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Saturday, December 21, 2013

Imaginos - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Imaginos - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Virtuoso guitarist Joe Satriani financed the recording of his second album, Surfing with the Alien, through his work on Imaginos.

Cynic’s Progress | The Weekly Standard

Cynic’s Progress | The Weekly Standard: His witticisms, which were of a very high order, reappear sometimes, too. His best aphorisms in The Devil’s Dictionary are easily a match for La Rochefoucauld, maybe even Voltaire. His most reprinted book review consists of a single sentence: “The covers of this book are too far apart.” When a young mother pestered him for advice on bringing up children, he finally replied: “Study Herod, madam. Study Herod.” Democracy he defined as “four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” At the death of a local politician, Bierce volunteered the epitaph: “Here lies Frank Pixley, as usual.” Disdainful of philosophical pretension, he rewrote Descartes’s axiom as “Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum”: “I think I think, therefore I think I am.”

Friday, December 20, 2013

New Mac Pro: Simultaneous Real-Time 4K Effect Rendering, +900MB/s Read/Write

New Mac Pro: Simultaneous Real-Time 4K Effect Rendering, +900MB/s Read/Write: FCP.co posted a 24-hour hands on with the new Mac Pro. They found read speeds of 880MB/s from the Mac Pro's solid state storage, with impressive write numbers of 985.5MB/s. Further, the team discovered that new machine could post full 4K video with multiple color corrections, effects and transitions playing back all in real time.

Macworld saw even more impressive SSD performance, with Black Magic reporting 952.8MB/s writes and 920.5MB/s reads. Black Magic's speed test app reports that the new Mac Pro can easily handle all video formats it currently tracks, with FCP.co adding that its Mac Pro was able to play back 16 simultaneous streams of 4K video.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

FaceTime Audio Coming to Macs With Next OS X Update

FaceTime Audio Coming to Macs With Next OS X Update: According to 9to5Mac, the FaceTime audio feature is "integrated deeply" into both the Messages and FaceTime apps, making voice communication between Apple users on any device easier than ever. With Messages, FaceTime, and FaceTime audio on iOS and OS X, Apple will have a complete communication system in place.

With a simple way to answer telephone calls and chat requests from all devices, those in Apple's ecosystem will have little reason to resort to alternative VoIP apps when communicating with other Apple users. FaceTime audio is also a high-quality VoIP choice, as it uses the AAC-ELD codec for Full-HD Voice. AAC-ELD is designed to provide CD-like audio quality for voice calls, delivering high speech and audio quality at a low coding delay.

Plex Media Server 0.9.8.17 - Seamlessly connect your Plex clients with your local media. (Free)

Plex Media Server 0.9.8.17 - Seamlessly connect your Plex clients with your local media. (Free): Plex Media Server seamlessly connects your Plex clients with all of your local and online media. The combination of centralized library management, streaming of online content, and powerful transcoding functionality provides an unrivaled level of flexibility and ease of use.
Plex Media Server runs on your Mac, PC, or compatible NAS device and serves your media to all of your Plex clients including Plex-enabled mobile devices and 2011 LG Smart TVs.

Making the most of iMovie's lesser-known features | Macworld

Making the most of iMovie's lesser-known features | Macworld: Using the Sports Team theme and editor
Speaking of themes, iMovie includes the Sports theme, which has a special talent for adding player names and statistics, player photos, and team logos. It gains this information via the Sports Team Editor. You use it this way.

Choose Window > Sports Team Editor. By default you’ll see an entry for the Leopards. You can edit this entry by clicking on it or you can start fresh by clicking the plus (+) button to add a new team. Click on the Sport pop-up menu to choose the sport the team plays—baseball, basketball, football, soccer, or volleyball.

Below the teams area is a place for the team’s players. Click the plus button to add team members. For each player you can, by default, add a number, name, position, age, height, and weight. (Adding all of this information isn’t required.) To add a player’s picture, just drag it to the Player Photo field or click the plus button in this field and navigate to the image you want to add. Likewise, to add a team logo, drag it to the Team Logo field or click the plus button and navigate to it.

You can edit much of this information. For example, if the sport your team plays isn’t listed, click the triangle that appears next to Sports at the bottom of the window. Then click the plus button that appears below the list that’s revealed. A New Sport field is added. Fill it in as you like—Bowling or Disc Golf, for example. To the right are four Label fields. Select each one and enter an appropriate label—Average, Shoe Color, Ball Weight, and Cocktail, for example. When you’re finished configuring your team, click Done.

Apple releases Final Cut Pro X 10.1, optimized for Mac Pro with 4K support

Apple releases Final Cut Pro X 10.1, optimized for Mac Pro with 4K support: “Alongside the release of the new Mac Pro, Apple has updated Final Cut Pro in the Mac App Store to take advantage of the machine’s immense raw processing power,” Benjamin Mayo reports for 9to5Mac.
“Specifically, Apple says that playback and rendering has been optimised for the Mac Pro’s dual GPUs,” Mayo reports. “Final Cut Pro X 10.1 also adds 4K support, including monitoring across Thunderbolt 2 and HDMI displays as well as 4K titles, transition and generators.”

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Roku enters early 21st century, offers YouTube

Roku enters early 21st century, offers YouTube: Merry early Christmas, Roku owners. You can finally watch YouTube as a Roku channel.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Scientists Discover a Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics - Wired Science

Mind-blowing!!


Scientists Discover a Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics - Wired Science: The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their interactions. Interactions that were previously calculated with mathematical formulas thousands of terms long can now be described by computing the volume of the corresponding jewel-like “amplituhedron,” which yields an equivalent one-term expression.

“The degree of efficiency is mind-boggling,” said Jacob Bourjaily, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University and an author of the first of two papers detailing the new idea. “You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.”

Monday, December 9, 2013

Kitzhaber announces he'll run for historic fourth term

Kitzhaber announces he'll run for historic fourth term: Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber announced Monday morning that he will run for an historic fourth term.



Way to go, Hayduke, from your old buddy, Lightspeed!

Friday, December 6, 2013

How and why to use Google+, the surprising champ of photo sharing

How and why to use Google+, the surprising champ of photo sharing: Google’s much-maligned social network is leagues above the rest when it comes to photo-sharing tools and privacy controls