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.
Getting ready for the new season? Check out the Arrested Development ubercut: 18 running gags.
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)
Really happy to see this morning that Evernote Reminders Are Here on Mac, iOS and Web, fixing one of the biggest missing bits from my ability to use Evernote for everything I do all the time. The reminders UI isn’t bad, in my opinion of a user, but still might need some tweaking.
Still, the ability to hit a button on a new or existing note and set a date to be reminded by push notification is pretty damn cool. Congrats to the Evernote team on a nice update and I can’t wait to use this more!
There’s a tutorial on reminders as well as the video linked in the main article.
Are you a Whovian? Or even a fan of Doctor Who? You’ll want to make sure you watch the recap and prep trailer, featuring all your favorite Doctors.
Speaking of awesome people, check out Chris Hadfield’s Post-landing Interview With NASA.
Via Break.com: People Aren’t the Only Awesome People Video. A great spoof on the ‘People are Awesome’ Videos.
Next Generation Xbox One Unveiled, Everything You Need To Know | Macgasm over at Macgasm.
The biggest oddities for me are that it’s not going to be backwards compatible with XBox 360 games, and the DRM will prevent used games (as the game serial # is now tied to your account).
The latter I see as a natural evolution to the similar system as Apple has for tying iOS apps to your user account. It makes sense, but the side effect of killing the used game market (if it’s true) is a bad one, especially when you’re talking about $60 games instead of $1.99 apps.
The former I honestly don’t believe it’s true. MS is the king of backwards compatibility, and making it so that a hardcore games (no doubt considerable) library of XBox360 games is useless (unless they now have two XBoxes hooked up at all times) just seems ridiculous. I know the new XBox One is more than just gaming, but really, I don’t believe that’ll happen. Guess we’ll see on launch day (no idea other than “later this year”) when you can buy it (no idea for how much).
- 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.
In today’s version of “completely pointless but epically awesome hacking news”: Google Devs Install Ubuntu on Google Glass | OMG! Ubuntu!
In a session at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, cheekily titled “Voiding your warranty”, developers shared how to root Google Glass and install an alternative operating system on it. OS of choice for the demo being Ubuntu.
That’s pretty damn cool :)
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).
The New Pacific Rim Trailer Is an Orgy of Everything You Love.
I think I just nerd-gasm’d again.
In their quest to be an app on every possible platform out there, Evernote today announced Evernote for Google Glass, allowing you to send notes to your Google Glass.
Jim pointed me to the Full-Length Trailer For ‘Riddick’ Now Online!
I think I just had a geek-gasm.
Possibly the coolest page you’ll read today: 3-D Scans Reveal Caterpillars Turning Into Butterflies.
Science!
Here’s the live stream for Google I/O 2013 if you want to watch as things go along.
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - Trailer 1 makes me think that maybe I’ll be checking out some new shows this fall…
Half-Life 2 Games Available For Linux (Steam) via Web Upd8:
Like the other two titles Valve has made available for Linux last week: Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal, the Half-Life 2 games are in beta for now and they don’t show up in the Linux section on Steam but if you didn’t purchase them already, you can simply search for them in the All Items section and they should install on Linux. Or you can click the links below[…]
Booya.
Very true, but all I can think of is that the Ubuntu blatant copying of the Mac OS interface has reached an all time high. This is basically a copy of the “Launchpad” app that came with Lion (and no mac user I know uses Launchpad anyway).
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.
Not as bleeding edge anymore, the first RC for Ruby on Rails 4.0 is now available.
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.
Google announced that for storage space, 15 GB is now shared between Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos.
Life gets a bit easier when your Google products work well together—whether that’s inserting a Drive file into an email or sharing a photo from Drive on Google+. As this experience becomes more seamless, separate storage doesn’t make as much sense anymore. So instead of having 10 GB for Gmail and another 5 GB for Drive and Google+ Photos, you’ll now get 15 GB of unified storage for free to use as you like between Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos.
I’m sure there are some downsides and people are going to complain about something, but this isn’t bad for a free service :)
I’m back! Seems appropriate the first post from me after a week away is not only from a Canadian, but something “global”. This is Commander Chris Hadfield’s “Space Oddity” cover from the ISS:
@cmdr_hadfield is scheduled to leave the international space station today after a long time of service and an amazingly human look at life aboard the ISS.
Here’s a storify link with the full details.
Sir we thank you for your service!
Veronica Mars Season 4: FBI Pilot
Veronica Mars Season 4: FBI Pilot is a great tease for what to expect for the now financed
Veronica Mars Movie project. This should be pretty cool.
Adobe talks about cloud only as it effects photographers
Catch the rest of the podcasts as well if you are into photography.
After nearly 10 years, Adobe abandons its Creative Suite entirely to focus on Creative Cloud
A post by Trey Radcliff
Ready to pay Adobe $29.99 a month for the rest of your life? hehe… Or wait, how about $49.99 a month for the complete package?
I think it’s pretty crazy… I like the good old days of buying software and owning it forever. For example, let’s say that I drop my Creative Cloud membership and I want to go back in a few months later and, say, CROP AN IMAGE using Photoshop, then I can’t without paying Adobe again? It just seems crazy!
Anyway, we’ll discuss this on the live show soon - see https://plus.google.com/events/c647hgj11keapdsnva92m5d6uao — we’ll bring this up almost straight away with +Thomas Hawk +Frederick Van Johnson and more!
To me, it seems like Adobe seems more interested in having predictable revenue than making customers happy. This tends to happen in organizations with a lot of bloat where eventually decisions are made by bean-counters and committees. Am I wrong? I don’t think so…
Fancy is the new Sharper Image, things you never imagined and have no need for but buy anyway.
Hong Kong giant inflatable rubber duck
Why do I feel like singing the rubber duckie song?
Adobe gives sneak peak of Lightroom-style app for tablets
A Nice story to make Alan Squee….
The Secret of Alan’s success with the ladies
Robotic Insects Make First Controlled Flight
Need to add a Science category.
To The Apocalypse In Daddy’s Sidecar - Abney Park Enjoy a fun Music video.
I have a wide and varied taste in music so enjoy
Android tablets overtake Apple for the first time.
Here is your Anti-Apple post Alan (:
Time travel in movies, a spoilerific chart for all permutations of time travel in movies.
Instacast for Mac is now available for download. Instacast began it’s life as an iPhone podcast management system, and a damn good one (if you don’t want/need to sync back to iTunes). A Mac companion app sounds like the logical next step. Looking forward to checking it out.
This will be nice for people (unlike myself) who can’t stand iTunes and want to get rid of every little bit of it.
Just a quick note to welcome my friend Cthulhu who will be keeping things up to date here on the site while I’m away for a week for a work trip. Make him feel welcome and ignore his anti-iPhone rants (which will no doubt be posted as soon as I leave :)
The Joss Whedon’s take on Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing UK Trailer
Limited release in June.
Sipping my Mocha I have to agree with The Doghouse Diaries about What Your Coffee Says About You. I am creative dammit!
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.
You can uhm, now get, Google Now on your iPhone and iPad, with the Google Search app. Pretty impressive, but keep an eye on your battery, it keeps the GPS on all the time, causing faster than normal battery drain.
Great stuff, just wish that it was usable with non-gmail accounts (or could take advantage of them that is).
The team that creates the excellent iPad to Lightroom sync App PhotoSmith (app store link) blogged today that they are looking for beta testers for the next version of the app. This app is going to bring some huge changes which will make long time users happy and new users even happier.
So… we are asking you, dear readers, for 10 volunteers to help us really work the app over hard and smash it to bits to make sure it’s really as solid as we think it is.. To be clear, this isn’t a chance to play with new goodies for free like our Adobe brethren are able to do. No, we are asking for volunteers dedicated to helping make sure this app works no matter how crazy your workflow is.
There’s a beta signup link. If you are a lightroom user and looking for a great syncing setup for your iPad, and want to help out, give them a look.
A New Trailer For Pixar’s ‘Monsters University’ Released via Geeks of Doom.
Instapaper acquired by Betaworks, owner of Digg.
Whoah
Marco has the details over on his personal blog where the announcement went out.
Congrats to Marco and thanks for the awesome app, looking forward to more/better in the future!
Saw that Twitter for Mac goes Retina, gets design tweaks and 14 new languages. I honestly didn’t think this would ever happen, after the year (or more?) of complete inactivity on the official twitter app for the Mac.
Ubuntu released Ubuntu 13.04 today. There are a bunch of new updates you can find on the virtual tour or just check out the overview of the desktop or just download it now.
Congrats on the Ubuntu team.
How 99.9% of people judge the quality of their coffee. I’m a sucker for coffee comics.
