out a variety of malicious actions without triggering any security alarms. The app, which the researchers titled “Jekyll,” worked by taking the binary code that had already been digitally signed by Apple and rearranging it in a way that gave it new and malicious behaviors.
My two cents: As a developer, I am not alarmed by this, as much as surprised no one figured out a way to do this earlier. This is why Apple’s App Store model works. There’s a choke-point for this type of mechanism. It’ll be interesting to see Apple’s response.
The Good Eggs “farm-to-fridge” business model turns the supermarket model on its head. Instead of having one or several physical locations stocked with a standard, unchanging inventory, the Good Eggs storefront is online, and calls on local farms to deliver only what customers have ordered that day. Good Eggs essentially stocks and empties a grocery store every day, and because its inventory is based entirely on what each customer is ordering, it’s a different grocery store every day, too. The company has created an efficient new food system that’s elegant in its simplicity.
Due to their perishable cargo, grocery stores are notoriously difficult to migrate to an online model. The first attempt, Webvan, founded in the late 1990s, was considered one of the largest dot-com flops in history. Much has changed since then, including a stronger push for locally sourced goods. Interesting article. Will be interesting to see if Good Eggs and the like can overcome the inherent problems with shipping perishable goods in a cost-effective manner.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday published an Apple patent for a method of generating and manipulating a three-dimensional object on a computing device, with the process controlled by special gestures made above a touchscreen’s surface.
With the maturation of 3D printing and the emergence of technologies such as the Leap Motion Controller, this is a logical direction for Apple.
The document refers to a device that can detect the location of fingers with a combination of capacitive touch sensors and proximity sensors embedded in the display. These two components can be separate, or the capacitive sensors themselves can act as proximity sensors by measuring the capacitance of a nearby finger.
Proximity sensors mean that the gestures do not necessarily require touch, meaning you might rotate an object by rotating your hand. Tremendous possibilities.
There’s a trend emerging that I find very interesting. It started with people posting complicated guitar pieces, slowing things down a bit so you really get a handle on the complexity. For example, here’s a link to Frank Zappa’s Rat Tomago, slowed by 20%.
Today, I came across this post, slowing down the Dolly Parton song, Jolene, by 17%. I love the new guitar sound, but I was really taken by the change in vocal. What else you got for me internet?
The retail giant’s main U.S. site went offline at approximately 3 p.m. ET on Monday. The cause of the outage remains unclear, but Amazon Web Services (AWS), including EC2, remained up and working on the most part unaffected, according to its status page.
However, after we first published this post, at 3:14 p.m. ET, the AWS Management Console was experiencing elevated error rates across all regions of the world, including North America and Europe. There was also a flagged issue with a North Virginia data center that was quickly resolved.
Affected sites were restored about 25 minutes later, as was the AWS Management Console, though it was still experiencing “elevated error rates” during its recovery. Amazon said it experienced “an increased error rate for CreateTags and DeleteTags APIs in the US-EAST-1 region.”
The cause of the outage is not clear. Interesting that Amazon-owned Audible.com was down as well.
One of the least-known Monty Python rarities is “The Great Birds Eye Peas Relaunch of 1971,” a short advertising film that was made for the Birds Eye company’s internal use and then apparently locked away from the public eye (and probably the Python’s, too) until it magically appeared on YouTube.
So great to see something from the Pythons that I’ve never seen before.
In an odd turn of events, Windows 8 has been banned from HWBot, one of the world’s top benchmarking and overclocking communities. All existing benchmarks recorded by Windows 8 have been disqualified. This is due to a fault in Windows 8′s real-time clock (RTC), which all benchmarking tools use as a baseline.
This seems fixable, but to have your flagship OS banned from one of the top benchmarking sites is a remarkable turn of events.
Happy to help keep the ship running straight and true while Jim is on the road. Beard growth in progress.