Elmore passed away this morning at 7:15 AM at home surrounded by his loving family. More to follow.
Very sad news. Leonard, 87, had a writing career that spanned almost six decades. His area of speciality was crime fiction, though he got his start in westerns. He was also a popular subject of movie adaptations, with films like Get Shorty, Jackie Brown and 3:10 to Yuma. Leonard’s stories also became the basis for the FX television series Justified.
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?
Om Malik has been digging around for details on Samsung’s rumored smartwatch and believes he has some particulars on the device.
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.
F-Sim Space Shuttle is a fun and highly realistic flight simulator for iOS. Your goal is to land one of the most amazing aircrafts ever built: the Space Shuttle Orbiter. Flight dynamics and the head-up display are simulated in great detail and accuracy. During descent the orbiter is an extremely heavy, unpowered glider, so there’s only one chance to get it right. Air speeds two times faster and glide slopes seven times steeper than a typical airliner approach make for a unique challenge.
Landing a space shuttle is not easy, but there are several landing aids and tutorials that will help you make your first safe landing. Every landing is rated, and more experienced pilots can try a perfect landing or add more challenges (night approaches, crosswind landings, system failures, and much more). A landing analysis screen shows how you performed and how you can improve future landings. You’ll also get a score that can be uploaded to Game Center. You can watch breathtaking replays of your flight from different camera angles and even record your replays to the camera roll in full HD.
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.
Federico often posts some of the most comprehensive app reviews on the Internet, but he really outdid himself this time—he basically wrote a book on this new app. I’m not joking. Much respect Viticci.
He plays The Police, Slayer, Pantera and a little bit of everything else. Very impressive acoustic playing.
I love Jason Kottke’s description of this video:
Meet Jumpy the dog. This dog can jump higher than you, skateboard better than you, dive better than you, walk on its front paws better than you, surf better than you, catch a Frisbee better than you, do a backflip better than you, and ride a scooter better than you. Jumpy is better than you.
There are some great old fonts here.
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.
iOS and Mac developer, Dave Mark, will be helping me post some things on The Loop over the next couple of months, as I begin my fall travels for speaking engagements and events. Dave is the author of Learn C on the Mac, as well as some other development books. You can follow Dave on Twitter.
They forgot better looking too.
For all of you guitar fans who love history, here’s a look at Jimmy Page’s rhythm guitar parts from Led Zeppelin’s classic hit “Whole Lotta Love.” The song might’ve ripped off Willie Dixon, but it exposed millions of kids to maybe the world’s most basic blues riff.
Jimmy Page is one of my favorite guitar players.
This is a really interesting article by Steve Cheney.
Sadly, this is happening all over the world these days.
They did such a great job resurrecting this guitar. I love that they left a lot of the fire damage there and gave the guitar its own serial number and name.
Fans of the fledgling cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin got quite a shock in recent days as some clever thieves worked out yet another method to swipe virtual cash from unsuspecting users. The source of the theft was traced to a bug in Android, and now Google has acknowledged the flaw exists.
Another day, another Android flaw.
Fascinating story.
Gates has been prolific in filing patent applications over the past few years, mostly through a partnership with friends at Intellectual Ventures (IV). That’s one of the world’s largest patent holding companies, typically described as a patent troll because of its practice of acquiring patents and using them to file lawsuits (notably against Motorola), despite not using the patents to make technology of its own.
It would be funny if the company sued Gates.
I’d like to thank Storm Sim for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loop. Storm Sim is the audio experience of a thunderstorm in your pocket. The app is more than a pre-recorded loop; it dynamically generates storms in real-time so it’s always unique and it never repeats.
It supports nearly infinite customization. Add more lightning, dial back the rain, or include a splash of freight train; get that perfect night’s sleep or just relax after a busy day.
Includes sleep and wake timers, AirPlay, LED Clock, add-on packs, and more. It’s a Universal app for iPhone and iPad that supports iOS 5 or higher.
Jim’s note: I showed this app to my wife and not only did she like it, she said she wished she had when the kids were smaller.
This is very clever. Now if you have a question about changing settings or how to do something, you don’t have to search help, just launch this plug-in and watch a video tutorial from MacProVideo. Of course, you have to be a member to watch, but you can download the plug-in free.
Great to see Leslie getting ready for a new release.
As a guitar player of 25 years, I have quite a bit of analog gear in my studio. Currently I have 23 guitars, eight amps and all kinds of pedals. As a computer nerd, I’ve watched the guitar amp emulation grow to impressive levels over the last decade, but never have I been more impressed with an amp plug-in than I was with the new ENGL amp bundle from Brainworx and Universal Audio.
The favorite amp in my collection is a 1988 Marshall JCM800 Head running through a 4 x12 1960A Cabinet. That amp will scream, but it can also sound gritty and bluesy and warm, and with a good hard strum of the strings, it will tear your head off. In my opinion, that’s what most amp emulations are missing.
There are a few factors that go into making a good amp emulation. One of them is obviously the tone—you want a JCM800 (or in this case, an ENGL) amp emulation to sound like the original. Many software amps can sound like a Marshall, but they have the same tone no matter what you do to configure it. They are missing the key ingredient, which is the dynamics.
When I play the strings of my 800 softly, I get a totally different tone than I do when I strum them hard. If I back off the volume knob a little, the tone cleans up significantly, giving me the freedom to play many types of music without ever engaging a pedal.
One of the things I’ve learned over the years is to use the amp first and pedals second. I dial in the amp and get everything I can out of it—I use its tone and dynamics to build my sound. You can’t always get that from software.
To my surprise, I did get a lot of that from the new ENGL amp plug-ins. The new amps are modeled after the ENGL E646 VS and the E765 Retro Tube. The VS has four channels—two lead, crunch and clean—that give you lots of choices when building the tracks for a song.
I don’t have an ENGL amp—although it is on my list of amps I want—but I have played through ENGLs in the past. Being a metal guy, I love the high gain channel of the VS. It has this low-end growl that just inspires you to play. The other channels give you the versatility to play almost anything. I was actually surprised with how well it sounded on the clean channel. I really like the sound of a tasteful chorus on a clean sound and when dialed-in, this sounds heavenly.
I must say, I thought the VS would be my favorite of the two plug-ins, but it wasn’t. The Retro Tube is amazing. It’s a two-channel amp that gives you some warm saturated tone and some nice heavy grit on the second channel. This amp plug-in is just full of tone.
I made two audio samples, one for each amp. I switched through the channels on both amps, so you can hear the difference. I purposely used the default settings and I didn’t play anything specific, I just noodled around. I played slow, soft, fast and hard, so you can also hear the difference the dynamics make. Listen to the saturation on the VS—it’s like you are pushing the amp a little too much and you get that wonderful warm sound out of it.
Both amps feature an effects rack that includes a Gate, simple EQ, Delay, Record Chains, Input Gain, Power Soak and the ability to bypass the pre or power amp. The Input Gain is especially nice if you have a single coil guitar and need to boost the input a bit.
One of the real treats of the ENGL amp plug-ins is the Record Chain section. This is where Brainworx owner Dirk Ulrich recorded the ENGL amps using his Neve VXS 72 Console—one of only nine ever made. There are 64 miked and EQed cabinet presets to choose from. You can also audition the presets by manually clicking through them, or by choosing the number of bars you want each preset to be available and let the plug-in automatically switch.
Someday I will have these amps in my studio, but I’m quite happy with the work that Brainworx and Universal Audio did with these ENGL amps. The attention to detail with amp dynamics alone make these amps a must-have.
All about the story behind one of the most popular (and enduring) coin-op arcade hits of the 80s.
There’s an interesting bit about halfway through talking about Apple’s increased presence in India of late. That’s a potentially huge market for Apple.
These are great. Much respect to Amazon and their customers for the laugh.
An interesting look at stock buybacks.