7 Spoileriffic Things You May Want to Know About The Avengers | GeekDad | Wired.com: 7. The reveal in the post-end-credits scene is of the new villain, presumably for Iron Man 3.
Who is it? Thanos!
Thanos!?! WTF?!?
Thanos is an Avengers-level threat, not an Iron Man-level villian.
I thought for sure, since they were filming Iron Man 3 in China, that the villian would have to be The Mandarin.
Maybe they're introducing him here in order to build him up for Avengers 2.
10 Things Parents Should Know About The Avengers (Spoiler-Free): It's got a great story and lots of character development, it's got laugh-out-loud moments liberally scattered throughout, and the last act has some of the best action sequences that have ever been put on film. That may sound like hyperbole, or exaggeration, but I assure you it's not. This is not just a good superhero movie; it's a good movie, period.
Will Your Next Smartphone Have Super-Science Wonder Glass? | News & Opinion | PCMag.com: The only stumbling block is that the glass costs a lot to produce. But the researchers may have figured out a way to bring down manufacturing costs. Park and Choi told MIT News that "in the future glass or transparent polymer films might be manufactured with such surface features simply by passing them through a pair of textured rollers while still partially molten," adding a minimal extra cost to the overall cost of making regular glass.
MIT's Glare-Free Glass Doesn't Fog Up, Cleans Itself | PCWorld: Beyond saving the eyes of some smartphone and laptop users in the sun, the glass could have a wide range of applications. The glare-free properties of the glass could allow solar panels to absorb more of the sun’s rays that would have been reflected otherwise. This “multifunctional” glass is also resistant to fogging up, can repel water, and it can even clean itself.
Imagine car windows that did not fog up in the winter, or ones that could whisk away rain and dirt all on its own. The scientists imagine that their glass modifications could be applied to all sorts of optical lenses for eyeglasses and cameras, televisions and smaller screens, and windows for buildings.
I have seen the future (And it's made of glass) - Computerworld: MIT researchers this week announced a breakthrough in glass technology that solves the glare problem. The glass has a revolutionary surface pattern made of nano-scale cones of glass.
It's called multifunctional glass. It's very clear, without glare or reflection.
The glass also deflects water, which bounces right off. Car windshields using the glass, for example, would not need windshield wipers.
More interestingly, solar cells under multifunctional glass would be self-cleaning and would enable more light to penetrate through the glass to the cells. It would be easy to imagine a phone like the iPhone 4 line with glass front and back, but with solar sells under the glass in the back.
Smartphones, tablets, laptops and TVs would be essentially self-cleaning. No smudges and no glare!
How I learned to say, 'Hi, Google Docs; bye, MS Word': Do I really need all those features? No. And so I've created my last document in Microsoft Word, a product I first began using 27 years ago.
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Looking for work? Get an instant interview:
Seven Feathers Resort and Casino is holding 'instant interviews in May, where you can meet the people that do the hiring, and have a chance to present yourself.
OMSI's IMAX Film Fest | GeekDad | Wired.com: If you’re a fan of IMAX movies and you live in Portland, Oregon, here’s a pretty cool opportunity coming up. Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) will be having an IMAX film festival from May 8 through July 1. They’ll be screening 28 films, both old and new, with a total of 450 showings in all. You can get more info on their website, including showtimes and short descriptions of each film, or you can also download the festival schedule as a PDF.
Regular ticket prices will apply throughout the festival, but you can also get some passes if you want to see a bunch of the movies: $90 buys you a Director’s Pass, which allows you and a guest to see any movie and attend any of the special events tied to the festival. The $40 Producer’s Pass gets you and a guest into four movies and some of the special events, and the $22 Producer’s Pass Single is four movies for just one person.
What if ebook DRM goes away tomorrow?: Charlie Stross is right: DRM is a club publishers gave to Amazon and then insisted that Amazon beat them over their heads with it. So, what if we woke up tomorrow and DRM for books disappeared, just like it has (for the most part) with music?
First Gigabit Wi-Fi Routers Ready to Launch: Apple was one of the leaders in early adoption of 802.11 Wi-Fi technology, with the original iBook being the first mainstream computer to ship with the technology as an option in 1999, coming in the form of the original AirPort card running the 802.11b standard.
WWDC Sells Out in 2 Hours, Leaving Many Devs Ticketless — And Outraged: Tickets for Apple Worldwide Developers Conference are coveted, command a hefty price tag, and sell out quickly. But this year, tickets sold so rapidly, and so early in the day, that many west coast developers were left ticketless -- and feeling alienated by Apple.
Descriptive Camera shuns photos for text images: Prototype, created for a class on computational cameras, makes you use your imagination by printing out text descriptions of what it sees, rather than the regular photos you'd expect from a cam.
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It's time to review a MakerBot | Crave - CNET: I picked up our unit yesterday from the company's office in Brooklyn, sparing us shipping costs and the risk of damage in-transit (you can check here for Daniel Terdiman's report on his own visit to MakerBot HQ). Total cost with the dual-extruder head was $1,999.
How do I justify spending $2,000 of CBS money on a niche product like a 3D printer? If you believe the hype, these devices have the same consumer/professional cross-over potential. And through its enthusiastic, engaging marketing, MakerBot has become the industry's flagship company.
Robot Chicken To Lampoon DC Comics in New Special: Adult Swim's stop-motion animation show "Robot Chicken" will produce a new DC Comics episode in the same vein as its Emmy-award winning "Robot Chicken: Star Wars" specials.
'Insanely Simple' Shares Anecdotes on Steve Jobs and Apple: Segall breaks his book down into ten chapters focused on different themes all centered around "the Simple Stick". Under the philosophy of Steve Jobs, the pursuit of simplicity is key in everything Apple does, and as complexity began to creep into projects he repeatedly hit them with the Simple Stick in order to bring them back to Apple's focus.
Chalk Art competition open to everyone:
The annual Art and Wine Walk is taking place on May 10, and organizers are asking local artists to help make the event colorful.
Apple's WWDC sells out in 2 hours: If you blinked, you may be out of luck. Tickets are already sold out for the June developer event, just announced this morning.
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Apple announces WWDC 2012: At long last, Apple has announced the dates for its annual developers conference. Last year's event sold out in fewer than 12 hours.
Macworld 4/25/12 5:56 AM Lex Friedman
Microsoft Security Essentials 4.0 ready for download: The latest version of the free anti-virus/anti-malware program for Windows PCs runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.
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Apple Reports Record March Quarter Sales of iPhone, iPad, and Mac: Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2012 second quarter ended March 31, 2012. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $39.2 billion and quarterly net profit of $11.6 billion, or $12.30 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $24.7 billion and net profit of $6.0 billion, or $6.40 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. “We’re thrilled with sales of over 35 million iPhones and almost 12 million iPads in the March quarter,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The new iPad is off to a great start, and across the year you’re going to see a lot more of the kind of innovation that only Apple can deliver.”
Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter? | Gadget Lab | Wired.com: At the end of the semester, the class participated in a demo day, where students presented their projects to a roomful of executives from the likes of ESPN, Hearst, and the Tribune. The Stats Monkey presentation was particularly impressive. “They put a box score and play-by-play into the program, and in something close to 12 seconds it drew examples from 40 years of Major League history, wrote a game account, located the best picture, and wrote a caption,” recalls the Medill dean, John Lavine.
Hands on with Google Drive | Macworld: Like Dropbox, you can sync other file types by dropping them into your Google Drive folder from elsewhere on your Mac. However, Google being Google, the company is also adding a few extra goodies for your files: support for optical character recognition (OCR) and location recognition. The former will scan your PDFs upon upload and yank out any recognizable text; you can then convert the PDF into an editable Google document. The latter—location recognition via Google Googles—attempts to add searchable tags to your images (for instance, if you take a photo of the Empire State Building, Google should theoretically label it “empire state building” for easy searching later). That said, the company describes location recognition as “still in its early stages,” and rightly so—it’s likely that Google will need to index quite a few Empire State Building pictures before it can identify yours.
Apple nearly doubles its profits in iOS-driven quarter: Apple on Tuesday reported profits of $11.6 billion for the fiscal second quarter, an increase of 94 percent over last year's $5.9 billion profit. Revenue was up 59 percent to $39.2 billion, thanks to the strong debut of the latest iPad as well as record March quarter sales for the iPhone and Mac product lines.
Macworld 4/24/12 2:00 PM Philip Michaels
UTRANS officials tell city ridership up 18%:
UTRANS officials were at the Roseburg City Council meeting Monday night, to give the group an update, and pitched the idea of a non-taxing transit district.
Planetary Resources seeks to mine asteroids' riches: A space startup says nearby asteroids can be mined for water, platinum, and other natural resources to enable space exploration and bring those valuable materials to Earth.
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Look Ma, I Made It Myself! 10 Amazing Things 3-D Printers Can Do Now: The breathless predictions about 3-D printers ? they'll revolutionize X, Y, and Z industries, they'll even mop your floors! ? can steal the spotlight from the everyday applications already in use. Analysts predict 3-D printing will become a $3.1 billion industry by 2016, driven by manufacturers of everything from shoes to sedans. Here are 10 ways 3-D printing is reshaping industrial design now.
Google Drive is not for everyone, so try these alternatives: Want the simplest cloud storage solution? The most flexible? The best free service? Here's which is what.
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Apple's IPv6 misstep is a sign of the times: Apple's controversial decision not to support IPv6 on Version 6.0 of AirPort Utility is the latest example of a broader problem plaguing the next-gen Internet protocol.
Literary Review - David Collard on Exorcism by Eugene O'Neill: Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude, written in 1923, was a four-hour psychodrama acclaimed for its modern use of soliloquy and unflinching approach to adultery, madness and abortion. That the Marx Brothers could so ruthlessly spoof O'Neill's recently established theatrical trademark - along with those poetic non sequiturs, the invocation of indifferent deities, a whiff of the ineffable beneath the hokey vernacular and the doom-laden register - tells us plenty about the cultural range and tolerances of 1930s cinema audiences, the Marx Brothers' hair-trigger sensitivity to intellectual pretension, the giddy extent of the 42-year-old playwright's celebrity and, finally, something about O'Neill's writing itself.
The Hobbit Will Fundamentally Change Your Movie-Going Experience: According to an article over at the Hollywood Reporter, the upcoming release of The Hobbit will be the catalyst that finally drives movie theaters to upgrade their projection hardware to 48 frames-per-second (fps) or better. The current theater playback technology supports 24fps, a standard that dates back to the 1920s; this, in-turn, was an upgrade from the 16fps that was common for earlier silent films. As video-game enthusiasts are keenly aware, a higher frame-rate reduces jitter and provides much smoother video playback, and that translates to a more immersive and realistic experience overall. (And for the trivia buffs among you, the move from 16fps to 24fps was necessitated by the advent of movie audio -- the original 16fps film speed moved too slowly over the magnetic heads to produce quality sound playback.)
Tech Billionaires Plan Audacious Mission to Mine Asteroids: A group of wealthy, adventurous entrepreneurs will announce on Apr. 24 a new venture called Planetary Resources, Inc., which plans to send swarms of robots to space to scout asteroids for precious metals and set up mines to bring resources back to Earth, in the process adding trillions of dollars to the global GDP, helping ensure humanity's prosperity and paving the way for the human settlement of space.
Ron Paul getting his own video game: Independent developer plans game based on presidential hopeful. The goal? Get Paul into the White House so he can shut down the Federal Reserve.
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New Dropbox learns to show and share: 
Dropbox, the Internet-hosted file-synchronization service, updated its desktop, mobile, and Web app software on Monday to allow any file or folder stored in a user’s sync folder to be shared with other people via a Web-accessible link.
Apple Agrees to Invest $250 Million at Oregon Data Center Site: Associated Press reports that Apple has reached a deal with local governments to finalize its plans for a new data center in Prineville, Oregon. According to the report, Apple has agreed to invest $250 million in facilities on its 160-acre property, and will offer an annual $150,000 "project fee" in lieu of property taxes over the next fifteen years. The company has also guaranteed to bring at least 35 jobs to the center at 150% of the average wage in the county.
Science Fiction and Fantasy Creators Who Became Their Own Genres: Robert A. Heinlein
Heinlein's influence on science fiction is so far-reaching that it's hard to separate his defining characteristics from those of the genre he wrote in. But Heinlein's work also stands apart, partly thanks to his amazing penchant for presenting facts and opinions that go along with the narrative and prop it up. Also, much of Heinlein's work has a few key preoccupations, as Alexei Panshin writes, including liberty and the "unreality of the world," and the recurrence of an ever-changing protagonist whom Panshin calls "The Heinlein Individual." Add in a fair amount of sexual nonconformity and a preoccupation with how social mores will change when we're out in space, and you've got a set of traits that pop up in much of Heinlein's writing, especially his later works.
April 18, 1915: Aerial Warfare Is About to Make a Quantum Leap | This Day In Tech | Wired.com: 1915: Roland Garros is forced down behind German lines and taken prisoner. His plane is recovered intact by the Germans, which results in a technological leap forward for aerial warfare.
Garros, a one-time aspiring concert pianist who gained fame as an aviator prior to World War I when he flew nonstop across the Mediterranean Sea, is considered to be the first true fighter pilot in history.
Going With The Flow: Google's Secret Switch To The Next Wave Of Networking | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com: Though Google says it’s too soon to get a measurement of the benefits, Hölzle does confirm that they are considerable. “Soon we will able to get very close to 100 percent utilization of our network,” he says. In other words, all the lanes in Google’s humongous internal data highway can be occupied, with information moving at top speed. The industry considers thirty or forty percent utilization a reasonable payload — so this implementation is like boosting network capacity two or three times. (This doesn’t apply to the user-facing network, of course.)
Restructure101 2.0.1727 - Refactor your software architecture.. (Commercial): 
Restructure101 is focused exclusively on refactoring your software architecture.
Not low level code refactoring but high-level structural refactoring - components, packages, jars, modules, assemblies, directories etc.
Remove component level tangles and see how much more effective the team becomes.
With the complexity inherent in today's codebases, the ability to let you see only what you need to see in the context of the whole code-base is key to successful refactoring. Our unique Levelized Structure Maps (LSMs) and their wide range of viewing options deliver the focus you need.
Manipulate our LSMs interactively with drag-and-drop simplicity to simulate structural refactorings. With the complexity chart, it's a risk-free heuristic step-by-step process that lets you see the impact of each change, so you always know you are heading in the right direction, allowing you to easily backtrack when necessary.
Restructure101's 'notables' highlight and rate the structural issues in your codebase - package tangles, class tangles, 'fat', and unused code so you know exactly where to target your efforts.
Version 2.0.1727 : Release notes were unavailable when this listing was updated.
New 3D printing firm takes shape with Objet-Stratasys merger | Crave - CNET: Two of the bigger 3D-printing manufacturers have merged into a single entity, with a strong position against competitors both big and small.
How to capture video from an iOS device | Macworld: It’s true, I did capture motion from the iPad’s screen, which is something that’s been difficult to do in the past. And yes, that blue bar is the very broad hint about how it’s done.
Selling the Apple II: Three true stories | Apple - CNET News: It turned out to be the musician Todd Rundgren ("Hello It's Me;" "Bang the Drum All Day"). He was interested in experimenting with computer technology, he said. I quickly and easily sold him a loaded Apple II, a monitor, two disk drives, and a thermal printer. Then he spied what I think were the only Apple Graphics Tablets we had in stock, and added them in, too.
Mavericks Invent Future Internet Where Cisco Is Meaningless: Martin Casado has mapped out a new future for the world of networking. He and Nicira and a small community of other computer scientists are pioneering a new breed of computer network that exists only as software, a network you can control independently of the physical switches and routers running beneath it. With this paradoxical arrangement, they aim to provide a far easier way of building and modifying and rebuilding the networks that run the largest services on the web and beyond.
SRS Labs : Multi Dimensional Audio : MDA: The basic concept of Multi-Dimensional Audio, or MDA, is to represent sound sources as objects in space just as they are in the real world, without regard to the number of channels or speaker locations. Once this level of abstraction is reached, a wealth of opportunities become available to greatly enhance every aspect of the audio ecosystem. MDA and its advantageous effects on audio content creation, distribution and consumption is the subject of this paper.
Why Hollywood loves 3D printing: The movie industry is beginning to see how much value 3D printing offers, especially on effects-heavy films that are made with huge numbers of 3D digital models.
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Review: Cabin in the Woods Rips Horror a New One: Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard turn the tired "don't go in the woods" trope into an energized blast of wit-infused gore.
4,800 Oxycontin pills found during routine traffic stop:
A man was arrested during a routine traffic stop on Thursday after police found a half ounce of marijuana and 4,800 Oxycontin pills in his vehicle.
Sony Conjures Archie’s "Sabrina" For Live-Action Movie: Sony Pictures plans to recast Archie Comics’ Sabrina the Teenage Witch as a young girl coming to terms with her powers in a superhero origin story compared to that of Spider-Man.
Opinion: Happy 20th anniversary, BBEdit: Venerable Mac text editor BBEdit was released 20 years ago. What's amazing is that it's still around, and still relevant.
I Take Back All the Bad Things I Said About Shostakovich: Concerto for Violin Orchestra No. 1 is the perfect sound track for the Year of Our Lord 2012. I have come to the conclusion that the only problem with classical music that I didn't like the first time round is that I wasn't playing it loud enough.
I'll second that emotion.
I was recently sitting around doing nothing, as usual, when the question popped into my head, "How is it that I don't all of Beethoven's symphonies just like I did when I was a little kid and we had that nice Reader's Digest boxed set I listened to over and over, along with The Addams Family TV show soundtrack and Switched On Bach and Professor Ludwig von Drake Presents Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color and Jan and Dean Meet Batman and Robin?"
(BTW, I've managed to get digitals of all of those except The Addams Family... Whoops, wait a sec, there it is in the iTunes store: Original Music from the TV Show by Vic Mizzy. Time to put it on the old wish list... There, done.)
So, as I was saying, (time to burn the other side of the pork chop before I get carried away again) I googled it and the first hit was an Italian site with a bunch of low-quality MP3s of old live 1950s concert recordings. So, what the hell....
Auditioning them one morning, very quietly while my roommate still slept, I was later in full accord with your conclusion after they had woken up and I was able to crank it up. Not quite the way I remember those first recordings I was exposed to (which will always sound to me like the only "right" versions), but close enough.
Excelsior!
'Bikini Barista' arrives in Roseburg:
They got off to a controversial start in Washington State, but 'Bikini Barista' stands are becoming a trend nationwide. That trend has now landed in Roseburg.
Final Cut Pro X In Action: Professional video editors around the world have moved to
Final Cut Pro X to create faster and more
flexible workflows. New York-based production house @radical.media is flipping its entire facility to Final Cut Pro X to tackle high-profile client projects. Hollywood’s Electric Entertainment is using Final Cut Pro X to cut episodes for the new season of its hit TV show “Leverage.” And accomplished editor Knut Hake used the software to edit new episodes of “Danni Lowinski,” one of Germany’s most popular and critically acclaimed TV shows.
Comic Book Easter Eggs - A Simpsons Extravaganza!: In this week's comic book Easter eggs, check out three different cameo appearances by the Simpsons, including an especially noteworthy visit to the pages of John Byrne's "Sensational She-Hulk!"
Get a Leaf indoor HDTV antenna for $29.99 | Marketplace Blog - CNET Reviews: But, holy crap, the Leaf works like magic. In my aforementioned basement, my TV picked up every local station and tuned them in at nearly full signal strength. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I'm absolutely astonished by how well this thing works. And you don't have to take my word: nearly a thousand users on Amazon rated the Leaf 4.5 stars out of 5 on average.
If you've been investigating your cable-TV cord-cutting options, this is one piece of equipment you'll definitely want to include. Pair it with a Windows 7-powered PC (equipped with an inexpensive ATSC tuner) and you can enjoy some sweet, sweet free-DVR action.
Local winery gets award from Ore. governor:
The Henry Estate Winery has just received the Governor's Tourism Award for Oregon. The surprise came when the winery opened a delivery box and found the award inside.
Spotify Launches Music Player for Web, Blogs and Tumblr: Spotify continues its quest to become the operating system of music on the internet, launching an embeddable music player that puts legal tunes on websites and blogs, for free, while compensating copyright holders.
Matt Groening finally reveals the location of Springfield | Robot 6 @ Comic Book Resources – Covering Comic Book News and Entertainment: The town’s location has been a recurring joke, with viewers teased repeatedly by the writers of The Simpsons. But now, at long last, the mystery has been solved, by none other than creator Matt Groening. In an interview with Smithsonian magazine, the cartoonist finally reveals Springfield (pop. 30,720) is in his home state of Oregon.
“Springfield was named after Springfield, Oregon,” he says. “The only reason is that when I was a kid, the TV show Father Knows Best took place in the town of Springfield, and I was thrilled because I imagined that it was the town next to Portland, my hometown. When I grew up, I realized it was just a fictitious name. I also figured out that Springfield was one of the most common names for a city in the U.S. In anticipation of the success of the show, I thought, ‘This will be cool; everyone will think it’s their Springfield.’ And they do.”
Facebook's 'dark side': study finds link to socially aggressive narcissism | Technology | guardian.co.uk: Researchers have established a direct link between the number of friends you have on Facebook and the degree to which you are a "socially disruptive" narcissist, confirming the conclusions of many social media sceptics.
People who score highly on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory questionnaire had more friends on Facebook, tagged themselves more often and updated their newsfeeds more regularly.
The research comes amid increasing evidence that young people are becoming increasingly narcissistic, and obsessed with self-image and shallow friendships.
Court Doc: K-9 tracked armed robber | Local & Regional News | KPIC CBS 4 - News, Weather and Sports - Roseburg, OR: According to Roseburg officers, they were called to the Rite Aid Pharmacy on SE Stephens Street just after 5:00 p.m., where employees reported a man with a knife had robbed them, getting away with a large number of Oxycontin pills.
iPad in the Enterprise: A videoconferencing dream machine? | Macworld: Videoconferencing, instant messaging and collaboration on the iPad is gaining steam as more iPads make their way into the enterprise. Companies have become more comfortable with these emerging methods of communication. They’re pouring investments into Wi-Fi upgrades and videoconferencing networking technology from tech giants such as Cisco, IBM and Microsoft.
Embracing the educational iOS device | Macworld: The Epicurious app is helping her learn to cook. Google Earth shows her our world in ways impossible when I was her age. Her monthly iTunes allowance has taught her something about budgeting and clearly evaluating what is and isn’t worth her money. And as part of that financial lesson, she’s learned that free is good. This has translated into her downloading a fair number of free (read: classic literature) books via the iBooks and Kindle apps. She may not be up on Twilight, but she’s read Conan Doyle and Verne.
Review: Rage is an old-fashioned shoot-'em-up game: Despite its state-of-the-art 3D graphics, Rage is really an old-fashioned shooter in the same mold as the now-ancient Doom and Quake.
Opinion: Apple needs to break up the iTunes band: iTunes is simultaneously Apple's most important and problematic product. It's a music and video player. It's a store, the gateway to buying music, videos, ringtones, and iOS apps. And of course, it's a syncing system, connecting to Apple devices from iPhone to iPod to Apple TV. Jason Snell thinks iTunes has gone too far.
Bare Bones releases TextWrangler 4.0: Many improvements from BBEdit 10 make their way into the app's free little brother with the release of TextWrangler 4.
Four short links: 9 April 2012 - O'Reilly Radar: How Big are Porn Site (ExtremeTech) -- porn sites cope with astronomical amounts of data. The only sites that really come close in term of raw bandwidth are YouTube or Hulu, but even then YouPorn is something like six times larger than Hulu.
Four short links: 9 April 2012 - O'Reilly Radar: How Big are Porn Site (ExtremeTech) -- porn sites cope with astronomical amounts of data. The only sites that really come close in term of raw bandwidth are YouTube or Hulu, but even then YouPorn is something like six times larger than Hulu.
Facebook Buys Instagram For $1 Billion: Facebook has announced it is buying the extremely popular photography app-maker Instagram for a reported $1 billion.
DC Comics Announces National Comics: This July, DC Comics will be launching a new stand-alone series, entitled National Comics. National Comics will tell done-in-one stories, exploring some of The New 52's characters that, while interesting, don't currently have an outlet for their stories. The first four in the spotlight will be Eternity, Madame X, Rose and Thorn, and Looker. Each of these will have an issue to tell their tale and introduce the reader to their little corner of the universe, with the hopes of building from there.
D'Oh! The Simpsons: Tapped Out Is an Addictive Time Waster: I pride myself on having avoided many years worth of time-sucking, premium content peddling, screen-tapping social games like FarmVille, CityVille and Mafia Wars. However, I do have a weakness for The Simpsons and the early SimCity games were among my favorites. Electronic Arts combined the TV Show, city building, optional social aspects and a whole lot of repetitive tasks in The Simpsons: Tapped Out, the iOS game that finally dragged me into the world of grinding, casual freemium gaming.
Plangrid brings iPad to construction sites: A new app puts blueprints with Apple's tablet, allowing construction managers and architects to leave the thick bundles of paper behind and distribute updated plans without the hassle of reprinting.
YouTube brings 3D to all -- even if the original video was 2D: The online video site now lets users accessing short-form 1080p video to automatically convert them to 3D.
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Editorial Radar with Mike Loukides & Mike Hendrickson: How 3D Printing and personal manufacturing will revolutionize the way business is conducted in the U.S. [Discussed at the 00:43 mark ]
Loophole Could Allow Private Land Claims on Other Worlds: Moon mining and outer-space colonies remain a pie-in-the-sky dream for now. But a new paper argues that the settlement of other worlds would take off if the government could provide one thing: property rights.
Nominees Announced For 2012 Eisner Awards: The nominations for the 2012 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards have been announced. Check out the full list of this year's nominees and see if your favorite title or creator made the cut!
Larry Page's First Year As Google CEO: Impatience is a Virtue | Epicenter | Wired.com: Of course, there are plenty of metrics that show that Google is doing just fine. It takes in $38 billion a year. (Its stock price has been fairly flat, but Page has always insisted that Google focuses on the long-term, not Wall Street’s quarterly calendar.) It is the world’s dominant search engine. In YouTube, it has the world’s premier internet video franchise. Its infrastructure is one of the marvels of the 21st Century.
Smaller, Quicker, Secret, Robotic: Inside America's New Space Force: The era of big space missions is fading. "Small" is the new watch-word for America's orbital force. Think tiny satellites, secret space planes, and so-called "pseudolites" -- that is, relatively inexpensive robots, planes and airships operating in the very-high-but-not-quite-orbit upper atmosphere. They're all part of the Pentagon's new plans to dominate its rivals in orbit.
Cheap laptop fix: How I learned to upgrade my own RAM | Crave - CNET: It took my friend persistently reminding me that his RAM upgrade on the same laptop model (a late 2008 aluminum MacBook) paid huge dividends on performance to finally pull the trigger. I'm glad I did. Even then, I waited about six months. My computer got progressively slower with each OS X update, until Lion gave me endless spinning wheels with only one program open.
A quick search on Amazon gave me a bargain: Crucial's 4GB upgrade kit with two 2GB modules cost just $26, or $29 after tax and shipping. A no-brainer. For older laptops, getting RAM costs practically nothing at all.
Comics on the iPad: will the new iPad attract paper readers?: Comics have been around for centuries, but the iconic Action Comics #1 featuring Superman in 1938 is widely considered to be the beginning of the “Golden Age.” Other metalliferous ages followed: silver, bronze, iron. Now, comics are in the “Modern Age.” And the biggest question both today and going forward—will comic books largely remain on glossy paper or transition to backlit LED?