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One of the biggest mysteries in tech is on the cusp of being solved. Apple's highly anticipated wearable device for the wrist will be shown off in September, according to the well sourced Apple observer John Gruber. Responding to a Verge story today on the Moto 360 charging dock, Gruber announced the gadget's unveiling with characteristic understatement. "The only way this could get funnier would be if it doesn't even ship until after Apple announces their wrist wearable thing next month," he wrote on Daring Fireball. (It's funny to Gruber because he thinks the Moto 360 has a "stupid flat-tire display shape.")

This week, several outlets reported that Apple is planning to hold an event September 9th. We assume that's the day we'll see...

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The IXION windowless jet—which makes its interior transparent using display panels that cover most of the cabin—might look like an impossible sci-fi concept but the fact is that we are not very far from this. Check out the video. It's so cool.

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Filed under: Government/Legal

The bill targets any speed-control devices that are capable of automatically producing a recorded image of an alleged violation.

New Jersey may soon prohibit other states from issuing traffic citations to its residents for alleged violations that were caught on speed or red-light cameras.

Lawmakers in the Garden State have introduced a bill that would stop New Jersey's Motor Vehicles Commission from providing license-plate numbers or other identifying information to another state or an interstate information network for the purpose of doling out a fine.

"I've been getting loads of complaints from people," state senator Nick Sacco told The Star-Ledger, the state's largest newspaper. "They drive to Virginia to visit relatives. They go through Maryland. They come back home and start receiving tickets in the mail. And they swear that they're not speeding; that they're keeping up with the traffic."

Introduced in the state assembly last month and in the state senate last week, the bill targets any speed-control devices that utilize cameras, vehicle sensors and are capable of automatically producing a recorded image of an alleged violation. It has a measure of bipartisan support: Republican Declan O'Scanlon sponsored the bill in the assembly, while Sacco and another Democrat sponsored the bill in the senate.

One of the main criticism of the speed and red-light cameras is they penalize the registered owner of the vehicle, not necessarily the driver of the vehicle. When weeks pass by before owners even know they have been been implicated by a camera, that's a problem.

Continue reading New Jersey may shield drivers from other states' red light, speed cameras

New Jersey may shield drivers from other states' red light, speed cameras originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 08 Aug 2014 14:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With all the talk about the $1B vanity museum that George Lucas is bringing to Chicago, it's worth stopping for a moment to consider the fact that the Star Wars creator has already plucked a moving fortress from dunes of Tatooine and dropped it in a Singapore office park. Officially opened on January 16, and featured yesterday on Arch Daily, the regional HQ of Lucasfilm Singapore is modelled after a Sandcrawler, those caterpillar-tracked fortresses inhabited by the diminutive hooded Jawas. Of course, this one trades the energy furnaces, workshops, and armored plating that made its fictional counterpart a perfect mobile live/work space for the scrap scavengers that inhabited them for nine stories of glass-wrapped modern offices, but...

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This guy must have never been afraid of the dark growing up, kept pet spiders and snakes as a child and ate the weirdest foods without blinking because he has absolutely no fear. He goes from almost hitting a mountain to spinning down in between two buildings and swooping in for a perfect landing.

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[Photo: Nick Solares]

After making the earth-shattering decision to start serving fresh-cut French fries instead of frozen fries last year, Shake Shack has just reversed gears. Almost exactly a year to the day since CEO Randy Garutti unleashed the new fries on the Upper East Side, with promises to eventually bring them to every single location, he admits that it was a mistake. "We didn't fully appreciate the simple, tactile pleasure and the emotional attachment our fans have to the crispiness, the ridges and pure joy that these fries bring to guests of all ages," he writes.

Also, hand-cut fries take more work, and it's harder to keep them consistent. So, despite a year's worth of revamping kitchens and retraining staff to the hand cut ways, Shake Shack will bring back the crinkle cuts by November. And when they return, they will be, for the first time, free of artificial ingredients. Of course, there are bound to be some who are disappointed by the move, but when the people speak, Danny Meyer listens.
· Crinkles Are Coming Back This Fall [Shake Shack]
· All Coverage of Shake Shack [~ENY~]

Water on the moon, Reykjanes Peninsula

Hvitserkur Rock

Gullfoss at dusk

Turquoise Falls, Bruarfoss

Black Falls, Skaftafell

Blue Storm, Jokulsarlon

Blue Ice, Jokulsarlon

The mighty Dettifoss

Sacred Water, Godafoss

Svartifoss, infrared processing

Photographer Jérôme Berbigier moved from France to Australia in 2007 and soon after took up photography. Inspired by a childhood spent near the Atlantic Ocean and the natural beauty of areas surrounding Sydney, it wasn’t long before he was capturing stunning landscapes up and down the Australian coast. A 2012 trip took him to Iceland where he captured these amazing views of the country’s waterfalls, rivers, and seascapes, some of which he didn’t publish until just this year. You can see much more of his photography on Flickr and over on Facebook. Prints of all his work are available upon request. (via Colossal Submissions)

From the gaming laboratory at CERN (??!), Particle Clicker is like Cookie Clicker but about particle physics. As in, you actually learn about particle physics while you're playing.

I am addicted to these damn things. Send help. (via waxy)

Tags: video games

Reed Hastings, posting on Facebook:

Minor milestone: last quarter we passed HBO is subscriber revenue ($1.146B vs $1.141B). They still kick our ass in profits and Emmy’s, but we are making progress. HBO rocks, and we are honored to be in the same league. (Yes, I loved Silicon Valley and yes it hit a little close to home.)

Short, sweet, and honest.

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One man is committed to the life-saving-ultra-essential task of improving a classic New York breakfast: "I will save the adequate-but-underachieving NYC egg sandwich by delivering instructional leaflets to all Midtown egg-sandwich makers," proclaims Joseph Checkler on his project's Kickstarter page. He's seeking just $310 "for printing and mailing costs, as well as for my time researching every corner of Midtown Manhattan to find out who needs this breakfast-saving leaflet," and he's already surpassed his goal. So perhaps better sandwiches are on the way. [Kickstarter via NYT]
[Yelp]

Microsoft is planning to force Windows users onto the latest supported versions of Internet Explorer. The change will take effect on January 12th, 2016, meaning Windows 7 and Windows 8 users will need to be running Internet Explorer 11 to continue receiving updates. If Internet Explorer 12 or even version 13 debuts before January 12th, 2016 and it supports Windows 7 and Windows 8, then those users will need to upgrade to the very latest. Microsoft’s change means Internet Explorer 8 and 10 will no longer be supported on consumer versions of Windows after January 12th, 2016.

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Everyone in Japan knows Brown, the laid-back bear, and Cony, the bunny whose wild enthusiasm makes Brown seem even more chilled. They make a good pair — they’re dating, you see — and they also make a lot of money for their owners. They’re virtual stickers inside Line, a messaging app that now dominates Japan.

The cute characters in Line’s stickers — next-level emoji, basically — are hugely popular outside the app itself, with ubiquitous merchandising that’s impossible to ignore. Though it...

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For years, Comcast has been giving its employees special cards to hand out to customers who had "a negative or unpleasant experience that is unresolved."

Once called "Make It Right" cards and recently rebranded as We're On It" cards, the cards are printed with a unique ID number and a "no wait" hotline that connects to a dedicated team of 250 customer service agents. Employees receive 12 cards a year, which they can hand out at their discretion.

The cards are also printed with a QR code that directs customers to self-service options.

Comcast handles more than a million customer interactions a day, according to the company, which means a lot of angry customers if even a tiny fraction of them go wrong. "Despite our best efforts,...

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Things tend to change for video services when they're bought by Google — just look at YouTube. Now Twitch, which Google-owned YouTube is said to have snapped up (though neither company has confirmed), is making some major changes to its service: one aimed at keeping copyright lawsuits and takedowns at bay, and another that keeps past broadcasts from being stored on the service for the rest of time. Both appear designed at making it a better acquisition target for a company with deep pockets.

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I love this post from Recode's Peter Kafka, who points out that AOL's solid Q2 numbers aren't really based on its high-profile media properties like The Huffington Post, but rather the dial-up business, which has been minting pure profit for years. The big trick? Increasing prices even as subscriber numbers fall: instead of just over 3 million people paying $18 in 2011, this quarter 2.34 million people paid just over $20. It's safe to assume that most of these people don't even know they're paying, and probably don't need to pay AOL for access, especially if they have broadband service from their local cable or phone companies.

On the flip side, it's also likely that a lot of those people can't get broadband service where they live —...

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Blizzard has implemented cloud saving in its latest update for the console versions of Diablo 3, allowing players to transfer their character data across platform generations for the upcoming Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition. Diablo 3's...

Video game levels are dangerous: Mario has to deal with lava-spewing pits, while Solid Snake slips through heavily guarded enemy buildings in Metal Gear Solid. Metrico for the PS Vita, on the other hand, puts you in a world made of something much more mundane: infographics. The game asks you to navigate puzzles made of bar graphs and pie charts. It's not the most obvious inspiration for a game, but it works. "It is all about communication in composition," Geert Nellen, one-third of Dutch game studio Digital Dreams, says of infographic design, "which makes it perfect for games." And despite its seemingly strange concept, Metrico is an impossibly stylish and uniquely challenging experience.

Metrico looks and controls like a traditional...

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Sony is giving up on e-readers after facing stiff competition from rivals like Amazon’s Kindle. "We do not have plans to develop a successor Reader model at this time," says a Sony spokesperson in a statement to BBC News. The PRS-T3 is the last Sony e-reader and it will be sold across Europe until stocks sell out. The move comes just months after Sony shuttered its ebook distribution store in the US and Canada, making it less surprising that the company is killing off the associated hardware.

Sony will still keep selling its e-reader hardware in Japan alongside ebooks from its online store. That might not mean much for its prospects in Sony’s home turf of Japan though. While Sony and Kobo have attempted to beat Amazon’s e-readers, the...

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Bernie Ecclestone is an exceptionally wealthy man who until recently will have been familiar to Formula 1 racing fans and quite unimportant to the rest of the world. Only what he did today should make him a figure of global notoriety: Ecclestone paid $100 million to have a German court dismiss corruption charges raised against him that could have resulted in a 10-year prison sentence. No wonder he's laughing.

The prosecutors in the case decided to accept Ecclestone's settlement offer on account of his advanced age and the anticipated difficulty of obtaining a conviction. This is in spite of the fact that Ecclestone admits to having paid millions of dollars to a German banker that has already been successfully prosecuted and is currently...

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 It seemed inevitable, but the day has finally come: Justin.tv, the life-streaming service that birthed (and was quickly overshadowed by) the game broadcasting service Twitch, has closed its doors. From here on out, their focus is solely on Twitch. Read More

Gmail says it wants to make email more global, and today it's taking a first step: Gmail now recognizes email addresses containing accented or non-Latin characters. You can't create accounts with those same characters yet — Google says it's working to get there — but Gmail users can now send to and receive emails from these addresses without issue. Google's approach, which will also be implemented in Google Calendar soon, is based on an email standard created by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 2012.

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Williamsburger, which opened in 2008 with the boast that it was "beefing up hipsters" is no longer. The restaurant shuttered its original Wythe Avenue location recently, leaving a farewell note in the window. Although many Williamsburg residents might argue that Dumont Burger has a solid claim to the local crown, Williamsburger boldly signs off: "Thanks for making us the #1 burger joint in Hipsterville." Its Long Island City location is still open for business.
· All Coverage of Williamsburger [~ENY~]

Eva Dou, reporting for the WSJ:

Xiaomi led China’s second-quarter smartphone shipment rankings with 14% market share, following by Samsung, Lenovo and Yulong each with 12%. It’s quite a jump from the first quarter, when Xiaomi’s 10.7% market share trailed Samsung’s 18.3% and Lenovo’s 11%. And an even bigger leap from a year ago, when Xiaomi only held 5%. […]

Xiaomi’s devices typically sell for more than $100, while Samsung’s high-end Galaxy smartphones typically cost more than $500.

Market share as a first priority generally doesn’t end well. When you compete on quality, “almost the best” will often still do pretty well. When you compete on price, “almost the cheapest” always loses.

Facebook spent billions of dollars to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp and it offered billions more for Snapchat. The reason why is in this chart.

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It’s been over a year since we last checked in with video artist Erdal Inci (previously) who clones multiple recordings of himself moving through public spaces resulting in these bizarre looping performances. Inci often carries lights or other objects which lend a sense of choreography to each video, and at times the exposure eliminates him from the scene or makes him appear shadowlike in the background. Here are a few of our favorites over the last few months but you can see more on his website and at a higher resolution on Vimeo. (via iGNANT)

There are 179,712 possible vehicle combinations in Mario Kart 8. That's enough to drive even the most serious gamer insane. Thankfully, one player who's not scared of number-crunching has compiled all this raw data into a handy mobile app that's worth its weight in gold stars.

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None of Marvel Studios' films are entirely original. That isn't a criticism: the storyline and characters are adapted from years of comic books, films, TV shows, etc. Each film embraces the past with an insane number of Easter eggs that acknowledges both the source material and the other films in the wholly-interconnected Marvel Cinematic Universe. In a 13-minute montage, MTV breaks down all the Easter eggs from 2008's Iron Man through 2013's Thor: The Dark World— meaning no Captain America: The Winter Soldier, no Guardians of the Galaxy, and nothing from Marvel's Agents of SHIELD television show. Is it complete? "Absolutely not," say someone who knows comic books way better than us. But we still enjoyed watching.

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Scorpion Dagger, aka James Kerr, makes these fantastic GIFs more or less every day. "They're digital collages made mostly from northern and early renaissance paintings," he says.

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