Rexfeng

That's the somewhat unusual name of a feature-length documentary about world-class stone skippers. Here's the trailer:

I love skipping stones. When I see flat water and flat rocks, I can't not do it. They have to change that name though. They were likely going for "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" but really missed the mark. Oh, and they're raising funds on Kickstarter to finish the film.

The zen art of stone skipping meets the competitive nature of mankind in this feature-length documentary. Set in the world of professional stone skipping, this film will examine the competitive nature of mankind. World Records will be tested, rivalries will fester, and a sport will rise from the ashes of obscurity.

Tags: movies   Skips Stones for Fudge   video

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Colossal got its eye on the newest hypnotizing mathematical GIFs by Dave Whyte. Here are my favorites. Pop an Ambien and zoom in.

Read more...

The above video will not help you in real, three-dimensional life. But it should help you understand how you'd be able to move if you could sidestep your way into a fourth spatial dimension—sort of like what might happen if a character in a 2D cartoon leapt into our 3D world.

Read more...

When the Oculus rep met my confused look with, "yeah, we weren't sure it was going to work either," I didn't know what to expect. As it turns out third person works in VR.

Read more...

Swedish furniture behemoth IKEA has very nice, very large catalogues that I had thought contained hundreds of very staged, very nice photos. Turns out that assumption was only half right.

Read more...

As if Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls wasn't already packed with enough content to keep you dutifully clicking away at demons for months, Blizzard has launched Patch 2.1.0 which adds a host of new items and activities to the fan-favorite dungeon...

Your childhood has been torn asunder by the Gods that once gifted you. In preparing a Hello Kitty retrospective for the Japanese American National Museum, University of Hawaii Anthropologist Christine R. Yano was given one major correction by Hello Kitty owners Sanrio (via LA Times):

"Hello Kitty is not a cat. She's a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She's never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it's called Charmmy Kitty."

Indeed, after rigorously applying a variation of the "Duck test," it all became clear: she only kind of look like a cat, she doesn't walk like a cat, and she doesn't talk like a cat...

Continue reading…

Remember Friends? You know, that kinda homophobic show about sex positive horndogs that gave aspiring New Yorkers completely unrealistic ideas about what their apartments would be. Well, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the series premiere of this show you may or may not have heard of, Eight O’Clock Coffee is sponsoring a pop-up cafe, modeled off the show's Central Perk, in SoHo next month. [ more › ]

Their Refinement of the Decline, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches

Their Refinement of the Decline, detail

Diminishing Returns, oil on canvas, 48 × 60 inches

Diminishing Returns, detail

Witching Hour, acrylic on paper, 34 × 42.5 inches

A New Religion, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches

Hollow Pursuits, acrylic on canvas, 54 × 54 inches

Fool’s Gold, oil on canvas, 60 × 48 inches

Michael Kerbow is an artist based in San Francisco who works in a variety of mediums including painting, assemblage, drawing and digital photography. Of particular note are his large oil and acrylic paintings that depict surreal and at times nightmarish visions of the future, where industry and human development has grown without regulation or care for the environment. Kerbow shares via email:

My work explores the way in which we engage with our surroundings and the possible consequences our actions have upon the world in which we live. Through my work I attempt to question the rationale of our choices, and try to reveal the dichotomy that may exist between what we desire and what we manifest. Recently my work has focused upon the mechanisms that power our society and examines how they may influence the construct for a possible future.

Kerbow will have work at an upcoming group show called “Real Surreal” at Sandra Lee Gallery in San Francisco.

Amazon has been in a heated battle with the publisher Hachette for a few months now, and the general consensus is that Amazon has very little to lose while Hachette has a quite a bit to lose — a relationship with the biggest seller of books, to be specific. Modern life without Amazon has always sounded like a big problem for any publisher, but apparently that's not the case for all of them. In a big profile today, Business Insider looks at the case of Educational Development Corporation (EDC) — the publisher of titles like Everyone Poops — which has managed to break free from Amazon and actually succeed on its own.

EDC's business was declining when it decided to cut off Amazon sales back in 2012 in a dramatic move to spur a turnaround....

Continue reading…

Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee has a truly formidable presence within South Korea, but his presence within his own company is apparently something else altogether. Bloomberg reports that, during one visit to a factory, workers were told that they shouldn't watch through the windows as he entered the building, because they should not look down at him. Factory employees also had to park their cars in a rear lot so that Lee wouldn't have to see them (their cars were, apparently, not nice enough for his eyes), mints were placed in the bathrooms so that workers could improve their breath, and a red carpet was set out for Lee to walk down as he entered.

Stories of the reverence for Lee within his company are by no means new, but they may stand...

Continue reading…

As promised, Australian grilled cheese company Jafflechutes (Aussies call grilled cheese jaffles) will be dropping sandwiches to 30 to 40 New Yorkers next month. Brokelyn reports that the first drop point will be The Diamond bar in Greenpoint, where, on a still unknown date, the Jafflechutes team will throw grilled cheeses off the roof to customers waiting below. Here's how it works: the team posts a date and a menu on Twitter, diners place orders online, pay via Paypal, and wait for patiently at a designated time for their cheese to drop from the heavens and into their arms. While waiting on that announcment, check out a video of the delivery system in action.
· Jafflechutes [Official Site]
· Coming soon to The Diamond: Grilled cheese sandwiches thrown off the roof and into your mouth [Brokelyn]
· All Coverage of Jafflechutes [~ENY~]

Cloud storage bigwig Dropbox just slashed the price of its plans, offering 1TB of storage for $10 per month. And it's not alone. Over the last year, most of the major players have been cutting prices and upping sizes. So what's the best option today?

Read more...

BioShock on iOS is a true testament to how far mobile gaming has come. And starting today, you'll be able to return to Rapture and experience this new port of an old classic for yourself. The iOS version stays true to the original, with the entire story presented here just as it was on last-gen consoles and PC way back in 2007. The graphics have been downgraded slightly for an optimal experience and to squeeze the entire game into Apple's 2GB file size limit on iOS.

But even with those concessions, Polygon recently said players can expect a "seamless replay" and "a mesmerizing experience" — so long as you play through the game using a Bluetooth controller. Progressing through BioShock using touch controls sounds a bit unwieldy, though...

Continue reading…

It's probably a good thing that Time Warner Cable schedules its network maintenance for really early in the morning. That way, when things go terribly wrong and internet somehow gets knocked out across the entire United States, most customers are asleep and none the wiser. That's exactly what happened today; the company says that at around 4:30AM this morning, routine maintenance took a decidedly bad turn and left every single Time Warner Cable customer without web access. Nationwide outages are fairly uncommon — especially when you're talking about an ISP the size of Time Warner Cable, which provides high-speed broadband to 11.4 million residential customers.

Continue reading…

While Windows 8-powered laptops have been pushing display resolutions higher and higher, there’s been one piece of desktop software that has lagged behind: Google Chrome. Despite updating Chrome for Mac to support the first Retina MacBook Pro after just a month, Google has taken around two years to bring full support to Windows. Chrome for Windows users have had to settle for registry hacks, or optional flags to get various forms of high-DPI support, but the latest Chrome 37 release enables it fully by default.

Alongside the high-DPI update, Chrome 37 also supports Microsoft’s DirectWrite font rendering technology. This dramatically improves the way fonts are displayed in the browser with smooth animations, bringing an end to some of...

Continue reading…

Almost from the day it launched, Dropbox has been arguably the best storage and file syncing service on the market — and it's also been among the most expensive. Founder Drew Houston has often said that Dropbox customers aren't focused on the price, so long as they get a service that works. But with competitors like Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive relentlessly cutting their prices, Dropbox has found itself under increasing pressure to respond in kind. Today, it's relenting.

Continue reading…

My colleague Dieter Bohn is wondering whether to buy a Wii U. I'm here to convince him that he should.

Nintendo's Wii U launch was the company's biggest disaster since the Virtual Boy. The console was slow and clunky, with very little to play upon release and a barren line-up of games for the next several months. It's a cliché, but after I bought mine upon its Japanese launch, it quite literally gathered dust for the best part of a year. (It does that pretty easily because it is glossy and black.)

Just look at the chart above — the Wii U has posted terrible retail figures ever since its initial burst of sales, and there's little chance of that changing even with blockbuster titles like Mario Kart 8. Many third-party publishers...

Continue reading…

If you've tried playing a retro console on a modern HDTV, you may not have liked what you saw — smeary, stretched images that are a far cry from the sharp chunky blocks of yesteryear. Luckily, there's a better way for purists to get a crystal clear image that doesn't involve buying an old CRT TV.

Read more...

Casey Newton, reporting for The Verge:

But one Uber contractor The Verge spoke with said Lyft’s complaint had merit. “What’s simply untrue is that not only does Uber know about this, they’re actively encouraging these actions day-to-day and, in doing so, are flat-out lying both to their customers, the media, and their investors,” the contractor said. Until now, the canceled Lyft rides have been understood as a kind of prank call designed to keep competitors’ drivers off the road. But interviews and internal documents suggest another reason: Uber’s recruitment program has vastly increased in size and sophistication, and recruiters cancel rides in part to avoid detection by Lyft.

Great service, dirtbag tactics.

(And kudos to The Verge for the excellent investigative reporting.)

Dan Frommer:

Amazon also is aggressively building out its advertising technology portfolio. The company is “developing its own software for placing ads online that could leverage its knowledge of millions of web shoppers,” the WSJ reports (paywall). Amazon supposedly has told potential partners that it could start testing a “new placement platform, dubbed Amazon Sponsored Links” this year. Amazon also recently debuted a new service that runs banner ads on other sites, called Amazon CPM Ads. (“CPM” is ad-industry jargon for “cost per thousand” ad impressions — referring to the way that banner ads often are priced and publishers often are paid.)

Together, these services broadly sound like Google’s AdWords product, which allows advertisers to buy sponsored links on Google and other sites, and AdSense, which is Google’s ad network for publishers. And Amazon is investing in more: The company has 45 job listings for its Ad Platform team, ranging from general manager to various engineering and sales roles.

As the rest of the world continues to dump buckets of cold water over their heads in support of ALS research, some Palestinians have created their own version of the Ice Bucket Challenge to raise awareness about the ongoing crisis in Gaza. Known as the Rubble Bucket Challenge, the campaign invites social media users to douse themselves in sand, gravel, and other materials from buildings that have been destroyed during Israel's seven-week military offensive. The choice of materials was both deliberate and necessary: they couldn't use ice water, participants say, due to deteriorating conditions on the ground.

"In Gaza we don't have water and when we have water, we can't make ice since the electricity is off most of the time," writes Gaza...

Continue reading…

Los Angeles' city school district is halting plants to provide an iPad to every one of its students amid growing criticism and issues with the $1 billion program that it initiated last year. The Los Angeles Times reports that the superintendent of the LA Unified School District, the second largest district in the US, wrote in a memo yesterday that he was suspending use of the district's contract with Apple, which would ultimately have been used to supply it with iPads for every student at its 800 schools.

Continue reading…

Uber is arming teams of independent contractors with burner phones and credit cards as part of its sophisticated effort to undermine Lyft and other competitors. Interviews with current and former contractors, along with internal documents obtained by The Verge, outline the company’s evolving methods. Using contractors it calls "brand ambassadors," Uber requests rides from Lyft and other competitors, recruits their drivers, and takes multiple precautions to avoid detection. The effort, which Uber appears to be rolling out nationally, has already resulted in thousands of canceled Lyft rides and made it more difficult for its rival to gain a foothold in new markets. Uber calls the program "SLOG," and it’s a previously unreported aspect of...

Continue reading…

The Wednesday special: farmers' market salad from Ocean 41.

Uber very desperately wants in on that billion-dollar food-delivery market, but every PR strategy it deploys to announce this — ferrying burgers to Oaklanders, commandeering Mister Softee trucks — tends to register seriously high on the gimmick spectrum. A seemingly more earnest move in the GrubHub direction starts today, however, with UberFresh. The idea: For $12, cabbies will bring you your lunch.

Uber says that while hum-drum "food delivery takes 45 minutes to 1 hour," its Flash Gordon version "delivers you healthy, fresh food in about 10 minutes." There's no tip or delivery fee, but the fine print is that there's a really confined scope. The program is available in Santa Monica for now, only on weekdays until September 5, and the menu is super limited. You can have lunch in ten minutes, sure, if you want to eat the one thing Uber will deliver to you, a daily special that's either a salad, sub, or soup, with a cookie thrown in for free. And before you even begin fretting over the eventual possibility of $35 surge-priced chicken-noodle soup, just remember you have to walk out to the curb when the driver arrives.

Hungry to Happy in Under 10 Minutes [Uber]
Uber Trials Fast Food Delivery Service "UberFRESH" [Forbes]

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: the future, delivery service, grubhub, uber, uberfresh

Vietnamese cuisine is world-famous, but few visitors to the Southeast Asian country think about what they'll be sipping on the streets of Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. That's a mistake: the country's drinks are as delicious and diverse as its cuisine. Read More

As more and more cities battle urban sprawl by building taller and more densely-packed buildings, threats from fire, terrorism, or similar calamities become more pronounced, especially for people living and working on the upper floors where the designated exits are their only options. But this lifesaving device aims to gently lower its wearer to safety from 25 stories up.

Read more...

Police turned people away from the Nevada festival in Black Rock desert, as rains reduced the playa to undrivable sludge; organizers warn it may be closed tomorrow, too. Thousands of cars turned back for Reno, and nearby gas-stations ran dry. Read the rest

Because so few people ever read all of the notes in a Steam changelog, here's a neat new feature a lot of people missed in a recent update: you can now opt to install multiple games at once.

Read more...