Rexfeng

Rex Sorgatz on how rare media doesn't really exist anymore.

With access to infinite bytes of media, describing a digital object as "rare" sticks out like a lumbering anachronism. YouTube - the official home of lumbering anachronisms - excels at these extraordinarily contradictory moments. Here, for instance, are the Beatles, performing a "VERY RARE" rendition of "Happy Birthday". That sonic obscurity has been heard 2.3 million times. And here is a "Rare Acoustic" version of Slash performing "Sweet Child O' Mine". Over 26 million have devoured this esoteric Axl-less morsel.

Tags: Rex Sorgatz

(via Imaginary Foundation)

Hot off his run in the insane Gumball 3000 road rally, Joel Zimmerman, alias Deadmau5 — one of progressive house's best-known producers — is days away from releasing his latest album. while(1≺2) is his first full studio effort since 2012's ≻ album title goes here ≺, and if the latest single is any indication, it could represent the most exciting work he's done since 2010's 4x4=12.

"Phantoms Can't Hang" is the latest of several tracks from while(1≺2) that Zimmerman has seeded ahead of the album's release, and it's instantly identifiable as classic Deadmau5: gobs of clean synth over a massive prog-house beat that runs a little longer than nine minutes. If you pull out Random Album Title every once in a while, it sounds like you're going...

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The shooting happened "right at the counter."

According to Fulton County, Georgia, police, a 25-year-old cook named Quintavius Martin shot diner Adrian Mosley "right at the counter" of a local Waffle House that is open 24 hours a day. A witness tells the Journal-Constitution Mosley came in around 4:30 a.m. with another man and a woman, who allegedly started some sort of brawl with on-site security. At some point the woman left the restaurant and the two men stayed behind, at which point an argument broke out with Martin after he refused to serve them. "The guy that got shot, he threatened the cook," the witness recalls. "He told him, 'You come outside and I'm going to fire you up,' which basically meant he wanted to shoot him." Police say that's when Martin "retrieved a weapon and fired upon the customer."

Witnesses say the shooting happened at the restaurant counter. Martin
has been arrested and charged with murder, using a firearm, and carrying a concealed weapon without a permit. The shooting is the second gun-related Atlanta-area Waffle House death this month.

Police: Waffle House employee shoots, kills customer [WSB-TV]
Parties identified in fatal Waffle House shooting [AJC]

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Filed Under: awful things, atlanta, waffle house

Jeremiah Moss is perplexed and saddened by the fact that people are waiting in absurdly long lines for the special anniversary burgers at Shake Shack. From his description of the scene in Madison Square Park yesterday: "A guy standing in line, close to the burger stand, the promised land, offered to sell his spot for $100. 'I'll even throw in a hand-job!' No one took him up on it." In other Shack related news, people are lining up for April Bloomfield's special burger right this second. [JVNY]

I've seen the waterfalls and the hot springs and the rocky desolation, but I didn't know that Iceland was also this:

I mean, come on. Photos by Max Rive, Menno Schaefer, and Johnathan Esper. Many more here. (via mr)

Tags: Iceland   photography

The next Zelda game coming to the Wii U is anything but traditional fare for the series. Instead, it follows a different set of traditions, basing its core mechanics on Tecmo-Koei's Dynasty Warriors franchise. Rather than putting players in the midst...

No, Back to the Future hoverboards won't be real anytime soon but there's a damn good substitute. All you need is a board, a speedboat, and a firehose.

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Monterey Park will be hosting its own monthly (and free) MPK Night Market starting on July 25. [ more › ]

After a long, long stretch of not really even looking at Twitter’s first-party iPhone app, I gave it a shot earlier this week. With a fresh installation and default settings, I was simply astounded by the barrage of notifications the app was getting, prompting this rant on Twitter.

This piece by Christina Warren for Mashable shows how to control these notifications:

So what’s the solution? You might think — just disable Twitter notifications on Android or iOS. But that means you can’t get alerts you might want — like a direct message or updates from a specific user. Fortunately, it is possible to refine those alerts within Twitter’s settings. Unfortunately, accessing those settings isn’t as straightforward as you might hope.

I consider myself a savvy user who is familiar with the various design patterns for getting to “Settings” in iPhone apps. I spent 15 minutes trying to find settings like these in Twitter for iPhone, and gave up, because I couldn’t find them.

The forthcoming Ralph Lauren Polo flagship store on Fifth Avenue in Midtown will have a sit-down restaurant. And because the Coca-Cola Co. owns the building, the restaurant can only sell Coca Cola beverages as its non alcoholic options. Commercial Observer hears that this was "one of the final points in the deal." The new restaurant is slated to open later this year. [CO] [Photo: Racked NY]

It's a tale as old as time: Traveler meets luggage. Traveler falls in love. Traveler buys luggage. Traveler causes a scene as flight attendant forces traveler to pay $75 for improperly-sized baggage. And if you've secretly been holding out hope that we might one day be able to put this bit of passenger pageantry behind us—too bad. It's about to get a whole lot worse.

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K-cups and footlongs, together at last.

Everybody's after their slice of the breakfast market these days, and the chain's assortment of egg flatbreads apparently aren't cutting it, even with the avocado option. What are the nation's 30,000 Subways to do? Corporate's bold plan is to put single-serve Keurig coffee in every single one of them. Some locations already offer K-Cup's crimes against coffee, a major coup for Keurig. In a statement about the partnership, David Zambory, Subway's head of beverages, praises "Keurig's ability to deliver variety, quality, and freshness on demand," mostly because that demand is "at breakfast." Now, in precisely the same sense that your footlong is "made fresh," your morning coffee can be too. [Official site]

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: the chain gang, k-cups, keurig, single-serve, subway

Don't get it twisted.

We haven't checked thoroughly, or really at all, but this seems to be the first instance in Time magazine's 91-year history where butter has gotten its own cover, and they really nailed it. The new story on fats — butter included — follows the magazine's earlier proclamation that "We're Living in a Golden Age of Butter," and Mark Bittman's "Butter Is Back" announcement in the Times. And more good news: If the honor has previously been given out to "the computer" and the "endangered Earth," surely this lowly butter curl is one step closer to being named Time's "Person of the Year." [Time]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: butter time, butter, time

A bag of 50 of these hand carved ice cubes costs $325. They are made by a California-based company that claims the cubes have no taste, so they don't ruin the taste of drinks, and they provide minimum dilution and maximum cooling. I suspect these inconveniences don't matter after the first two drinks.

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Those crazy kids at ThinkGeek will soon have an officially licensed Mega Man Buster Gun replica for sale.

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Starbucks plans to install Powermat's wireless charging stations at its coffee stores across the US. After a small pilot run with these "Powermat Spots" — small circles that are seamlessly implanted in tables and counters — the larger rollout will kick off within Starbucks and Teavana locations in the San Francisco Bay Area. Eventually the charging stations will make their way to the company's coffee and tea shops nationwide. "2014 will be focused mainly on the west coast, but 2015 will see expansions to major metropolises across the United States," said Powermat President Daniel Schreiber in an interview with The Verge. On average, each store should receive 10 or more Powermat Spots.

Starbucks hands PMA a big win

The deal is a major...

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Arena of Fate, Crytek's entry into the fast-growing MOBA genre, will feature 30 characters pulled from real-world history and legends, a company rep told Joystiq at E3. Little Red Riding Hood, Fenrir, Jack The Ripper and King Richard The Lionheart...

We have received a couple of specs for the upcoming replacement to the EOS 7D which lead us to believe it will in fact be a “pro” APS-C camera.

There was no mention of video features or whether or not the camera would record 4K.

• EOS-1 style top plate, which means no mode dial.
• Pop-up flash, even with the new style top plate.
• WiFi & GPS will be internal. We all figured this one.

No other specs have been given to us as of yet.

cr

Brussels-based design and advertising firm TM led by Marc Thomasset, just released the second edition of their wildly popular Inspiration Pad. The ruled notebook plays with the traditional red and blue-lined design of notebooks, turning each spread into a different layout to “inspire people to unleash their own creativity.” The 48-page notebook is printed on sustainable paper and is available here. (via This Isn’t Happiness)

Aaron Hillegass, who I think is universally regarded as the preeminent teacher of Cocoa:

When Apple announced Swift, I heard a few people say “Hurray! Now I can be an iOS developer without learning Objective-C!” I have three messages for these people:

• If you want to be an iOS developer, you will still need to know Objective-C.
• Objective-C is easier to learn than Swift.
• Once you know Objective-C, it will be easy to learn Swift.

Before I proceed, let me preface this with a confession of love for Swift. The syntax is lovely. The Swift compiler will catch so many errors for us; I’m certain that when everyone is coding in Swift the reliability of apps will improve considerably. The enum construct is gorgeous. Swift is a major step forward for the entire iOS and Mac OS X ecosystem. But…

Points 1 and 3 I agree with. Point 2, I’m not so sure about. But the real question is time. I don’t think anyone would dispute that a serious Mac or iOS developer needs to know Objective-C today. But what about a year from now? Two years? Five? At some point, the answer to “Do I need to learn Objective-C?” will be “No.” I don’t know when that will be.

I’m bullish on Swift’s uptake not because I think it will appeal to new developers (although eventually I think that will help too), but because I think it appeals to the huge base of developers who already know Objective-C and Apple’s frameworks.

In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences found that the common tools of forensics — bite mark analysis to ballistics — were so flawed as to be almost useless. Courts still trust them like gospel.

David Streitfeld, writing for the NYT:

The Everything Store is shrinking again. Amazon customers who want to order forthcoming Warner Home Video features, including The Lego Movie, 300: Rise of an Empire, Winter’s Tale and Transcendence, are finding it impossible to do so.

The retailer’s refusal to sell the movies is part of its effort to gain leverage in yet another major confrontation with a supplier to become public in recent weeks.

Hardball tactics. Seems risky to me — won’t a lot of people just pre-order these movies somewhere else instead?

Stephen Shankland, writing for CNet:

Google apparently has taken one step back from its “origin chip” plan that would hide the full addresses for Web sites that people visit with its Chrome browser.

On Tuesday, Chrome team member Peter Kasting demoted one aspect of the address-hiding feature from a top priority to a third-level priority. “The origin chip work is backburnered,” he said in his explanation on Google’s issue-tracking site.

The new Safari on OS X Yosemite does pretty much the same thing. I wonder if Apple is going to stick with it. I have mixed feelings about it — I think it’s probably better for most users to just show the domain name, but I’d like an option to restore the old behavior.

During its keynote presentation last night, Sony bet big on the upcoming game Destiny. The highly-anticipated title will be available to PlayStation 4 owners in a limited-window alpha this weekend, and a beta is coming next month. For the game's full release, however, Sony is putting together a special bundle package that will feature the game, a white PlayStation 4, and a matching controller.

Sony has both on display here at E3, along with a pair of white branded headphones. Simply put,...

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Another high-profile Amazon vendor has apparently found itself at the mercy of the company's aggressive pricing tactics. The New York Times reports that Amazon has stopped taking pre-orders for upcoming Warner Home Video offerings including The Lego Movie, Winter's Tale, and Transcendence, among others. It comes as the company is locked in a dispute with the book publisher Hachette over e-book pricing that has seen Amazon stop taking pre-orders and delay shipments for weeks. The move has drawn wide criticism, particularly among Hachette authors, whose ranks include Stephen Colbert.

The Times reports that Amazon stopped taking pre-orders for Warner movies in mid-May, leading to complaints on the company's forums. While they can't buy...

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Pac-Man has been revealed as a playable character in Super Smash Bros. on Wii U and 3DS. The news comes from a special event going on ... right now at E3 2014, hosted by series creator Masahiro Sakurai. He appears as he did in Pac-Land (similar to...

It looks like Apple's doing everything it can to get its in-house Maps software back in our good graces. Thanks to a hidden asset buried deep in iOS 8, new icons seem to reveal a Maps feature that would remember exactly where users last parked their cars.

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Excellent advice!

A PSA

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