Rexfeng

As promised, today Nintendo is finally bringing classic Game Boy Advance game downloads to the Wii U' s virtual console. And the company is kicking off the service with a bang, releasing a trio of excellent games with Metroid Fusion, Advance Wars, and Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. The games will run you $7.99 each, and you can play them either on your TV or on the console's tablet-like Gamepad controller. New GBA games will be added to the service every week in April, with classics like WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames! and Golden Sun slated to launch in the coming weeks. It might not be quite the shot in the arm the Wii U needs, but these classics should at least hold you over until Mario Kart 8 launches next month.

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[Photo: Foursquare]
Ramen Co., the new FiDi noodle shop from Ramen Burger mastermind Keizo Shimamoto is now, very quietly, in soft opening mode. Although, according to the lone Yelp review, the windows are still papered over, the restaurant is in fact serving three kinds of ramen burgers, several types of regular ramen, and bento dishes like beef curry and Japanese fried chicken. According to a tipster, it's only open for lunch, until 3 p.m. daily.

Shimamoto tells Eater that he is still just trying to "get the feel," and that the restaurant is "not fully open." He'll make an announcement on his blog, Go Ramen! when he does. But in the meantime, there are still ramen burgers to be had, and no line to wait in. Check out a photo of the preliminary menu, below.

· Get Your Ramen Burgers! [TC]
· All Coverage of Keizo Shimamoto [~ENY~]

Instant ramen's gonna get you — into college. (Apologies to John Lennon.)

Talk about essay prompts: A student from Fuzhou, Fujian province, turned his unabashed love of instant ramen noodles into a compelling piece that helped land him a place in the University of Rochester's class of 2018. The senior, identified only as Wang, his surname, reportedly attends Fuzhou No. 1 Middle School in China, and gleefully posted his acceptance letter on the social network Sina Weibo, almost instantly turning him into something of an online celebrity. In its response, Rochester's admissions department singled out Wang's enthusiasm for ramen as a clear sign he is poised to make an impact on campus.

Wang didn't post the contents of his essay, but he did share on the micro-blogging site that it was a narrative about discovering a life-altering local brand of noodles in Singapore. "I tried the noodles during my trip to the country, and my whole worldview changed the moment I ate it," he wrote.

The experience inspired a quixotic-sounding journey to sample "nearly all flavors of noodles from Asian brands," a process that must have occupied a major portion of Wang's life for the past few years.

The university advises applicants to "prize clarity and honesty above rhetorical flourishes," and the approach must have worked. Here, an excerpt from the acceptance letter:

Our emphasis on freedom makes us unlike other colleges, so the committee and I reviewed your application for much more than grades and scores.

I'm glad to know you're ready to embrace your independence, delve deeper into your interests, and study what you love.

Each Rochester student makes a critical, personal contribution to campus from day one. The counselors recommended that you be admitted in part after reading about your enthusiasm for Ramen noodles. The committee and I are confident you will both stand out and grow stronger as part of the Rochester family.

Let's hope the selection of instant ramen available in upstate New York includes some obscure Cup Noodles flavors, choice Shin Ramyun varieties, and hopefully some Prima Taste Curry La Mian.

Love of instant noodles gets guy into US college [ECNS]

* This post has been updated throughout.

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: use your noodle, fuzhou, ramen, university of rochester

The increasingly ubiquitous picture characters known as emoji have broken into a whole new frontier — Twitter on the web. Twitter has designed its own character set for web tweets, allowing for a much-improved experience across platforms; until now, emoji support was limited to Twitter apps on systems with the characters built in, like Android, iOS, or OS X.

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Gmail may be getting some new inbox-wrangling features. Android screenshots leaked by Geek.com suggest that Google is testing a version of Gmail with new tabs for travel, purchases, and finance, which will supplement the current Social, Promotional, Updates, and Forums tabs that users can add alongside their default inbox. These extra options were added to Gmail's Smartlabels lab feature earlier this year, but they'd be a set of fairly specific expansions for Gmail tabs. The leaked version is also said to include some new tools for making sure important messages don't get lost. In place of the old stars, there's apparently a system for pinning messages to the top of your inbox, and a snooze feature lets you read an email, then set it to...

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Last week was the semi-annual gathering of large parts of Silicon Valley at Y Combinator Demo day. We met and invested in a lot of great startups. But I also picked something else up (I think) at Demo Day – A godawful nasty case of the flu.

This wasn’t just a normal flu. This is the kind of flu where you become a drugstore cowboy, taking any and every pill that can possibly mitigate your suffering. The kind of flu that brings your face into intimate contact with your toilet seat.

Parts of Saturday night I was tripping balls, although I don’t know if it was from the half bottle of NyQuil I downed or from the raging fever slow roasting my brain. I was easily sicker than any time I can remember since I was seven years old.

Two days after I started my girlfriend got it (I’m sorry). We took another swing through CVS today to stock up on more drugs. Most of my symptoms have receded, although I now have a thriving cough and brutal sore throat that I’m pretty sure is planning on sticking around for as long as possible. I also have a very grumpy girlfriend on my hands.

Anyway, I’m blaming Demo Day, particularly after reading about YC head Sam Altman’s own flu woes just now on Facebook. A bunch of other people who were there seem to have gotten sick as well, based on the comments to his post.

How do we fix this? We end the goddamned barbaric practice of handshaking, that’s how.

I first wrote about this in 2009, noting that we continue this repulsively stupid activity only because so many people find it so odd and insulting, not to shake hands.

I wrote again and again about the evils of handshaking, but I eventually gave up and simply started carrying hand sanitizer with me at all times.

I forgot to bring hand sanitizer to Demo Day.

I sincerely hope that Y Combinator bans handshaking at future Demo Days. I also call on TechCrunch and other conference organizers to institute no-handshake policies at events, starting with TechCrunch Disrupt in NY next month.

We know people don’t stay home when they’re sick, and we know that most people rarely wash their hands, even after using the bathroom. The only solution I see to this is for events, where the germs really run wild, to strongly suggest to attendees that they keep their damned hands to themselves.

Mason Currey's book about the daily routines of scientists, painters, writers, and other creative people looks interesting. Sarah Green collected a list of common practices among some of the book's "healthier geniuses".

A workspace with minimal distractions. Jane Austen asked that a certain squeaky hinge never be oiled, so that she always had a warning when someone was approaching the room where she wrote. William Faulkner, lacking a lock on his study door, just detached the doorknob and brought it into the room with him -- something of which today's cubicle worker can only dream. Mark Twain's family knew better than to breach his study door -- if they needed him, they'd blow a horn to draw him out. Graham Greene went even further, renting a secret office; only his wife knew the address or telephone number. Distracted more by the view out his window than interruptions, if N.C. Wyeth was having trouble focusing, he'd tape a piece of cardboard to his glasses as a sort of blinder.

I love reading about people's workspaces; here's an old post about George Bernard Shaw's rotating writing room. (via myself apparently?)

Tags: books   Daily Rituals   George Bernard Shaw   Mason Currey   Sarah Green

After delays, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a final rule requiring safety equipment meant to prevent backing into pedestrians.

Temperatures topped 60 degrees this year during the Iditarod Trail Invitational, leaving trails bare and prompting speculation that climate change was responsible.

Nick Wingfield, writing for the NYT:

Cortana is named after a virtual character in Halo, Microsoft’s science-fiction video game series, that uses her encyclopedic knowledge about the universe to help the game’s protagonist, Master Chief. The actress, Jen Taylor, who does the voice for the character, also provided recordings for the phone assistant’s voice.

Two things jumped out at me regarding this story. First, that Microsoft gladly credited the actress supplying Cortana’s voice. Second, that Google and Android went unmentioned in the article.

Update: More on Cortana from The Verge.

Technically, Cortana isn’t supposed to exist for at least another 500 years, but that’s not stopping Microsoft from bringing her to life this week. While Apple has Siri and Google has Google Now — both digital assistants that run on smartphones — Microsoft is taking an approach that mixes the best of the competition with its own unique take. Based on a 26th-century artificially intelligent character in the Halo video game series, Cortana will debut as part of Windows Phone 8.1, the...

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He always takes a nap after writing a bubble-tea-shop takedown.

Here's something interesting: A new study suggests that you're more likely to tear into your local pizza parlor if you had to walk in the rain to get there. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Yahoo Labs took a look at online customer-review data gleaned from sites like Citysearch, TripAdvisor, and Foursquare to determine that very cold (less than 40°) and very hot (more than 100°) temperatures correspond to the "most negative reviews," the New York Times reports.

After running the numbers — some 1.1 million reviews of 840,000 restaurants written between 2002 and 2011 were taken into account, representing all 50 states — several interesting trends emerged from the models. Sushi restaurants routinely outperformed hamburger places, and consistently sunny and breezy places had a greater number of excellent reviews, while reviews from perpetually drizzly cities like Seattle had the greater tendency to suppress superlatives. (Take a look at the abstract here.)

"The best reviews are written on sunny days between 70 and 100 degrees," researcher Saeideh Bakhshi tells Science Daily. It's long been known that restaurateurs see a steep drop-off in business on frigid and sweltering days (when people would rather not leave the house). This data suggests, however, that diners tend to be more critical in inclement weather — the same lousy weather that should prompt owners to pay even more attention when customers take refuge inside their restaurants.

Online Reviews? Keep This in Mind [NYT]
Demographics, Weather and Online Reviews: A Study of Restaurant Recommendations [Yahoo Labs]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: everyone's a critic, online reviews, scientific studies, yelp

Microsoft today said it will make Windows free of charge for phones and tablets with screens smaller than nine inches, a move designed to help boost the company's market share. The announcement comes alongside plans to let developers make universal applications that work on all devices running Microsoft's software — both Windows Phone and Windows. That feature is headed to Windows 8.1 as well as Windows Phone 8.1, which was also detailed on stage and is arriving on mobile devices in the next few months.

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Millions asked for it, and Microsoft is providing it: the old Start Menu is coming back. Kind of. At its Build conference today, Microsoft announced a new Start Menu that looks like a hybrid of the best of Windows 7 and Windows 8. It's around the same size as the Windows 7 menu, but also features miniature Live Tiles along one side.

In the same demonstration, Microsoft also showed a new mode that allows modern Windows 8 apps to run in the desktop environment inside their own windows. It's a return to Windows' roots for Microsoft, and will make a lot of keyboard and mouse users very happy. If any of these ideas sound familiar to you, that might be because they bear more than a passing resemblance to a concept by a graphic designer that T...

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This is not an April Fool's prank. Or well: the reason the site updated is because of April Fools, sure, but the point is, I'm not pulling your leg. Homestar Runner has updated for the first time in three years.

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Sure, Jacques Pépin preps all his Granny Smiths tout de suite with a razor-edged paring knife, but Jasper van Ramhorst, a chef in the Netherlands, has created a method where he just stabs a drill bit into one end, guns it, and lets a peeler do the work. The Home Improvement&ndashstyle food-prep hack is in service of a fast tarte Tatin, but this is uncharted territory — pastry cooks are by no means encouraged to try this on the line.

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: apples to apples, video feed

Cartophiles rejoice — the NYPL recently made over 20,000 historical maps from its database free to access, download, and use. The library's Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division created an entire website called Map Warper where users can create an account and access all the maps, which are available courtesy of Creative Commons. Many of the maps detail New York City from 1852 to 1922, but there are also unlikely collections from the mid-Atlantic United States and the Austro-Hungarian empire. The library also created a tool that lets you overlay the maps on existing images from tools like Google Earth, so if you've ever wanted to compare topographic details from different generations, now's your chance. Read more about the...

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"Fresh from the can!" joked Daley, a former chef at 15 East who spent a couple of years living on Maui. "And sourced locally from the nearest bodega." [ more › ]

The Basque macaron predates the pastel-sandwich style by about three centuries.

Now that American cookie connoisseurs have finally learned to distinguish their macaroons (Jewish; dense coconut lumps; sold in tins at Passover) from their macarons (French; gossamer almond-flour-and-ganache sandwich cookies; sold at practically every patisserie in town), yet another variation has arrived to confound us. The Basque macaron, the signature sweet of Maison Adam in the southwestern French seaside resort town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, has landed on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, at the brand-new shop Léna, which is poised to launch a David-versus-Goliath offensive against Maison Ladurée, the Paris-based behemoth determined to corner the international macaron market.

It is no wonder that Maison Adam markets its “véritables macarons” as the true, original ones. After all, they precede Ladurée’s by three centuries, and can be traced back to the 1660 royal wedding of Louis XIV and Maria Theresa of Spain. And their closely guarded recipe remains the same to this day: just almond flour, egg white, and sugar, baked into rustic rounds that are sold as single biscuits, not pastel-hued sandwich cookies — a form which is, incidentally, a relatively recent development in macaron lore. Unlike the signature confections of Ladurée, which has been on an expansionist tear since the Parisian brand was bought in 1993 by Groupe Holder (the parent company whose subsidiary, Château Blanc, has also supplied macarons to French McDonald’s and Starbucks), Maison Adam macarons are rarely if ever spotted outside of the Pays Basque where they originated.

The exclusive New York distributor of this hot new old cookie is Pierre Gaona, a burly Saint-Jean-de-Luz native and former professional rugby player who looks like he could fell an ox in a single blow. Gaona wound up in the macaron racket after sustaining a career-ending ankle injury on the field. (Isn’t that always the way?) He imports the cookies, as well as chocolate and apricot-walnut “Basque brownies” (his American-friendly name for gâteaux Basques) from Maison Adam, but “finishes” them in the shop, with a top-secret technique he refuses to reveal.

His partner in this venture is his countryman Kamel Saci, bread baker at Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria, and fellow former athlete (the two met in judo school 20 years ago). But Gaona, who named the shop for his daughter, is more than an ambassador for his hometown’s historical treat. “My two passions are sport and coffee,” he says. In advance of his opening, Gaona trained with French national champion barista Ludovic Loizon, and makes his own espresso blend, or “wedding,” as he prefers to call it, of beans from Brazil and Papua New Guinea.

So how does the Basque variety compare to the Jeanny-come-lately sandwich-style macaron parisien? An early tasting revealed the newcomer to be simultaneously crisp and tender, its pure almond essence unsullied by supplemental flavors and fragrances, with a balanced sweetness that pairs as well with Champagne as it does with coffee. Its plain, unvarnished appearance could work in its favor, too, attracting sweet-toothed rugged he-man types who might desire a box for poker night or a Super Bowl party, but feel out of place on line at Ladurée. (Gaona's also appealing to the hipster contingent: The manlier macaron shop's patron saint could be Serge Gainsbourg, who appears in bed with Jane Birkin in a poster Gaona commissioned as décor.) Gaona is only making 300 macarons a day to start, but he hopes to have five locations within five years — not to mention the satisfaction that comes with reclaiming a bit of macaron history for the home team.

Léna, 1 W. 8th St., nr. Fifth Ave.

Read more posts by Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld

Filed Under: the urban forager, greenwich village, lena, maison laudree, manhattan

From Serious Eats: New York

[Photographs: Niko Triantafillou]

How do you sell frozen yogurt when you don't have an ice cream maker? Easy—use liquid nitrogen.

No, this isn't the latest dessert at wd~50; it's from an unassuming Mediterranean food market in Midtown East, Blue Olive.

Blue Olive's Frozen Greek Yogurt is made to order and starts at $5. Most toppings are decidedly Greek, such as honey pastel, a Greek candy made with honey and sesame, or spoon sweets, a preserve in which fruits (or vegetables) are cooked with sugar and molded into compact spheres.

For every order, Blue Olive puts two large scoops of Greek yogurt (from Kesso Foods in Queens) into a stand mixer, sets the beater running, and then pours half a pitcher of liquid nitrogen on top. In less than a minute you're eating frozen yogurt, much lighter and fluffier than store brands like Ben & Jerry's or Ciao Bella. And since the yogurt is unsweetened—there's no sugar or other additives—it's not cloying, either.

Crumbled Pistachios and Honey add sweetness and texture to the tart yogurt, a good contrast to the super-creamy full-fat yogurt and a welcome relief from skim milk Greek-style yogurts that keep popping up.

A reduced-fat 2% yogurt with Raspberries and 72% Dark Chocolate is also excellent. Despite the chocolate it's still quite tart; the raspberry adds more sweetness along with tart touches of its own.

The most interesting topping is a Crumbled Baklava that surprisingly doesn't turn soggy in the yogurt. Like the honey and pistachios, it adds crunch and sweetness. A touch of that chocolate would be a welcome addition, too.

About the author: Native New Yorker Niko Triantafillou is the founder of DessertBuzz.com his photographs of desserts and pastry chefs have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Dessert Professional Magazine. He is an unabashed foodie nerdling. Follow him on Twitter at @DessertBuzz.

Every time I think I'm ready to relegate Grand Theft Auto V to the video game archive closet, another insane video stunt montage is released, and I'm drawn right back in.

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A United Nations panel today said that the effects of climate change are already being felt across the globe, warning in a major report that they will likely be "severe, pervasive, and irreversible" in the years to come. The report, released by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), concludes that rising global temperatures are already having clear impacts on agriculture, human health, and water supplies across all continents, oceans, and ecosystems.

These effects will become more severe over time, the panel added, putting food supplies, infrastructure, and economies at serious risk. The IPCC noted that poor countries would be especially hard hit, due to lower crop yields and tighter water supplies, though it...

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Well, I don't even have the words to describe what this is; you just have to watch it. Preferably in fullscreen at full resolution. Takes about 30 seconds to get going but once it does.........dang. Breathtaking is not a word I throw around after every TED Talk or Milky Way time lapse, but I will throw it here.

More on the hows and whys the video was made on Vimeo and the director's site.

Tags: time lapse   video

In Hollywood’s sea of bravado, Kevin Tsujihara, the quiet new chief executive of Warner Bros., may seem miscast. But he is already making bold bets to keep the studio on top.

Russell Holly, writing for Geek.com:

HTC and Samsung have something new popping up on their smartphones every time you boot them up, and apparently the feature was mandated by Google.

Android is not a household brand. Google is but, despite having a significant portion of the global marketshare, their smartphone OS is not. And as long as hardware manufacturers are allowed to design their own user interfaces for Android, it’s going to be very difficult for the average consumer to look at a Nexus 5, an HTC One M8, and a Samsung Galaxy S5 and know that they are all running the exact same operating system. Google is hoping to change that, and one method the company has started to use is mandating that the phrase “Powered by Android” be present during the boot animation on new phones.

Yet another sign that Google’s relationship with Android OEMs is growing ever more adversarial. The handset makers do not want this — or at least the major ones like Samsung and HTC do not. Samsung and HTC want to promote their own brands, not “Android”. (If they wanted to promote Android, they’d have done so before Google mandated it.)

And this is quite different from the Windows and “Intel Inside” stickers that most PCs have shipped with for years — PC OEMs get paid for those promotions.

Those of you buying physical games through Origin will soon have to embrace digital distribution or scope out another store - Origin will cease its offering of disc-based games on April 4, when it transitions to serving solely as a digital license...

It's thigh time.

Beyond the nugget that Max Fish may be sticking around the LES after all, next month's newly posted CB3 agendas also indicate that Williamsburg's Pies 'n' Thighs will open its first Manhattan outpost, at 43 Canal Street. The restaurant will have nine tables and 19 seats, and its application to serve beer and wine is getting fast-tracked through the Community Board process as part of a new administrative initiative. [B+B, Related]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: doughnuts, expansions, fried chicken, pies n'thighs

Titanfall: pretty great game, yeah? Well, with one exception—the shoddy matchmaking system that continually fails to pit players against similarly skilled players. The good news is that thanks to an update, that's gonna start changing.

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