How Apple could shake up TV: A la carte channels

How Apple could shake up TV: A la carte channels: Apple's much-expected TV could have one big trick up its sleeve: Giving consumers the power to pick--and pay for--only the channels they want.

British Prime Minister to run the country with the help of a personalized iPad app

British Prime Minister to run the country with the help of a personalized iPad app: British Prime Minister David Cameron is having a personalized iPad app...

How to download YouTube videos using Safari or Firefox | Macworld

How to download YouTube videos using Safari or Firefox | Macworld: And then there’s the ugly way—using a screen capture utility to grab video and audio in real time. You can do this with QuickTime Player by choosing File -> New Screen Recording, but you won’t be able to capture the video’s audio until you install Cycling ’74’s free Soundflower. To do that, download and install Soundflower, open the Sound system preference, and choose Soundflower (2-ch) in the Output tab. Within QuickTime’s Screen Recording window, click on the triangle and under the Microphone heading choose Soundflower (2ch). Start the recording and then start the video playing.

Before Science Fiction: Romances of Science and Scientific Romances

Before Science Fiction: Romances of Science and Scientific Romances: The origin of science fiction stories is well-known to both critics and the public: by consensus, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) was the first SF novel. But the origins of "science fiction" as a concept are neither well-known nor agreed-upon. The phrase "science fiction," meaning the genre of scientifically-oriented fantastic fiction, was popularized in 1929 by Hugo Gernsback. But "science fiction" had a 19th century predecessor: "scientific romance," a term used by H.G. Wells. However, as we'll see, science fiction started decades before that, as did many of the terms describing science fiction.

Good Will Toward Men

Good Will Toward Men: And there were in the same country Shepherds abiding in the field, Keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, And the glory of the Lord shone round about them. And they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, "Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, Which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day In the city of David A Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the...

Amazon Builds World's Fastest Nonexistent Supercomputer

Amazon Builds World's Fastest Nonexistent Supercomputer: The 42nd fastest supercomputer on earth doesn't exist. This fall, Amazon built a virtual supercomputer atop its Elastic Compute Cloud -- a web service that spins up virtual servers whenever you want them -- and this nonexistent mega-machine outraced all but 41 of the world's real supercomputers. Amazon is the poster child for the age of cloud computing. Alongside their massive e-tail business, Jeff Bezos and company have built a worldwide network of data centers that gives anyone instant access to all sorts of computing resources, including not only virtual servers but virtual storage and all sorts of other services that can be accessed from any machine on the net. This global infrastructure is so large, it can run one of the fastest supercomputers on earth -- even as it's running thousands upon thousands of other virtual servers for the world's businesses and developers.

CineXPlayer: A powerful movie app

CineXPlayer: A powerful movie app: One of my favorite media apps for this is CineXPlayer, a powerful and versatile program for $3.99 that lets you watch your Xvid high-def movies and other formats on the iPad even if they aren't supported by the tablet natively. That way, you don't need to first convert your video content into a file the iPad can read.

Along with being the only iPad app that supports Dolby Digital Plus audio for clear and well-balanced sound, CineXPlayer can also convert your 2-D movies into 3-D to playback on a compatible 3DTV (via a 99 cent in-app purchase).

Similar to the VLC app, which got pulled off the App Store earlier this year, getting content into CineXPlayer is easy. Connect your iPad to your PC or Mac and open iTunes. Click on the App tab of your tablet and scroll to the bottom to see apps that support drag-and-drop functionality. Now, you can take movies off your hard drive — such as .Xvid, .AVI, .MOV, .M4V, .3GP and .MP4 files, or ripped from DVDs using software like Handbrake — and copy them to this folder. Unplug, and then go.

POW! Marvel, DC and the other comics publishers finally go digital - Chicago Sun-Times

POW! Marvel, DC and the other comics publishers finally go digital - Chicago Sun-Times: On behalf of what must be hundreds, or dare I even say thousands, of comic book readers who also own phones, tablets, and even our own home computers, it is my pleasure to finally welcome the comic book industry into the 21st century. Each of the big four comics publishers (DC, Marvel, Image, and Dark Horse) have committed to releasing every issue of every comic for digital download on the same day that the physical comics ship to retailers.

Brad Bird Talks <em>Ghost Protocol</em> and Making Great Movies

Brad Bird Talks Ghost Protocol and Making Great Movies: Since the turn of the century, director Brad Bird has galvanized Hollywood with animated masterpieces The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille. Now he's boosted a sagging spy franchise with Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol, his live-action thriller that has ironically blown past comics-based blockbusters like Captain America and Green Lantern to become the year's finest action film.

The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith—By Alan P. Lightman (Harper's Magazine)

The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith—By Alan P. Lightman (Harper's Magazine): It is perhaps impossible to say how far apart the different universes may be, or whether they exist simultaneously in time. Some may have stars and galaxies like ours. Some may not. Some may be finite in size. Some may be infinite. Physicists call the totality of universes the “multiverse.” Alan Guth, a pioneer in cosmological thought, says that “the multiple-universe idea severely limits our hopes to understand the world from fundamental principles.” And the philosophical ethos of science is torn from its roots. As put to me recently by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg, a man as careful in his words as in his mathematical calculations, “We now find ourselves at a historic fork in the road we travel to understand the laws of nature. If the multiverse idea is correct, the style of fundamental physics will be radically changed.”

North Korea Fires Off Missile As Kim Jong-Il Dies

North Korea Fires Off Missile As Kim Jong-Il Dies: The porno fetishist and nuke enthusiast who ran North Korea is dead. His twentysomething son now runs the world's most militarized state, without having served a day in uniform. So naturally North Korea launched off missiles on Monday morning, to tell the world: This is not the time to mess with it.

Bugs & Fixes: No green light for UltraViolet | Macworld

Bugs & Fixes: No green light for UltraViolet | Macworld: In the end, watching UltraViolet movies required that I first set up two accounts, download a viewing application on my Macs (and another on iOS devices, if I didn’t already have it), install Flash Player and Air on my Macs, download each movie multiple times (to get the better quality version), and put up with numerous login complications. And I haven’t even mentioned using the UltraViolet website to add additional family members to your account (needed if you want each member to have their own login) and add additional viewing devices (a feature that is not even up and running yet).

How to make a photo journal in iPhoto | Macworld

How to make a photo journal in iPhoto | Macworld: With iPhoto’s book-creation tools, you can easily combine the best elements of photo albums, written diaries, and scrapbooks to create compelling and personal photo journals. Unlike a regular photo book or album, a photo journal takes your photographs and uses them to tell a story. The images are typically organized chronologically and combined with large amounts of text to create an extensive and coherent narrative.

These journals can be a history of a period of time in your life, or they can get creative. You can document all your meals for a month, take a snapshot every day for a year, or create a record of your child’s first months in the world.

Bryan Ferry, Shepherd’s Bush Empire, review - Telegraph

Bryan Ferry, Shepherd’s Bush Empire, review - Telegraph: For someone who has helped shaped popular music over the past 40 years, Ferry doesn’t really have a lot of crowd-pleasing hits. He did eight cover versions and delved into some obscure corners of the Roxy catalogue, including the odd, sci-fi boogie of If There is Something from their 1972 debut.

Census data: Half of U.S. poor or low income - CBS News

Census data: Half of U.S. poor or low income - CBS News: (AP)  WASHINGTON - Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.
The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.

Spiders' Hundreds of Fine Hairs Are Hundreds of Ears

Spiders' Hundreds of Fine Hairs Are Hundreds of Ears: Tiny hunting spiders can not only watch your every move, but they can feel those moves, and that of their prey, through the air. But how they do it, exactly, has puzzled researchers for decades.

LiveCode 5.0.2 - Create iOS applications quickly and easily.. (Demo)

LiveCode 5.0.2 - Create iOS applications quickly and easily.. (Demo): LiveCode will help you unleash your killer app. Build apps twice as fast as any other environment with a modern and powerful workflow that saves time at every step. LiveCode is more than just mobile; deploy to 7 popular platforms from one code base. LiveCode has an incredibly rich, deep feature set with more than 2000 features for even the most sophisticated project. From ask password to zoom box, drop shadows to data grids, vector graphics to native scroll bars - LiveCode has it covered.

For NFL Teams, iPad Is Valuable Playbook | Playbook | Wired.com

For NFL Teams, iPad Is Valuable Playbook | Playbook | Wired.com: The Jets are but one example of how the ubiquitous tablets are changing how teams throughout the National Football League prepare for, and review, games. The iPad is quickly replacing traditional “films” and even printed playbooks in the NFL, much like it is replacing charts in many airliners. A growing number of teams find the devices are faster, cheaper and easier than ripping thousands of DVDs and compiling reams of paper. Tablets also provide far greater flexibility in when, where and how players and coaches prep for upcoming games, allowing them to, say, review annotated game clips or new plays just about anywhere.

“All the video that our players want to see, whether it’s all the third downs that the Patriots ran or all their red-zone plays, they’ll have all that stuff on their iPads,” said Jets video director Tim Tubito.

Inside Siri: Apple’s game-changing technology – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home

Inside Siri: Apple’s game-changing technology – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home: “Siri’s technology represents decades of combined research on artificial intelligence from more than 20 universities, including Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Yale,” Tobak reports. “It’s a spinoff of SRI’s Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO) project that was originally funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under its Perceptive Assistant that Learns (PAL) program.”

ComicBookLover 1.5 - Comic viewer, collector, organizer.. (Shareware)

ComicBookLover 1.5 - Comic viewer, collector, organizer.. (Shareware): ComicBookLover (formerly ComicBookViewer) enables you to easily view, collect and organise digital comics. Find comics by browsing cover art. Create smart lists. Edit information quickly. View comics in full-screen mode, on laptops and external displays. Supports CBZ, CBR and PDF comic archives.

Meet Gordon, the World's First Flash Supercomputer

Meet Gordon, the World's First Flash Supercomputer: Supercomputers aren't what they used to be. The Chinese are building a supercomputer with their own microprocessors, shunning American chip giants Intel and AMD. The Spanish are building one with cellphone chips. And this week, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) officially plugged in the first supercomputer that uses flash memory for storage rather than good old fashioned spinning disks. Naturally, they it call it Gordon. As in Flash Gordon.

Symantec: Spam levels fall to lowest in three years

Symantec: Spam levels fall to lowest in three years: Global spam fell to the lowest level in three years in a sign that spammers may be getting a better rate of return by hitting social-media websites instead, security firm Symantec says.

Why Sugar Makes Us Sleepy (And Protein Wakes Us Up)

Why Sugar Makes Us Sleepy (And Protein Wakes Us Up): Sugar subdues neurons in the brain that regulate wakefulness, and protein amps them up. Mixing both sugar and protein, however, leads to surprising results. Frontal Cortex blogger Jonah Lehrer explains why.

Reliving the Momentous 1882 Transit of Venus

Reliving the Momentous 1882 Transit of Venus: Nearly 130 years ago today, the premier event in astrophysics involved watching a tiny dot slowly sail across the surface of the sun. That dot was our sister planet, Venus, and observing its transit as it passed directly between the Earth and sun was a momentous scientific undertaking.

And the Transit of Venus features heavily in the first part of Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon."

How to Dispel Your Illusions by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books

How to Dispel Your Illusions by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books: Another famous example of statistical prediction is the Dawes formula for the durability of marriage. The formula is “frequency of love-making minus frequency of quarrels.” Robyn Dawes was a psychologist who worked with Kahneman later. His formula does better than the average marriage counselor in predicting whether a marriage will last.

The 27th Annual Editors’ Choice Awards | Macworld

The 27th Annual Editors’ Choice Awards | Macworld: The Editors’ Choice Awards (we affectionately call them the Eddys) recognize our favorite products released during the past year. It’s a task we take very seriously; starting with a list of over 130 candidates, we spend weeks discussing each product, debate its merits, and whether it fulfills our standards of quality, utility, innovation, value, and excellence.

Dec. 5, 1901: Disney, Heisenberg ? Separated at Birth?

Dec. 5, 1901: Disney, Heisenberg ? Separated at Birth?: Animation pioneer Walt Disney and nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg share a birthday. So, if you've ever thought the Uncertainty Principle was a bit goofy, you may be onto something.

Rihanna: Why is she so popular? - Slate Magazine

Rihanna: Why is she so popular? - Slate Magazine:

Famous classical composers: the last piece they wrote before they died. - Slate Magazine

Famous classical composers: the last piece they wrote before they died. - Slate Magazine: Last words are pithier than last pieces of music, and the world remembers the apropos or the funny ones. Enlightenment genius Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "More light!" Gen. Robert E. Lee: "Strike the tents." Gustav Mahler: "Mozart …" Richard Wagner, in the truest and most lucid words he ever spoke: "I feel lousy." Oscar Wilde, contemplating the garish wallpaper in his hotel room: "One of us has to go." Eugene O' Neill, son of an itinerant actor, who was similarly unhappy about his last residence: "Born in a hotel room, died in a goddam hotel room!" Salvador Dali: "Where is my clock?" Steve Jobs: "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."

YMCA offers unique indoor sporting event | KPIC CBS 4 - News, Weather and Sports - Roseburg, OR | - Roseburg, Oregon | Local & Regional News

YMCA offers unique indoor sporting event | KPIC CBS 4 - News, Weather and Sports - Roseburg, OR | - Roseburg, Oregon | Local & Regional News: Anyone is welcome to join in. Playing is free for YMCA members and community members wanting to give it a shot.
If you want to try your hand at pickleball, you can drop by the matches on Monday and Wednesday mornings from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.
The Y also offers family pickleball on Wednesdays and Fridays from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

The American Scholar: A Jew in the Northwest - William Deresiewicz

The American Scholar: A Jew in the Northwest - William Deresiewicz: It’s like this. I fell in love with the place. I spent a sabbatical here a few years ago just for the hell of it, and by the time it was over, I never wanted to leave. Everyone was so nice! They looked you in the eye! They smiled at you! They asked you how your day was going, and they really wanted to know. (Their day? Well, their stupid roommate had taken their bicycle without permission and ended up wrecking it, so now they needed a new bicycle and a new roommate, which totally sucked.) The niceness was political, as well. The Portland planning genius, which had created a city that was neither a playground for the rich nor a decaying postindustrial shit-hole, was all about making room for other people, putting public space over private advantage. Here was a city, a real city, that didn’t make you feel like garbage.

YMCA offers unique indoor sporting event

YMCA offers unique indoor sporting event:

Now that the weather is cold, the YMCA has an activity that can help you get in a workout while making a few new friends. It's called, 'Pickleball.'

Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future | CNET UK

Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future | CNET UK: A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.

The LHC successfully collided particles at record force earlier this week, a milestone Mr Cole was attempting to disrupt by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment's vending machines. He also claimed responsibility for the infamous baguette sabotage in November last year.

Mr Cole was seized by Swiss police after CERN security guards spotted him rooting around in bins. He explained that he was looking for fuel for his 'time machine power unit', a device that resembled a kitchen blender.

Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age, would not reveal his country of origin. "Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I'm here to stop it ever happening."

This isn't the first time time-travel has been blamed for mishaps at the LHC. Last year, the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya and Danish string-theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen put forward the hypothesis that the Higgs boson was so "abhorrent" that it somehow caused a ripple in time that prevented its own discovery.

Professor Brian Cox, a CERN physicist and full-time rock'n'roll TV scientist, was sympathetic to Mr Cole. "Bless him, he sounds harmless enough. At least he didn't mention bloody black holes."

Mr Cole was taken to a secure mental health facility in Geneva but later disappeared from his cell. Police are baffled, but not that bothered.

Further developments at the LHC: Accident at Large Hadron Collider shunts April Fools' Day to 1 November

Researcher’s Video Shows Secret Software on Millions of Phones Logging Everything | Threat Level | Wired.com

Researcher’s Video Shows Secret Software on Millions of Phones Logging Everything | Threat Level | Wired.com: The Android developer who raised the ire of a mobile-phone monitoring company last week is on the attack again, producing a video of how the Carrier IQ software secretly installed on millions of mobile phones reports most everything a user does on a phone.

Though the software is installed on most modern Android, BlackBerry and Nokia phones, Carrier IQ was virtually unknown until 25-year-old Trevor Eckhart of Connecticut analyzed its workings, revealing that the software secretly chronicles a user’s phone experience — ostensibly so carriers and phone manufacturers can do quality control.

But now he’s released a video actually showing the logging of text messages, encrypted web searches and, well, you name it.

Nov. 29, 1972: <cite>Pong</cite>, a Game Any Drunk Can Play

Nov. 29, 1972: Pong, a Game Any Drunk Can Play: If fire was the beginning of civilization, was the appearance of Pong the beginning of the videogame age? A case can be made.

Image Tool Catches Fashion Industry Photo Alterations | Wired Science | Wired.com

Image Tool Catches Fashion Industry Photo Alterations | Wired Science | Wired.com:

Four short links: 24 November 2011

Four short links: 24 November 2011: Green Array Chips -- 144 cores on a single chip, $20 per chip in batches of 10. From the creator of Forth, Chuck Moore. (via Hacker News)

Inside Occupy Wall Street?s Growing Student Protests

Inside Occupy Wall Street's Growing Student Protests: Occupy Wall Street may have been evicted from Zuccotti park, but New York students are now taking the protest back to their schools.

How to manage multiple Macs at home

How to manage multiple Macs at home: While it’s easier to manage a single Mac, it’s possible to have control over multiple Macs within your home. Here's how you can remotely configure parental controls on another computer, monitor what your kids do with their Macs, share media between the computers within your home, and more.

Google launches redesigned Google Search app for iPad (with video) – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home

Google launches redesigned Google Search app for iPad (with video) – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home: “Today, we’re very pleased to be launching a significant redesign for the Google Search app for iPad,” Daniel Fish, Software Engineer, Google Search app, reports via The Official Google Mobile Blog.

Google Search app for iPad gets gesture-driven remake | Electronista

Google Search app for iPad gets gesture-driven remake | Electronista: Google chose Monday to unveil a heavily remade Google Search app for iPads (App Store). The new version folds in Google Instant, but its highlight is a much more gesture-driven interface. Results slide in as panes that can be slid back to reveal the search results, and both image browsing and history get special thumbnail browsers to pick them out visually rather than by text.
Inside, the app has in-page searching, a +1 button to share results, and a dedicated apps menu to bring up Google services like Gmail or Reader in their web versions. Instant Previews have made their own appearance in the iPad app.

Any iPad running iOS 4 or later can load the app, which should be available worldwide.

How to share one Mac with your family

How to share one Mac with your family: If you're like most households, you have a central "family" Mac for every family member to use. These step-by-step instructions and tips—from creating separate user accounts to customizing parental controls—will make sharing that one Mac among multiple users more enjoyable.

‘Afghanistan’ and Other Books About Rebuilding — Book Review - NYTimes.com

‘Afghanistan’ and Other Books About Rebuilding — Book Review - NYTimes.com: When Coburn analyzed how power was exercised in Istalif, he found that no one was truly in charge. Local power brokers might possess wealth, honor, a reputation for piety, abundant weaponry or powerful allies, but they lacked the means or the will to convert those gifts into decisive authority. The maliks, or elders, made a big show of representing their communities’ interests in meetings with outsiders and serving their followers generous meals; each year they presided over festive villagewide “snow picnics,” where the children of Istalif playfully competed to wreck one another’s snow-and-ice dams on the terraced hills above the town. But for all their public visibility, the maliks were only as strong as their communities allowed them to be; they were not secure hereditary chieftains but anxious agents of the professions or neighborhoods or clans they served. (Coburn speculates that when villagers obeyed a curious edict permitting music at weddings only if it issued from a single boombox, they did so largely because they feared that louder music would draw too many guests needing to be fed.) The mullahs, for their part, had little ability to intervene outside the mosque, and the village’s wealthy merchants had little sway since they lived primarily in Kabul and often came from the low-status weaver class. Aging commanders of the anti-Soviet jihad supplied money and guns to young men, who struck a menacing pose by wearing the “pakul” hat of the great Tajik fighter Ahmed Shah Massoud, rather than the “karakul” hat favored by Hamid Karzai. While the commanders successfully extorted rent from local merchants who ran shops on public lands, they were unpopular and preferred to remain in the shadows, strenuously avoiding one another as well as any direct conflict with the state.

How Many Neutrinos Does It Take to Screw Up Einstein?

How Many Neutrinos Does It Take to Screw Up Einstein?: Results from a second experiment uphold the observation that neutrinos are moving faster than the speed of light. The OPERA collaboration, which reported superluminal neutrinos back in September, have rerun their experiment and detected 20 new neutrinos breaking Einstein's limit.

Steve Jobs wanted Apple to reinvent TVs, textbooks & photography

Steve Jobs wanted Apple to reinvent TVs, textbooks & photography: A new interview with the biographer of Steve Jobs reveals that before he died, the Apple co-founder had three things he wanted to reinvent: the television, textbooks and photography.

<cite>Batman</cite> Bows Out With Brave, Bold, Metafictional Finale

Batman Bows Out With Brave, Bold, Metafictional Finale: For three excellent seasons, Batman: The Brave and the Bold has skewered The Dark Knight's seriousness. On Friday, it bids television adieu with a multilevel satire on Batman's mythos, cartoons and fandom. Check out an exclusive preview clip and more images from the fantastic finale.

Reclocked CERN neutrinos still break the speed limit

Reclocked CERN neutrinos still break the speed limit: A first round of error checking has shown subatomic particles still travel faster than the speed of light, but physicists want more confirmation before drawing any conclusions.

Hypersonic bomb: One-hour delivery?

Hypersonic bomb: One-hour delivery?: The U.S. Army's Advanced Hypersonic Weapon can travel about five times the speed of sound and strike anywhere on Earth in less than an hour.

Breakthrough material barely denser than air - CBS News

Breakthrough material barely denser than air - CBS News: Researchers at HRL Laboratories and the Composites Center at the University of Southern California have created what they say is the lowest-density material, a lattice of hollow tubes of the metal nickel.

Its volume is 99.99 percent air, and its density is 0.9 milligram per cubic centimeter--not including the air in or between its tubes. That density is less than one-thousandth that of water.

Same-size lithium ion battery, 10 times the storage | Cutting Edge - CNET News

Same-size lithium ion battery, 10 times the storage | Cutting Edge - CNET News: With a better anode, a cell phone could be charged in 15 minutes and have 10 times the energy storage capacity of current lithium ion batteries, according to Northwestern University researchers, who predict the technology could be available in three to five years.

Argonne's battery researchers, meanwhile, say that replacing the traditional graphite anode with titanium oxide could lead to cell phones that can get half their full charge in less than 30 seconds.

AOL reworks AIM: message sync, in-line media, easy groups

AOL reworks AIM: message sync, in-line media, easy groups: AOL on Wednesday launched a redesigned AIM for both desktops and mobile devices to compete with modern alternatives like Facebook Messenger or Google+. The service now syncs message histories and makes sure users can follow what was missed, even if they were signed out.

VIDEO: Neil Gaiman Visits "The Simpsons"

VIDEO: Neil Gaiman Visits "The Simpsons": You may know Neil Gaiman from such works as "Sandman" and "Coraline," but the acclaimed writer is also set to guest star on this Sunday's episode of "The Simpsons." ROBOT 6 has details and a video clip.

Vet to Feds: Enough Stonewalling, Give Us Pot for PTSD

Vet to Feds: Enough Stonewalling, Give Us Pot for PTSD: Marine Corps veteran Ryan Begin once took over 100 pills a day for his post-traumatic stress. Now he smokes a few joints. He's launched an online petition asking the federal government to reverse their ban on a study to determine marijuana's effectiveness in treating PTSD -- and scored 12,000 signatures in a mere two days.

More Mammoth (and Mysterious) Structures Found in China’s Desert | Danger Room | Wired.com

More Mammoth (and Mysterious) Structures Found in China’s Desert | Danger Room | Wired.com: As former CIA analyst Allen Thomson notes, turning on the DigitalGlobe coverage layer in Google Earth shows all the various times the imaging satellite has been asked to inspect that part of the desert. (Here’s a screenshot, above.) “Starting in 2004, somebody has ordered many, many satellite pictures of it,” Thomson tells Danger Room. “Can’t have been cheap.”

Below are some of the strange things those satellite swoops photographed, which were then uncovered by Danger Room’s community of commenters.

Autonomy's wizardry: Bringing still images to virtual life | Digital Media - CNET News

Autonomy's wizardry: Bringing still images to virtual life | Digital Media - CNET News: Lynch had an assistant hold up poster-size images--an ad for a Harry Potter move, a front page of a newspaper, a static ad. Lynch then pointed the camera at the images and, one by one, they came to virtual life.

In each case, the device would pick up a familiar pattern and transform the image. Suddenly, a scene from Harry Potter was playing on the iPad, the page of a newspaper updated to a current story and became a video presentation, and a man walked out of the ad to explain the product.

It was an amazing, if slightly creepy, stuff. And according to Lynch, it's just the beginning of what's possible. He said, for instance, that the iPhone can remember up to 500,000 things that it can draw on to, in effect, trigger its memory and transform static images.

Eventually, he said, the device will begin to scan your physical world, looking for familiar items around you without you even doing a thing. The magic happens within the device, he stressed--there's no need for a website.

Why Is China Building These Gigantic Structures In the Middle of the Desert? | Danger Room | Wired.com

Why Is China Building These Gigantic Structures In the Middle of the Desert? | Danger Room | Wired.com: This is crazy. New photos have appeared in Google Maps showing unidentified titanic structures in the middle of the Chinese desert. The first one is an intricate network of what appears to be huge metallic stripes. Is this a military experiment?

They seem to be wide lines drawn with some white material. Or maybe the dust have been dug by machinery.

It’s located in Dunhuang, Jiuquan, Gansu, north of the Shule River, which crosses the Tibetan Plateau to the west into the Kumtag Desert. It covers an area approximately one mile long by more than 3,000 feet wide.

The tracks are perfectly executed, and they seem to be designed to be seen from orbit.

SPINOFF REVIEW: "Immortals"

SPINOFF REVIEW: "Immortals": While Tarsem Singh's "Immortals" is gorgeous, filled with gold-armored warriors, sweeping vistas and Greek gods in impossible headpieces, the film stumbles as the story gets in the way of the adrenaline-pumping action

Apple Store Employees Made This Music Video to Teach Customer Service Skills

Apple Store Employees Made This Music Video to Teach Customer Service Skills: The Apple Steps of Service, as taught during Core Training, which every new hire at Apple goes through:

A - Approach the customer with a "warm welcome"

P - Position, Permission, Probe -- Tell the customer what you want to do, ask permission, and then ask them questions to determine their needs.

P - Present the appropriate product solution that fits their needs.

L - Listen to their concerns.

E - End with a fond farewell and an invitation to return.

There are also the three A's -- three steps used with the "L" above to help alleviate customer concerns.

A - Acknowledge that their concerns are valid.

A - Align with the customer, agreeing that you would feel the same were you in their shoes.

A - Assure the customer that you will be able to solve their problem to their satisfaction.

Amazon updates, sunsets Stanza app

Amazon updates, sunsets Stanza app: Amazon on Thursday released an update to Stanza that fixes a slew of problems affecting the app when running on iOS 5. But the company's support team suggests that the app will no longer be updated.

Amazon acquired Lexcycle, the original developers of Stanza, in 2009. Though the app can’t display Kindle books, it does offer support for ePub, eReader, PDF, Comic Book Archive, and DjVu book formats. Stanza devotees praised the app’s plentiful customization options for text display.

Pentagon Regrowing Soldiers' Muscles From Pig Cells

Pentagon Regrowing Soldiers' Muscles From Pig Cells: Some pig cells, a single surgery and a grueling daily workout: They're the three ingredients that patients will need to re-grow fresh, functional slabs of their own muscle, courtesy of Pentagon-backed science that's two years from hitting mainstream medicine. Already, the research team behind the project has operated successfully on four soldiers.

I Don't Like To Complain

I Don't Like To Complain: I really don't. We've been lucky so far. Got a good college education, married well, raised three pretty good children, and drifted into a career that pays very well most of the time. We've got a big house on an acre and a half and three cars. But lately we've had a series of setbacks, and Monday night was the low point. Saturday I felt fine. Sunday evening I got sick. Leslie was across town staying with her eighty-eight year old mom who is waiting for gallbladder surgery. I was supposed to...

GarageBand Version: 1.1 Review | iPhone and iPad Music App | Macworld

GarageBand Version: 1.1 Review | iPhone and iPad Music App | Macworld: The buying advice I offered for the first version of the app still holds. GarageBand 1.1 is a remarkable musical powerhouse that can be had for a song. It’s a better experience when run on the iPad because of the larger work surface and ability to use it with external controllers and microphones. But the fact that Apple could create a version as accessible as this one, for more diminutive iOS devices, is a testament to the brilliance of GarageBand’s designers. Plus, the refinements and improvements brought with this version of the app make it a better and more musical tool. Whether you’ve been making music for years or have only dreamed of doing so, GarageBand remains a must-have iOS app.

Women Have Sex Out Of Obligation? - Forbes

Women Have Sex Out Of Obligation? - Forbes: A new survey on women’s sexual habits and beliefs sparked some interesting theories: Women are not prioritizing sex as part of their health regimen; women are not all that satisfied in the bedroom; and, most notably, that women are having sex because they feel obligated rather than for enjoyment.

It found that while half of women agree engaging in sexual activity a few times a week is “sexually healthy,” the majority of women (66%) have sex once a week or less. Moreover, while three out of five women said that connecting with their partner was the most important aspect of their sex life, only two out five report being “very or extremely satisfied” with that aspect of their sex lives.

Finally, to those healthy 30% who are having sex four times a week and reaping the benefits–decreased stress, strengthened pelvic floor muscles, increased immune system function and calorie burning–bravo. What’s your secret?

The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)

The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog): Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers - that's the social graph.

Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.

We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage - we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they've built to document your entire online life.

Adobe ceases development on Flash Player for mobile, refocuses efforts on HTML5 – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home

Adobe ceases development on Flash Player for mobile, refocuses efforts on HTML5 – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home: Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests.

Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.

Four short links: 9 November 2011

Four short links: 9 November 2011:

1. The Social Graph is Neither -- Maciej Ceglowski nails it. Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers - that's the social graph. Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.


2. Anonymous 101 (Wired) -- Quinn Norton explains where Anonymous came from, what it is, and why it is.


3. Antibiotic Resistance (The Atlantic) -- Laxminarayan likens antibiotics resistance to global warming: every country needs to solve its own problems and cooperate—but if it doesn't, we all suffer. This is why we can't have nice things. (via Courtney Johnston)


4. Deep Idle for Android -- developer saw his handset wasn't going into a deep-enough battery-saving idle mode, saw it wasn't implemented in the kernel, implemented it, and reduced battery consumption by 55%. Very cool to see open source working as it's supposed to. (via Leonard Lin)

Adobe Discontinues Development of Flash on Mobile Devices

Adobe Discontinues Development of Flash on Mobile Devices: ZDNet is reporting that Adobe has announced to its partners that the company has discontinued development on Flash Player for mobile browsers. The news comes roughly a year and a half after the publication of Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" open letter, laying out his thoughts on the use of Flash in mobile devices.

Instead of working on mobile Flash, Adobe plans to continue developing its tools to produce applications that work on mobile app stores, including Apple's App Store.

From Adobe's announcement:
Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.

Apple brings Criterion Collection to iTunes, minus extras | Electronista

Apple brings Criterion Collection to iTunes, minus extras | Electronista: Apple has scored a minor coup for iTunes by adding some of The Criterion Collection's movies (iTunes Store) to its roster. The group includes 46 classic, usually remastered movies of the hundreds in the group. Among the titles are Akira Kurosawa movies such as The Seven Samurai, Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, and Louie Malle's My Dinner With Andre.

How to make basic edits in iPhoto | Macworld

How to make basic edits in iPhoto | Macworld: Take your best pictures and make them better with editing. iPhoto includes most of the image-editing tools that casual photographers need to spruce up their photos. If you use iPhoto to manage your photo collection, try these fixes before cracking open a dedicated image editor.

CROWDS R US | More Intelligent Life

CROWDS R US | More Intelligent Life: Crowds, we are often told, are dumb. They obliterate reason, sentience and accountability, turning individuals into helpless copycats. Commentators on the riots offered different explanations but most agreed that crowd psychology was part of the problem. “The dominant trait of the crowd is to reduce its myriad individuals to a single, dysfunctional persona,” wrote the novelist Will Self in the New Statesman. “The crowd is stupider than the averaging of its component minds.” The violence was said to have spread like a “contagion” through the crowd, facilitated by social media. For those who wanted to sound scientific, the term to drop was “deindividuation”: the loss of identity and moral responsibility that can occur in a group. But do crowds really make us more stupid?

Earlier this year, the world watched a crowd bring down an autocratic government, by the simple act of coming together in one place, day after day, night after night. Egyptian protesters created a micro-society in Tahrir Square, organising garbage collection, defending themselves when they needed to, but otherwise ensuring the protest remained peaceful. As well as courage, this took intelligence, discipline and restraint. Few international observers accused the crowd in Tahrir Square of being dysfunctional, or of turning its members into animals.

Le Bon’s book hit a cultural nerve: a phrase of his, the “era of crowds”, stuck to the late 19th century. Europe’s cities had grown and industrialised fast, creating a vast and unruly class of people who had a nasty habit of coming together in public places to demand things. In Paris riots had threatened and sometimes overturned the established order for the last hundred years. Le Bon was a conservative, distrustful of fashionable democratic ideas. Like other members of the French middle class, when he saw a crowd he smelt only trouble. It’s hardly surprising that he would characterise the people in them as sub-human.

What is surprising is that we seem to have inherited his prejudices. John Drury, a psychologist at Sussex university who studies crowd behaviour, believes that the idea that crowds induce irrational behaviour and erase individuality just isn’t supported by the evidence. First, most crowds aren’t violent. The crowd in the shopping mall or at a music festival is usually calm and ordered. Even crowds that include conflicting groups, as at football matches, are more likely to be peaceful than not. Second, even when crowds do turn violent, they aren’t necessarily irrational. In the 18th century England was afflicted by food riots. If ever there was an atavistic reason to riot, that was surely it. But the historian E.P. Thompson showed that the riots took place not when food was at its most scarce but when people saw merchants selling grain at a steep profit; the rioters were motivated by a rational sense of injustice rather than the “animal” drive of hunger.

When an accountant plays air guitar at a concert, he isn’t giving up his identity so much as finding a neglected corner of it. Above all, he is enjoying the glorious sensation of feeling part of something bigger than himself.

An accidental crowd can become an organised one in response to an external threat. Passengers on the Piccadilly line who left King’s Cross at 8.50am on July 7th 2005 would have felt little in common with each other, bar the tetchiness of the commuter. But when the carriage exploded and the survivors realised they had been attacked, they performed heroic acts to save the lives of strangers they had just been ignoring. The Tahrir Square crowd included supporters from Cairo’s leading soccer teams, Al-Ahly and Al-Zamalek. The two groups have a longstanding post-match tradition of vicious fighting. Yet in Tahrir Square they stood together against Mubarak’s thugs. Crowds are as likely to bring out the best in us as the worst.

Organize and play your media from a NAS

Organize and play your media from a NAS: If you have multiple computers, iOS devices, and media players in your home, it's likely your media is a mess--scattered from one end of your home to the other. With the aid of a NAS and these tips, you can cull, organize, and play that content on any device you own.

Intel's newest lands in an old standard: Commodore 64 | Nanotech - The Circuits Blog - CNET News

Intel's newest lands in an old standard: Commodore 64 | Nanotech - The Circuits Blog - CNET News: Well, a lot has changed in 30 years. After resurrecting the Commodore name in April of 2010, the company came out with an Intel Atom-based design in April of this year. That's a relatively pokey processor though. So, now Commodore has bulked up its lineup with Intel's latest 2.2GHz Core-i7-2720QM quad-core processor (which turbos to 3.3GHz).

Go to iforgot.apple.com to reset your Apple ID password.

Go to iforgot.apple.com to reset your Apple ID password.:

If you forget your Apple ID password or simply want to change to a new one, use Safari on your computer or any of your devices to go to iforgot.apple.com where you can enter your Apple ID and begin the process. You'll be asked to choose whether you want to confirm your identity via an email to the account associated with your Apple ID or by answering the security question you put in place when you first created it. As you create your new password, you'll see an indication of its relative strength in the area below the form. You can keep entering and editing until you achieve your ideal password strength. When you're satisfied, confirm your password and tap or click the Reset button.

You can use your Apple ID in iTunes, iChat, iCloud, the Apple Online Store, Apple Retail Stores and at Apple.com Support. If you don't have an Apple ID and want to create one, go to appleid.apple.com.

What Should We Expect From Genre TV in 2012? « Spinoff Online – TV, Film and Entertainment News Daily

What Should We Expect From Genre TV in 2012? « Spinoff Online – TV, Film and Entertainment News Daily: ABC prepping both 666 Park (about an apartment building wherein all the tenants have made a literal deal with the devil) and Wicked Good (about a coven of witches in Southern California fighting evil. I think this used to be called Charmed, but I don’t think ABC can really be blamed for forgetting about that show)

Yahoo's IntoNow: Interactive TV, but not on TV | Challengers - CNET News

Yahoo's IntoNow: Interactive TV, but not on TV | Challengers - CNET News: IntoNow started out as an iPhone app that Yahoo acquired back in April. It's based on a clever TV-show-fingerprinting technology that's basically Shazam for TV: You let it listen to the program you're watching for a few seconds and it can figure out what the show is.

I tried the iPhone version a few months ago, and it was fun for a while to play random episodes of "I Love Lucy" and have IntoNow identify them for me. By itself, though, the identification is kind of a party trick. Generally speaking, if you're watching a TV program, you either already know what it is or can find out easily enough.

That's what I've found. I already know what I'm watching, so what's the point?

Arts & Letters Daily (05 Nov 2011)

Arts & Letters Daily (05 Nov 2011): The university is broken. Students learn little and take on big debt to pay for an education that, intellectually, doesn't amount to much... more

Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?

The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years.

Second, and more depressing: vast numbers of students come to university with no particular interest in their courses and no sense of how these might prepare them for future careers. The desire they cherish, Arum and Roksa write, is to act out “cultural scripts of college life depicted in popular movies such as Animal House (1978) and National Lampoon’s Van Wilder (2002).” Academic studies don’t loom large on their mental maps of the university. Even at the elite University of California, students report that on average they spend “twelve hours [a week] socializing with friends, eleven hours using computers for fun, six hours watching television, six hours exercising, five hours on hobbies”—and thirteen hours a week studying.

Americans, as Malcolm Harris recently pointed out, now owe almost a trillion dollars in student loans, more than they owe in credit card debt. Student debt, he explained, “is an exceptionally punishing kind to have. Not only is it inescapable through bankruptcy, but student loans have no expiration date and collectors can garnish wages, social security payments, and even unemployment benefits.” The burden is distributed by the reverse of the Matthew principle: to him who hath not, no one gives anything.

All this to pay for an education that—as we have already seen—means little, intellectually, to many of those who are courting debtors’ prison to pay for it. The unkindest cut of all, of course, is that those who drop out must still carry the full burden of the loans that so many of them have taken out—even though they will, in all probability, earn less and fare worse in hard times than graduates. Yet even unemployment among graduates has been rising—as have rates of student loan default.

Imagine what it’s like to be a normal student nowadays. You did well—even very well—in high school. But you arrive at university with little experience in research and writing and little sense of what your classes have to do with your life plans. You start your first year deep in debt, with more in prospect. You work at Target or a fast-food outlet to pay for your living expenses. You live in a vast, shabby dorm or a huge, flimsy off-campus apartment complex, where your single with bath provides both privacy and isolation. And you see professors from a great distance, in space as well as culture: from the back of a vast dark auditorium, full of your peers checking Facebook on their laptops.

It’s no wonder, in these circumstances, that many students never really internalize the new demands and standards of university work. Instead they drift from course to course, looking for entertainment and easy grades. Nor is it surprising that many aren’t ready when trouble comes. Students drink too much alcohol, smoke too much marijuana, play too many computer games, wreck cars, become pregnant, get overwhelmed trying to help anorexic roommates, and too often lose the modest but vital support previously provided by a parent who has been laid off.

Still, the dark hordes of forgotten students who leave the university as Napoleon’s army left Russia, uninspired by their courses, wounded in many cases by what they experience as their own failures, weighed down by their debts, need to be seen and heard.

Steve Jobs interview: One-on-one in 1995

Steve Jobs interview: One-on-one in 1995: I used to think when I was in my twenties that technology was the solution to most of the world's problems, but unfortunately it just ain't so. I'll give you an analogy. Alot of times we think "Why is the television programming so bad? Why are television shows so demeaning, so poor?"

The first thought that occurs to you is "Well, there is a conspiracy: the networks are feeding us this slop because its cheap to produce. It's the networks that are controlling this and they are feeding us this stuff."

But the truth of the matter, if you study it in any depth, is that networks absolutely want to give people what they want so that will watch the shows. If people wanted something different, they would get it. And the truth of the matter is that the shows that are on television, are on television because that's what people want. The majority of people in this country want to turn on a television and turn off their brain and that's what they get. And that's far more depressing than a conspiracy.

Does Inequality Make Us Unhappy?

Does Inequality Make Us Unhappy?: When the rich do something to deserve their riches, nobody complains. But when those at the bottom don't understand the unequal distribution of wealth, they get furious. Neuroscience blogger Jonah Lehrer examines the psychological roots of the occupy movement.

Yahoo Doesn’t Understand What Makes Flipboard Special | Epicenter | Wired.com

Yahoo Doesn’t Understand What Makes Flipboard Special | Epicenter | Wired.com: Flipboard solves an actual problem for readers: trying to distill newsworthy reading items from already existing RSS and social media feeds. Yahoo’s Livestand only solves problems for publishers and advertisers: how to display content and advertising to readers without having to have everyone write their own code from scratch.

Google pulls Gmail iOS app for fix, accused of low interest

Google pulls Gmail iOS app for fix, accused of low interest: Google in just two hours has already pulled its Gmail app for iOS. The company's Dave Girouard explained the removal as a voluntary step after Google found a bug that would break notifications and trigger errors the first time the app is open. The fix is underway, and a new version was coming "soon," he said....

Good thing I haven't opened it yet.

'Steve Jobs' Easily Tops Best Seller Lists in Debut Week

'Steve Jobs' Easily Tops Best Seller Lists in Debut Week: Despite being on sale for just six days in the US, Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography is already the 18th bestselling book of the year.

‘Steve Jobs – One Last Thing’ premieres today on PBS

‘Steve Jobs – One Last Thing’ premieres today on PBS: Few men have changed our everyday world of work, leisure and human communication in the way that Steve Jobs has...

Moodle 2.1.2 - Produce/manage educational sites.. (Free)

Moodle 2.1.2 - Produce/manage educational sites.. (Free):

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities.

You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student University. This site itself is created using Moodle, so check out the Moodle Demonstration Courses or read the latest Moodle Buzz.

Version 2.1.2: Release notes were unavailable when this listing was updated.

Mac OS X 10.4 or later

Download Now

SPINOFF REVIEW: "Puss in Boots"

SPINOFF REVIEW: "Puss in Boots": Wielding its charming hero's wit like a blade, "Puss in Boots" sets out in a welcome direction, giving the feline a proper (and highly entertaining) origin with a stellar supporting cast.

Import camera videos directly into iMovie '11 | Macworld

Import camera videos directly into iMovie '11 | Macworld: Admittedly, that's a lot of steps, made slightly frustrating by the fact that Image Capture doesn't remember other folder locations the next time you open the application. So, to streamline the process for the next time, create a simple Automator workflow specifically for Image Capture.

Apogee Lets You to Plug Into iOS and Jam | GeekDad | Wired.com

Apogee Lets You to Plug Into iOS and Jam | GeekDad | Wired.com: I connected the Apogee Jam to my iPad 2 and launched GarageBand. The status light on Jam turned green, indicating that the app I launched connected to the device. I adjusted the control knob to bring up the level of my guitar. I selected a clean amp and a 2 x 12″ cabinet to emulate a Fender Twin reverb, added some reverb and tremolo and strummed out a few chords. Gorgeous sound exploded out of my headphones. Full of clarity, detail and nuance that I haven’t heard in an iOS app, the combination of Jam with Garageband’s amp simulation and effects technology created an unparalleled mobile experience. So true was the sound I was creating that it was easy to forget about the interface and begin exploring the music and all that Garageband for the iPad had to offer.

Dwarf Planet Eris Is Icy Double of Pluto

Dwarf Planet Eris Is Icy Double of Pluto: Astronomers from France have made the first accurate measurements of the distant dwarf planet Eris, and found that it's an almost exact doppelganger of the declassified ninth planet, Pluto.

Cataloging Cosmic Train Wrecks

Cataloging Cosmic Train Wrecks: By spying on galactic smash-ups, we're learning how the massive Milky Way-Andromeda collision might play out in 5 billion years.

PBS to air Steve Jobs documentary Nov. 2

PBS to air Steve Jobs documentary Nov. 2: PBS will air a documentary about late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs on November 2, that includes interviews with numerous early Apple employees and those who knew him, as well as part of an un-aired interview Jobs did with PBS in 1994.

Steve Jobs - One Last Thing will premiere next Wednesday, November 2nd, at 10:00 PM on PBS stations around the United States.

Discover What's New in CSS 4

Discover What's New in CSS 4: CSS 3 we hardly knew you. The World Wide Web Consortium is already making plans for CSS 4, an update that will give web developers even more powerful ways to wrangle their code into a faster, better looking web.

Steve Jobs’ biography: The first great digital book event – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home

Steve Jobs’ biography: The first great digital book event – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home: Carmody reports, “Jobs’ biography may be the first great digital book event, a last hurrah for the universally appealing hardcover, a collective reading experience of Potteresque proportions.”

Everywhere Man - Magazine - The Atlantic

Everywhere Man - Magazine - The Atlantic: Count Harry Kessler dined with Diaghilev, fought for Germany, and penned one of the greatest diaries ever published.

HE WAS COSMOPOLITAN, and a member of a new aristocracy. He grew up in Paris, in England, in Germany, and on Staten Island. Though his mother was Anglo-Irish, Count Harry Kessler was, or became, intensely German, as if by a sort of tragic choice; and he also became, through his experiences and through the anguished searching of his spirit, something close to a representative man.

The diary he wrote, starting in 1880 when he was 12 and continuing until his death in 1937, is said by the editor and translator of the volume, Laird M. Easton, to be one of the greatest ever written, “comparable in its stature to those of Samuel Pepys, André Gide, Henri Frédéric Amiel, Beatrice Webb, or Virginia Woolf.” Kessler moves between countries and is intimate with high society in England, France, and Germany. He seeks out great artists and gives us memorable portraits of Verlaine in old age, of Degas and Renoir, of Rodin and Maillol, of Rilke and Hofmannsthal, of Cosima Wagner, of Richard Strauss, of Diaghilev and Nijinsky, and of other great dancers and theatrical figures of the age. He tells us of the intrigues of the German Imperial Court. We see him helping Hofmannsthal to work out the plot of Der Rosenkavalier. We accompany his party to the premiere of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and to the dinner afterward with Nijinsky, Cocteau, Misia Sert (as she later became), Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Bakst, Ravel, Hofmannsthal, and—a late arrival, covered in gems from the Persian Ball—the Aga Khan, who, “sitting next to Nijinsky with his jaw and vulgar face, was like a fat sack of real money next to a fantastic dream of wealth.” The cast list alone makes this an amazing diary.

...

Here, at Edward Gordon Craig’s production of Ibsen’s Vikings, we witness the invention of modern theatrical production style:

The chief reforms: he completely abolishes the ramp lights, and the stage decorations almost completely. He uses only overhead lights and props. The stage is surrounded as if by cloths that remain almost invisible behind the changing lighting effects and the colored veil of lights. You feel as if you were looking into a kind of infinite space. Your entire attention is concentrated, however, on the action that takes place, lit up brightly and variably, according to the mood in this sidereal, so to speak, infinity. These basic ideas seem to me of great value, and the impression is in any case much stronger than with the usual papier-mâché decoration because the imagination has more room and the attention is concentrated.

Elgan: Getting serious about Siri - Computerworld

Elgan: Getting serious about Siri - Computerworld: One thing Siri can do is send text messages. And text messages can do powerful things, with the right help.

I told you recently about a new service called "If This Then That," which is abbreviated and lowercased by the company as: ifttt, for some reason.

The service lets you connect together all kinds of Internet-based services. One of these services is SMS. And that's the key to empowering Siri.

Here's how it works: You use Siri to send a text to ifttt, and that service can turn your text into a Facebook or Twitter post, Tumblr, Posterous or Wordpress blog post, an Evernote entry or any number of other actions.

The New York Times reviews ‘Steve Jobs’ by Walter Isaacson: Replete with passion and excitement – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home

The New York Times reviews ‘Steve Jobs’ by Walter Isaacson: Replete with passion and excitement – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home: “Skeptic after skeptic made the mistake of underrating Steve Jobs, and Mr. Isaacson records the howlers who misjudged an unrivaled career,” Maslin reports. “‘Sorry Steve, Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work,’ Business Week wrote in a 2001 headline. ‘The iPod will likely become a niche product,’ a Harvard Business School professor said. ‘High tech could not be designed and sold as a consumer product,’ Mr. Sculley said in 1987.”

“Mr. Jobs got the last laugh every time,” Maslin reports. “‘Steve Jobs’ makes it all the sadder that his last laugh is over.”

Hints of New Physics Crop Up at LHC

Hints of New Physics Crop Up at LHC: Preliminary findings from CERN's Large Hadron Collider may have uncovered experimental evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model. Data from the CMS experiment is showing significant excesses of particles known as leptons being created in triplets, a result that could be interpreted as evidence for a theory called supersymmetry.

Al Gore: Steve Jobs' greatest work was Apple itself

Al Gore: Steve Jobs' greatest work was Apple itself: The Apple board member says Jobs leaves behind a world-class executive team that is "hitting on all cylinders" and committed to taking risks.

Lytro Light Field Camera offers simplicity with futuristic features | Macworld

Lytro Light Field Camera offers simplicity with futuristic features | Macworld: Ng claims that the "light-field engine" needed for viewing, refocusing, and interacting with the images is embedded in each image file, making it possible to embed the images in interactive, refocusable form on sites such as Facebook.

At Popcorn Hackathon, Coders Team With Filmmakers to Supercharge Web Video | Underwire | Wired.com

At Popcorn Hackathon, Coders Team With Filmmakers to Supercharge Web Video | Underwire | Wired.com: Popcorn.js, which few outside the web-development world have ever heard of, could be the next big thing in internet video. It’s a simple — for coders, at least — framework that allows filmmakers to supplement their movies with news feeds, Twitter posts, informational windows or even other videos, which show up picture-in-picture style. For example, if a subject in a film mentions a place, a link can pop up within the video or alongside it, directing the viewer to a Google Map of the location.

Popcorn-powered videos work in any HTML5-compatible browser and are easy to navigate for anyone who has ever used the internet. The tools the Popcorn coders are creating could lead to far more interactive online experiences, not just for movies and documentaries but for all videos...

“Popcorn is the most developer-friendliest library for making it super-simple to make a read-only experience, which is what HTML5 video really is,” said Waldron, one of Popcorn.js’s lead developers, while ferociously typing out The Interrupters code. “The library is very small and very capable of making it super-easy to add an interactive level [to video]...”

Troy Hunt: Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps

Troy Hunt: Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps: Not so in the mobile app world of today. These days, there’s this great big fat abstraction layer on top of everything that keeps you pretty well disconnected from what’s actually going on. Thing is, it’s a trivial task to see what’s going on underneath, you just fire up an HTTP proxy like Fiddler, sit back and watch the show.

Let me introduce you to the seedy underbelly of the iPhone, a world where not all is as it seems and certainly not all is as it should be.

Lytro unveils radical new camera design | Deep Tech - CNET News

Lytro unveils radical new camera design | Deep Tech - CNET News: Conventional digital cameras uses lenses to focus a subject so it's sharp on the image sensor. That means that for an in-focus part of the image, light from only one direction reaches the sensor.

For light-field photography, though, light from multiple directions hits each patch of the sensor; the camera records this directional information, and after-the-shot computing converts it into something a human eye can understand.


The result that a Lytro camera image is a 3D map of whatever was photographed, and that means people can literally decide what to focus on after they've taken the photo.

"It's got an instant shutter. You press the button--bang! It takes the picture right away," Ng said. "We have that unique feature--shoot first, focus later. The camera doesn't have to physically focus while you take the shot."

How Apple screwed up the iPad music app with iOS 5 | Apple - CNET News

How Apple screwed up the iPad music app with iOS 5 | Apple - CNET News: The changes to the Music app may be minor amidst the other new features in iOS 5. But as someone who regularly listens to music, podcasts, and iTunes U content on my iPad, I think Apple dropped the ball here. Let's hope we see some fixes to this new and improved Music app in the next iOS update.

I might add that, while listening to the MacBreak Weekly podcast, I discovered that you can no longer adjust the speed to 2X - a huge feature loss. :(

NetNewsWire 3.3 - RSS/Atom newsreader.. (Free)

NetNewsWire 3.3 - RSS/Atom newsreader.. (Free):

NetNewsWire is an easy-to-use RSS and Atom newsreader for Mac OS X. Its familiar three-paned interface -- similar to Apple Mail -- can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs, making it quick and easy to keep up with the latest news. Features include:

• A tabbed browser lets you read web pages with the convenience of staying in the same window.
• Search your news items with a standard Apple search widget -- as in Mail and other applications.
• Downloads podcasts and enclosures, and sends podcasts to iTunes with with your choice of genre and playlist.
• The flagged items feature lets you mark items that you want to keep -- they stay forever or until you mark them as unflagged.
• Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) compatible, and includes Automator actions to control functions in NetNewsWire.
• Other features include syncing, smart lists, search subscriptions, built-in styles, and AppleScript support.
• Includes a built-in categorized list of feeds that can be easily subscribed to.
• If NetNewsWire Lite is already running, quit it before running NetNewsWire.

Version 3.3:

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• NetNewsWire 3.3 require Mac OS X 10.6.8 or later. If you need a version that runs on 10.5.8, you should continue to use NetNewsWire 3.2.15.

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In a Single Month, the Occupation Became a Force

In a Single Month, the Occupation Became a Force: The Occupy movement turned a month old Monday, and it's grown up quickly from a protest that NPR dismissed to a movement that has the world watching.

NetNewsWire upgrade provides key missing link to David Handy - Blogger workflow

I am very pleased.

The workflow for this blog, on my Mac, is NetNewsWire.app-to-MarsEdit.app-to-Blogger website.

On my new iPad 2, the workflow became FeedlerRSS.app-toBlogger.app-to-Blogger website.

This morning I upgraded NetNewsWire to its latest free (albeit ad-supported) version. Its support for syncing with Google Reader provides the last missing link in giving me the same kind of workflow on my iPad as I do on my Mac.

I've benn using FeedlerRSS on my iPad and syncing with Google Reader. Or, rather I've stopped using it because until now NetNewsWire didn't sync with Google Reader.

Now my workflow will be much more efficient. I can read on my iPad in FeedlerRSS and go to my desktop and
NetNewsWire to post to MarsEdit.

Or, in a pinch, do what I'm doing now: composing a post in the iPhone Blogger app. ;)

How Yahoo Spawned Hadoop, the Future of Big Data

How Yahoo Spawned Hadoop, the Future of Big Data: If you listen to the pundits, Yahoo isn't a technology company. And yet it spawned one of the most important software technologies of the last five years: Hadoop, an open source platform designed to crunch epic amounts of data using an army of dirt-cheap servers.

HP TouchPad gets major webOS update despite device's end

HP TouchPad gets major webOS update despite device's end: WebOS chief Ari Jaaksi said on his blog that an update is available for the HP Touchpad. Among the new features and improvements in version 3.0.4 of webOS are better camera support, connectivity for non-HP phones, improved messaging, and a tweaked UI. The over-the-air update is being applied automatically....

Dark Matter: Now More Mysterious Than Ever

Dark Matter: Now More Mysterious Than Ever: Astronomers have one more reason to scratch their heads over the unseen material known as dark matter. Observations of two dwarf galaxies, Fornax and Sculptor, show the dark matter within them is spread out smoothly rather than heaped into a central bulge, contradicting cosmological models.

Adobe brings Reader to iPhone, iPad

Adobe brings Reader to iPhone, iPad: Adobe has released the first iOS version of Reader, its dedicated PDF viewer. While iOS can already open PDF files, Reader supports some additional features, such as the ability to load portfolios, packages, annotations and drawing markups. Users can open documents protected by passwords or Adobe LiveCycle, and launch files in other apps using an "Open In" command. Likewise, Reader becomes an option in any other iOS title that supports Open In....

Google Voice drops from App Store after iOS 5 crash bug

Google Voice drops from App Store after iOS 5 crash bug: Google has temporarily but voluntarily pulled Google Voice for iOS devices (App Store, cached) following a major bug with iOS 5. At least some users are reporting the app crashing when they try to sign in.

Apple stock closes at all-time $422 high on iPhone 4S launch

Apple stock closes at all-time $422 high on iPhone 4S launch: Apple capped off a successful iPhone 4S launch by reaching an all-time high in share price. Its shares closed at exactly $422 after seeing a rapid $13.57 climb. The value was over $52 above the drop to $369.80 recorded just a week earlier....