Rexfeng

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Brooklyn's favorite bearded, bean to bar chocolate-making duo, the Mast Brothers, have just opened a new beverage-centric addition to their Williamsburg factory. It's called The Chocolate House, and according to a Facebook announcement, it is "an establishment dedicated to the craft of chocolate beverages." A tipster sends a photo of the full menu, which includes brewed chocolate, cold brew chocolate and chocolate soda, as well as the more standard chocolate milk. According to a staff member, the first is basically a pour-over made with cacao nibs instead of coffee, while the second similarly involves steeping cocoa nibs to create an unsweetened, tea-like brew.
· Mast Brothers Chocolate [Facebook]
· All Coverage of Mast Brothers Chocolate [~ENY~]

This is getting messier.

Well, that potato salad Kickstarter finally ended this weekend with a whimper of fat-free mayo and $55,492 to its name. Zack Danger Brown's now infamous foray into salad-making for the first time will now culminate, hopefully, in a bash called "PotatoStock 2014, to be held in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. Columbus is where backers who gave $3 or more have to go for their sample (initial plans for mail order have been scuttled — sorry, potato people of Reykjavik), but at least Brown will uphold his promise to "say out loud" all 6,911 backer names as he "VERY slowly" makes it.

There's a potato salad tour in the works, too, perhaps because Brown made very clear last month that he was, above all, a side-dish-making altruist who wanted this project "to do the most good possible." He's said that the donations won't profit him personally, or benefit his friends, because the Kickstarter miracle "is about something way more than us." Admirably, Brown has earmarked "a significant portion" of what's left over after he fulfills Kickstarter obligations — i.e., making the potato salad and doling out rewards — for a new anti-hunger/homelessness relief fund through the Columbus Foundation. He's also using "some of the profit" to "start an LLC, pay web hosting and buy / rent production equipment to continue making content." It will be a "for-profit venture" whose goal is "to spread humor and joy around the world," of course.

[Kickstarter]
Related: This Potato Salad Has Raised $9,6 and Counting on Kickstarter
Related: The Potato Salad Kickstarter Lost $30,000

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: complex carbohydrates, kickstarter, potato salad, potato salad kickstarter, zack danger brown

Adrianne Jeffries, writing for The Verge:

“We locked down the ability for most customer service reps to disconnect accounts,” a billing systems manager who worked for Comcast from 2008 to 2013 told The Verge. “We queue the calls for customers looking to disconnect to a retention team who are authorized to give more deeply discounted products to keep subscribers. Even if the subscriber disconnects cable, maybe we can keep them on internet or voice.”

A current employee at Comcast who participated in the Comcast Confessions series provided The Verge with a copy of the 20-page guidelines the company uses for retention specialists.

This will be the cable industry’s downfall. No company with such disregard for their own customers will succeed for long.

Bust out the Champagne and crackers.

Caviar, the upstart service that figured out how to offer delivered menu items like ramen bowls and pork buns from sought-after restaurants that typically don't offer delivery, has just sold to Jack Dorsey's Square for a reported $90 million. Caviar will operate separately from the payment-processing service, for now, and it's not yet clear how the two platforms will sync. A side note to the acquisition news, however, is that Caviar reps recently told Re/code they will soon drop the somewhat annoying $9.99 flat delivery fee to $4.99, which is a pretty exciting tidbit on its own. [Official site, Related]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: big deals, caviar, jack dorsey, roe, square

Not everyone's happy about scientists on social media. University of Liverpool geneticist Neil Hall recently noticed scientists with large Twitter following gaining a seemingly unfair advantage at conferences and in scientific discussions. As a counterbalance, Hall has proposed a "Kardashian index," directly comparing a researcher's Twitter followers to his or her journal citations. As Hall describes it in his paper introducing the index, "I think it’s time that we develop a metric that will clearly indicate if a scientist has an overblown public profile so that we can adjust our expectations of them accordingly."

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The recording of the “Comcast Rep from Hell” has now been listened to more than 5 million times, sparking a conversation about the largest player in the nation’s cable industry. That debate is a timely one: Comcast is in the process of acquiring the second-largest cable provider, Time Warner Cable, and both companies are plagued by notoriously low customer-satisfaction ratings.

Comcast and Time Warner have agreed on a price, but the deal isn’t done. The Federal Communications Commission...

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The Rose of Jericho (Selaginella lepidophylla) is a species of desert moss that has the amazing ability to ‘resurrect’ itself after bouts of extreme dehydration lasting months or even years. After just a few hours of exposure to moisture the plants burst to life, uncurling from a tight ball of dry leaves to a green flower-like shape. Videographer Sean Steininger shot this timelapse of several plants as he exposed them to water. (via Cause, Science!)

Update: Apparently a few places sell these plants online.

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Poor Johnny Dronehunter. All this gun-toting, freedom-loving American wanted to do was cruise on down the Utah highway and listen to some rock 'n' roll at sunset. You know — America things. Then a bunch of sinister, privacy-destroying drones all but run him off the road — and that's when Johnny earns his surname. Utah silencer manufacturer SilencerCo is taking our worries about unmanned aerial vehicles to the logical extreme, using them to market its brand of quiet-making gun gizmos with an over-the-top advertisement that's chock full of unrepentant drone murder.

Naturally, the gang over at SilencerCo say they're hoping to start a dialogue. "We wanted to use this video to energize the ongoing discourse about privacy in a creative way,"...

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 It really didn’t make sense to me why Y Combinator’s Sam Altman let a smoothie delivery service go through his startup incubator. Were the Fresh Mint Immunity and Cafe Mocha Energizer flavors delicious? Yes. But I scratched my head at how the next Jamba Juice had anything to do with tech. Read More

The Google+ photo organization and editing tools are probably the most useful part of Google's oft-criticized social network, and now it sounds like they'll soon be spun off into their own standalone product. According to Bloomberg, Google is planning to make the existing Google+ photo features into an independent product that'll be accessible even to users who don't have a Google+ account. It's an effort to find more users for the strongest part of Google+ without the baggage that comes with a service that has consistently struggled to find an engaged user base, despite Google's claims to the contrary.

The future of Google+ has been up in the air for several months now — VP Vic Gundotra, the head of Google+, left the company in April,...

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It's finally happened: as of today, unlocking your cellphone to work on other networks will be legal again in the US. The White House and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who helped pass legislation earlier this year, announced that President Barack Obama is signing the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act. The bill will restore a copyright exemption that allows customers (or authorized third parties) to modify a phone's firmware, removing the restrictions that most carriers place on their phones.

President Obama made clear last week that he would be signing the bill, a version of which was recently agreed upon by both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The rule was one of several proposals floated last year in...

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That's not a real kind of discount.

Mary's Gourmet Diner in Winston-Salem is most definitely going to have a surge of customers angling to get a few dimes off their $11 home-fry scrambles now that word is out it offers a hefty 15 percent off the check whenever its servers see a customer "praying in public." Echoing other random and impromptu discounts like the one for "well-behaved kids" — it's only a matter of time before some plucky café rewards a customer for not cutting their toenails at the table, or for reading Infinite Jest, let's hope — this one's gone viral, getting national attention after initially being posted on a Christian radio station's Facebook page.

The discount is apparently nondenominational: "It's not really a 'religious' thing. It's a gratitude thing," the restaurant wrote on Facebook, in response to a question of who gets discounted breakfast platters. Because everyone is eligible except for ungrateful people, who make lousy customers anyhow, the real issue Mary's Diner faces with its newfound popularity is having its servers work overtime to verify which of its customers are praying and which aren't, which will no doubt be especially tricky during the brunch rush. There may also be customers who claim they've prayed but who weren't observed in the act. In other words, money off the bill for "gratitude" might get chaotic, and fast. These are just worst-case scenarios, of course; let's just hope everyone tips really well.

Winston-Salem restaurant gives 15 percent discount for praying in public, photo of receipt goes viral [My Fox 8]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: pray for discount, mary's gourmet diner, praying discount

The company is facing investor pressure to pare its product lineup and trim costs.

File this one under “That’s rich.”

Beginning last year, Disney World started issuing "MagicBands," rubberized RFID wristbands that can do everything from unlock your hotel room to act as a fast pass to get you slotted to skip the long lines on rides. It also tracks your every move and lets you buy things. With tens of thousands of visitors to the park every day, Disney is amassing a wealth of personal information on its customers. "MagicBands offer a kind of data tourism, an uncanny experience of a future in which we don't just tolerate surveillance but openly embrace it as fashion," Ian Bogost says in his article on the technology. Read the full piece, and see what the inside of a MagicBand looks like, on Medium.

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Heaping mounds of kcals.

This year's Center for Science in the Public Interest "Xtreme Eating Awards" names not one but three Cheesecake Factory dishes to its top nine list of the nation's most abominably calorie-laden chain menu items. The French Toast Napoleon's 2,900 calories are a solid 700 to 900 more than recommended for moderately active adults, and even a slice of the chocolate peanut-butter variety of the namesake cheesecake would require three and a half hours of aerobic exercise to eliminate. That's a lot of laps, but thrill-seekers can in fact do worse: An A.1. Peppercorn Burger, steak fries, and a Monster Salted Caramel Milkshake combo at Red Robin manages to amass 3,540 calories. [CSPI]

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: who's counting?, calories, center for science in the public interest, cheesecake factory, red robin

Historic Royal Palaces

To commemorate the centennial of Britain’s involvement in the First World War, ceramic artist Paul Cummins and stage designer Tom Piper conceived of a staggering installation of ceramic poppies planted in the famous dry moat around the Tower of London. Titled “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red,” the final work will consist of 888,246 red ceramic flowers—each representing a British or Colonial military fatality—that flow through grounds around the tower.

Volunteers began placing the poppies several weeks ago and the process will continue through the summer until a final flower is symbolically planted on November 11th. You can read more about the project over on the Historic Royal Palaces website, and see the volunteers’ progress by following the #TowerPoppies hashtag on Twitter.

Historic Royal Palaces

Historic Royal Palaces

Historic Royal Palaces

Massimo Usai

Massimo Usai

Massimo Usai

Historic Royal Palaces

Historic Royal Palaces / Massimo Usai

Historic Royal Palaces

Microsoft has tried to push standards with its mobile Internet Explorer browser, but unfortunately the wider web largely develops specifically for the webkit rendering engine and the iPhone. That’s left a lot of mobile websites not rendering properly in Internet Explorer mobile, and a frustrating user experience. Twitter and a number of Google web sites do not render correctly in Windows Phone, but Microsoft thinks it has an answer. With the upcoming Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1, Microsoft is tweaking its mobile browser to better support sites that were designed for an iPhone. The approach means Microsoft is adding non-standard web platform features, but the result is a much better experience for Windows Phone users.

Some of the changes...

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20 million gallons of potable water later, the massive double "trunk line" break that's resulted in spectacular flooding in the streets of Los Angeles and throughout the UCLA campus has finally been sealed off and crews have this bulbous blockage to thank for it.

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 Twitter is acquiring a small password security startup called Mitro for its New York office. Mitro built a way that multiple people can share or control passwords to a single account. The most obvious use case would have been in the enterprise where team members need to share a single password for an account. Twitter isn’t keeping the product and we hear that the team will likely be… Read More

Created by Tokyo-based designer Daisuke Akiyama, this packaging concept effectively turns the small air pockets of plastic bubble wrap into miniature fish bowls. Akiyama says the novel idea is an attempt to make the irresistible plastic bubbles “psychologically more difficult to pop.” Currently the idea is just a prototype, but supposedly he’s working on marketing the idea to a manufacturer. (via NOTCOT, Spoon & Tamago)

Update: Many have questioned if the fish used in the concept are real. They are not. These are images printed inside plastic bubbles.

Ethan Swanson, the lunatic making this ridiculous roof jump, is a professional stunt man, so he sees life differently than the rest of us. Where normal humans see buildings and houses and stairs, Swanson sees a playground. This jump, which starts from the top of a building and ends on stairs, is just epic.

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[The future home of Uncle Sam's: Google Maps]

Uncle Sam's Fast Food, a Beijing-based burger chain with (obviously) heavy American influences has just signed the lease on a large Nomad space. The flagship restaurant on Fifth Avenue would be the fast food joint's first foray into the American market, and a representative tells The Real Deal its goal is to "create the perfect Chinese-American — or American-Chinese — burger."

It's very unclear what that means, but the chain also reportedly aims to "to be competitive level with Shake Shack," which of course sits just blocks away. The company has filed a US trademark for the name Uncle Sam's Famous American Burger, but it remains to be seen how those burgers will fare in the burger-saturated neighborhood when they are actually neither famous nor American.
· Chinese Burger Joint Opens on Fifth Avenue [TRD]

Bagels are delicious literally no matter which way you slice them—but are they more delicious when cut into a "mathematically perfect" shape? Stony Brook University's engineering professor George W. Hart thinks he has found the magic formula.

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Canon.com has the refurbished Canon PowerShot S100 12.1MP / 5x Optical Zoom Digital Camera (Black or Silver) + 8GB Secure Digital Memory Card for $129.99 with free shipping. Features: DIGIC 5 Image Processor, Full HD 1080p video recording in stereo sound, f/2.0 Aperture w/ 24mm wide angle.

Review: Imaging Resource

Quartz:

Earlier this month, BAM quietly submitted its own letter to the FCC, where it was equally scathing about internet fast lanes[…]. It’s a shame that BAM’s comments have been overlooked, because they amount to one of the most coherent arguments in favor of net neutrality we have come across.

While Shazam has long existed on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, it’s making the jump to the Mac today to bring song detection to the desktop. Shazam already has a fullscreen Windows 8 app, but its new Mac app is more of a traditional desktop app that sits quietly in the system tray. This subtly extends to one of its best features: automatic music detection in the background. If you allow Shazam for Mac to detect music automatically then it will do so while it’s open, particularly useful if you’re watching TV or listening to a radio in a coffee shop with your MacBook. If you leave Shazam for Mac silently detecting music in the background then it will trigger a notification each time a new track is identified. The idea of an app...

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