Jonkenator

Ever wonder how boards turn from trees into building materials? While not a secret, the process is also not entirely obvious – and rarely this clear or quite so visceral.

Vincent Kohler (photos by Geoffrey Cottenceau) shows the art and geometry of the dissection process in much the same way an insect specialist might cut and splice a living specimen (or a butcher’s chart shows where slabs of meat can be found).

The result is a kind of three-dimensional version of a logging diagram drawing, showing in frozen time and physical reality how each cut is made and what the resulting sizes are, from which our minds can also reverse-engineer the order of cuts.

We’ve all been there: stuck in traffic, frustrated that you chose the wrong route on the drive to work. But imagine if you could see real-time traffic updates from friends and fellow travelers ahead of you, calling out “fender bender...totally stuck in left lane!” and showing faster routes that others are taking.

To help you outsmart traffic, today we’re excited to announce we’ve closed the acquisition of Waze. This fast-growing community of traffic-obsessed drivers is working together to find the best routes from home to work, every day.

The Waze product development team will remain in Israel and operate separately for now. We’re excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google’s search capabilities.

We’ll also work closely with the vibrant Waze community, who are the DNA of this app, to ensure they have what’s needed to grow and prosper.

The Waze community and its dedicated team have created a great source of timely road corrections and updates. We welcome them to Google and look forward to working with them in our ongoing effort to make a comprehensive, accurate and useful map of the world.

Posted by Brian McClendon, Vice President, Geo

The folks over at Teehan+Lax have just released a new tool (you’ll need Google Chrome and a pretty kickin’ internet connection) that lets you scrape public data from Google Street View to create sweeping hyperlapse videos. What’s a hyperlapse? Via Teehan+Lax:

Hyper-lapse photography—a technique combining time-lapse and sweeping camera movements typically focused on a point-of-interest—has been a growing trend on video sites. It’s not hard to find stunning examples on Vimeo. Creating them requires precision and many hours stitching together photos taken from carefully mapped locations. We aimed at making the process simpler by using Google Street View as an aid, but quickly discovered that it could be used as the source material. It worked so well, we decided to design a very usable UI around our engine and release Google Street View Hyperlapse.

The team turned their new UI over to one of their motion designers, Jonas, who made the stunning clip above. Incredible. Some other great examples of art made with Google Street View: Address is Approximate and this clip from Giacomo Miceli. (via it’s nice that)

When you’re asleep and dreaming, you can be anything your heart desires – and this creative bedding helps send you (or your little one) off to dreamland already dressed for the adventure. Astronaut and princess bedding sets from Dutch company Snurk feature photo-realistic costumes that let sleepers pretend to be someone else as they drift off.

The astronaut set lets little space lovers blast off into the great unknown in a soft version of a space explorer’s suit. The intricately detailed image on the duvet is complemented by the equally realistically-rendered helmet on the pillowcase. When he’s lying down, the child’s head fits perfectly on top of the helmet, creating the illusion that he’s actually wearing it.

When your little dreamer isn’t in bed, the spacesuit and helmet will remind him to make his bed. All laid out nicely and evenly, the duvet and pillowcase look just like a real astronaut laid out on the bed.

For tiny sleepers who are more into frills than rockets, the beautiful princess bedding set gives the experience of being dressed up in a festive frock and a jeweled tiara. When she’s lying in bed, the tiara looks to fit right on top of her head – just as if she’s wearing it for real.

Just like with the astronaut set, the promise of seeing a lovely princess dress and tiara all laid out is the perfect motivation for faithfully making the bed every single morning. Both of the above bedding sets are available for worldwide shipping from Snurk.

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Keep Going - Check out this Great Related Dornob Article:

Dirty Sheets: Bold Custom ‘His and Hers’ Bedding Designs


Safe-T-Beds: Hide Your Money Where You Sleep

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A comic about people who wait tables

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If you’ve been waiting for LTE support in the bring your Sprint device to Ting program you need wait no longer.

I’m going to go ahead and assume that you’ve already clicked through to the bring your Sprint device to Ting page and therefore don’t care about anything I have left to say. Just in case though:

One of the most requested features our customers (or would-be customers) have asked us for is to make LTE devices eligible to make the move to Ting under the bring your Sprint device to Ting program.

Since before we even launched the bring your own Sprint device program (first MVNO to do so… just saying) we’ve been working hard to have the LTE limitation lifted. Now, that limitation is a thing of the past.

If you’ve got an off-contract Sprint device waiting to make the move to Ting you need wait no longer. Along with this little LTE win, we’ve also worked on the back-end provisioning system such that bringing a 4G WiMAX device over is now instant, just as it is for 3G and now LTE devices.

What’s more, we’ve also added the option to port a Sprint number while also turning your Sprint device into a Ting device. Porting a number can take four to six hours.

Supported LTE devices

We have official support for the Samsung Galaxy SIII, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the Samsung Galaxy Victory and the Samsung Galaxy Note II LTE devices at launch. You may notice a pattern developing.

We’ll be adding official support for other manufacturer’s LTE devices as soon as possible. In the interim though, it’s not that other LTE devices can’t make the move, it’s that we can’t offer support for those devices making the move. Basically, if you’re comfortable with a more DIY approach in moving your LTE device from Sprint to Ting then have at it. If not, you’d be advised to let us do all the testing first.

It behooves us to say that this latest development wouldn’t be possible without Sprint as our partner. I mean, it’s obvious what’s in it for us but seeing what’s in it for Sprint requires taking a longer view. Lifting the LTE device limitation from the bring your Sprint device to Ting program demonstrates that Sprint is taking that longer view.

Hello everyone!

This morning I have mixed feelings: I am happy that we have the possibility to bring our beloved The Old Reader to a new level, and I am sad that Google Reader soon will be completely over. It was a large part of my daily internet life. We even started making The Old Reader because no one could stand my whining anymore.

News came unexpected (mind you, we are living in GMT, so it was literally the middle of the night), but we are doing out best. We tripled our user base (and still counting), and our servers are not amused so far. We will be deploying more capacity shortly, so things should get better by the end of the day. Please, be patient with us.

(The Old Reader’s team before March 13, photo by repor.to/shuvayev)

This is overwhelming. When we started this as something for us and our friends to use, we never expected so many of you to join us in our journey. Thank you very much for your kind words and support, we appreciate this.

Seeing Google Reader go, many of you are asking whether The Old Reader is going to stick around. Also, quite a lot of people would like to donate to keep our project running. We have been discussing this quite a lot recently, and we decided that paid accounts (the freemium model) are the way to go. We want to keep making a great product for our users, not cater it for advertisers’ needs.

We are going to be honest, we have not even started coding this yet. However, we would like to get this news out as soon as possible for everyone to know the way we will be going. Paid accounts will have some additional features, but the basic free accounts will still be 100% usable. We are not in this game to make money, but we want to give something special back to the people who are going to be supporting us.

We have our daily jobs, so we can’t promise that new features will be ready tomorrow or next week. We have no investors or fancy business plans, but we are open about everything we do, and we want to do it the right way.

We reworked the plans according to the news today. Creating an API for mobile clients is the number one priority in our roadmap. We would love to collaborate with any developers who were making Google Reader clients. Please, spread the word about this if you can.

For those of you who are posting feedback and creating new feature requests - please, double-check for existing items in Uservoice. We hate answering the same questions multiple times and removing duplicate requests.

Most asked questions are:
- “When will OPML import be working again?” As soon as we launch more capacity to handle this. Hopefully, later today.
- “Why are you asking for access to my Google contacts when I log in via Google account?” We don’t anymore.
- “When will you make an iOS app? How about Android?” We will start with API as soon as we can and see how it goes.
- “Why is there no way to login without Google or Facebook accounts?” We cover that one in our knowledge base, but we plan to implement own login code. The demand is high.
- “How do I rename a feed?”. Just browse the Tour page, please? 
- “Shut up and take my money!”. Will work on that, stay tuned.

We have lots of things to do, and it will probably take us several days to reply to all emails and tickets. Also, Twitter keeps reminding us about daily tweet limits, so there might be delays as well.

Some other news: last week our developer (on the left) turned 21, and we have implemented PubSubHubbub support. Many of you asked us to make feed updates faster, and PubSubHubbub makes compatible feeds refresh almost instantly. Yay!

Thank you very much for your support. We will do our best during next three months to prepare for the day Google Reader will no longer be around.