For some reason mankind has been happy to settle for elastic rubber bands that only exist in two dimensions. So far they've served us mostly ok, but the talented designers at Nendo have realized that taking rubber bands into the third dimension vastly improves their usefulness. From securing rolled up documents, to binding together a bunch of pencils, it's just an all together better design.
Tired of your boss busting your chops for getting back a few minutes late from lunch? Just hang this Hazy wall clock in your office and let it serve as the perfect alibi. Is it eight after one, ten after one, twelve after one? It's impossible to say, because designer Ivan Kasner has given the Hazy clock an opaque face that makes it hard to accurately tell where the hands are pointing.
Do you feel guilty printing out an entire email when all you really needed was someone's address? King Jim's new compact Cocodori printer is designed for just those occasions. Using an included piece of software, it lets you highlight only specific areas of your screen for printing. And what you're left with is a receipt-sized note with an adhesive backing that you can even use as a sticky note.
Wouldn't it be great if you could start playing a game on one computer, save it, then pick up where you left off on another computer? Here's how to sync all your game saves with Dropbox.
A small part of doing your taxes might not be so daunting anymore. An official from the United States Department of the Treasury announced today that Americans can now download their tax returns directly from the IRS from the new service Get Transcript. The announcement was made at the White House’s education "Datapalooza," a meeting of hackers and policy leaders that explored how open government data can help the country's education system.
[Photographs: Niko Triantafillou]
Is the canele making another run at blowing up? Last week, New York City got its first canele-only bakery but quietly, for about a month, Thomas Keller's Bouchon Bakery has been selling mini versions of the sweet treats at their Time Warner Center location.
If you've never tried a canele, it's a small French pastry made with sugar, flour, vanilla, rum, and eggs that has a sweet, caramelized crust and a moist custard-like interior. To date, there are still only about ten bakeries in New York that sell them, including Dominique Ansel, Balthazar, and Boise Tea Parlor.
Bouchon sells their Mini-Canele for $3 each—the same price Dominique Ansel and Bosie currently offer their large Canele. And as with those versions, Bouchon uses the significantly more labor-intensive copper molds for baking, that some believe results in a more caramelized crust, although this last point is controversial.
How do they taste? They're beautiful. The crust has a delightfully crunchy exterior and the custard-like center isn't too sweet. Despite its small size, this canele packs a flavor and aroma punch—I could smell the vanilla right after slicing the canele in half for these photos. Stay tuned.
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.
    
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Sega's military strategy game Company of Heroes 2 and Volition's open-world fever dream simulator Saints Row 4 are next in line to get the Free Steam Weekend treatment. Both games are free to download and play via Steam starting today and extending ...
It seems the emo makeover of America's creepiest animatronic rodent didn't pay off for Chuck E. Cheese's: Apollo Global Management will acquire the struggling chain of arcade-restaurants for $950 million, or $1.3 billion including debt. Other forlorn companies taken under Apollo's wing for rehabilitation include Pabst Blue Ribbon and Hostess, meaning there's real potential here for some inter-portfolio collaboration to keep parents sane on PBR while their young'uns chow down on Ho Hos and count out tickets for a Styrofoam Twinkie the Kid. [AP, Related]
Read more posts by Belle Cushing
Filed Under: token sales, apollo global management, chuck e cheese, hostess, pbr, twinkies
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Cloudbuilt allows players to freerun-and-gun in a futuristic sky world, and it's coming to PC this year from publisher Rising Star Games. We got a first look at Cloudbuilt in October 2012, when developer Coilworks described it as "a challenging, ...
The British Library has a million images up at Flickr. 1,019,998 to be precise. And it appears that most (all?) of the images are copyright-free. An amazing resource.
Tags: Flickr photography
Most people don't care much about their filesystems. But at the end of the day, the filesystem is probably the single most important part of an operating system. A kernel bug might mean the loss of whatever you're working on right now, but a filesystem bug could wipe out everything you've ever done... and it could do so in ways most people never imagine.
Sound too theoretical to make you care about filesystems? Let's talk about "bitrot," the silent corruption of data on disk or tape. One at a time, year by year, a random bit here or there gets flipped. If you have a malfunctioning drive or controller—or a loose/faulty cable—a lot of bits might get flipped. Bitrot is a real thing, and it affects you more than you probably realize. The JPEG that ended in blocky weirdness halfway down? Bitrot. The MP3 that startled you with a violent CHIRP!, and you wondered if it had always done that? No, it probably hadn't—blame bitrot. The video with a bright green block in one corner followed by several seconds of weird rainbowy blocky stuff before it cleared up again? Bitrot.
The worst thing is that backups won't save you from bitrot. The next backup will cheerfully back up the corrupted data, replacing your last good backup with the bad one. Before long, you'll have rotated through all of your backups (if you even have multiple backups), and the uncorrupted original is now gone for good.
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The Steam Controller is going to change. According to two game developers tweeting from Valve's Steam Dev Days developer summit, Valve has decided to remove the controller's central touchscreen. While it sounds like the gamepad's twin trackpads will remain intact, the touchscreen was deemed redundant and possibly even distracting from games, as Valve wants players looking at the television instead of their hands. That doesn't mean there won't be customizable controls in the center of the gamepad, though. Players will simply use a feature that Valve's calling "ghost mode."
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Japan is famous for its Kit Kats. The country has a slew of unique flavors that simply aren't available elsewhere. On this month, it will get the first Kit Kat specialty store on Earth.
There's a new trademark in town, and it's registration number is 4,465,439: That's right, the pastry chef's Cronut is now the Cronut®. So all you makers of knockoff pastries — and potentially infringing racehorses, maybe — that too closely resemble the O.G. Cronut should probably watch out. As for all the inventors of pastry-mashup things with names like Kreegals, Cruise-nuts, Krönums, Crarwpets, and Creep'yles, you're likely not going to get sued, but you should probably just cut it out anyhow. [USPTO via Seth Fiegerman/Twitter]
Read more posts by Hugh Merwin
Filed Under: it's official, cronut, cronuts, dominique ansel, dominique ansel bakery, patents, trademarks
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SamMobile:
First, let’s get the most mysterious thing about the Galaxy S5 out of the way: Yes, it will come in both metal and plastic versions as has been rumored, with the metal version costing around 800 Euros and the plastic model coming in at around 650 Euros. It’s pretty much similar to what Apple has done, offering both a plastic iPhone (iPhone 5c) and a metallic one (iPhone 5s).
Nilay Patel, The Verge:
It’s a strange set of affairs: an innovative young company led by some of the best engineers and executives in the business being acquired and validated by one of the great American businesses of the past 20 years should be a slam dunk of good PR. Instead, there’s a chorus of concern — some sincere, some contrived, but all of it grounded in fear of an unchecked Google.
Picking up on where Adam Platt left off in his own review of the restaurant this week for New York, Pete Wells takes aim at the bistro portion of Villard Michel Richard and leaves the ritzy Palace Hotel establishment zero stars. (Both critics admired the roast chicken, incidentally, so there's that.) The narrative even compels the disbelieving Wells to take a trip to Washington, D.C., to Central Michel Richard, so he can sample the dishes the chef's New York restaurant are based on. The whole thing is online here, but the verdict is that something isn't quite up to snuff in Midtown East.
1. On the veal blanquette: "Slithering around the meat was a terrifying sauce the color of jarred turkey gravy mixed with cigar ashes."
2. Of the house bisque: "The Villard version was floury, pale and almost completely bland; you could get nearly as much flavor by putting a lobster bib into a juicer."
3. "One night, when my table of three wanted a little Beaujolais, the sommelier tried to sell us a magnum."
4. "If soldiers had killed Escoffier’s family in front of him and then forced him to make dinner, this is what he would have cooked."
5. "Mr. Richard was so clearly a smart, accomplished chef that for one crazy moment, I wondered if Villard Michel Richard was bad on purpose."
6. "If Villard Michel Richard doesn’t make it as a restaurant, it could reopen as the Museum of Unappetizing Brown Sauces."
7. "Think of everything that's great about fried chicken. Now take it all away."
8. "The difference between them was like the difference between winning a medal for figure skating and falling through the ice." — On the disparate renditions of fried chicken served in D.C. and New York.
9. "This unidentifiable paste coats your mouth until you can’t perceive textures or flavors. It is like edible Novocain." — On the purée served with the fried chicken.
A Visitor’s Luxury Room [New York Times]
Earlier: Platt: Villard Michel Richard Is Fit for Nobility
Read more posts by Hugh Merwin
Filed Under: the other critics, bistro at villard michel richad, michel richard, pete wells
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Thor? CGI all over the place. Pacific Rim? Ditto. The Wolf of Wall Street? Surprisingly, also yes. You might not have thunk it, but there's CGI slathered all over that thing.
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Whether it's Jay-Z giving free albums to Samsung users, or Alicia Keys serving as Blackberry's creative director, celebrities and smartphones are a seemingly perfect match. But while the stars do a good job of selling phones to the rest of us, when it comes to their personal devices it takes a special kind of sales technique to get Martha Stewart using a Galaxy S3. In Fast Company, Shane Snow details Samsung's "white glove" parties, in which a combination of fellow celebrities, Samsung reps, and free gadgets are used to lure stars to the brand.
It's sort of like a Tupperware party, but with free smartphones, where Samsung reps make the conversion as painless as possible, providing everything from customized devices to technical...
Google PR:
Tony Fadell, CEO of Nest, said: “We’re thrilled to join Google. With their support, Nest will be even better placed to build simple, thoughtful devices that make life easier at home, and that have a positive impact on the world.”
Nest will continue to operate under the leadership of Tony Fadell and with its own distinct brand identity. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals in the US. It is expected to close in the next few months.
Tony Fadell at Google is an interesting turn of events.
Tony Fadell, in an interview today with Om Malik, on why Nest sold to Google:
I was spending nearly ninety percent of my time on building the infrastructure of the company and I wasn’t able to spend enough time and cycles on what I love doing: products and creating differentiated experiences for our customers. That is where my love is and Google offered to let us focus on that, but with scale that will help bring our horizon closer to us, faster. Google offers to bring that scale to us. For me, ultimately building great products is key.
Consider Fadell’s record with the iPod at Apple. Clearly, he knows how to do hardware: design, utility, software integration. But he also knows scale — creating devices that sell tens of millions of units. And he knows iteration: not just building and shipping an iPod, but building and shipping new iPods year after year, each better, in some way, than the last.
One of Alan Kay’s numerous oft-cited quotations is, “People who are really serious about software should partner with an OEM in Asia.” No, wait, that’s not what he said. What he said is, “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” That’s never been true of Google, putting aside Motorola (which they seemingly acquired more for its patent portfolio than for its phone hardware acumen) and the niche Google Search Appliance.
In a sense, Google has always followed Kay’s adage. The software that Google was most serious about — web search, Gmail, and so forth — ran in the cloud, and with the company’s legendary data centers, they effectively built their own hardware.
Google now has a division with a remarkable consumer hardware track record. Nest and Fadell now have the financial resources to work faster. Money doesn’t solve scaling problems, but the actual solutions to scaling problems always cost money. Google’s Nest acquisition has very little to do with selling thermostats and smoke detectors in particular. Instead, it’s about Google having the ability to do consumer hardware right, in general.
Bad news for HTC One X and One X+ owners who thought they might get future Android updates: HTC has just said users on both phones will be stuck on Android 4.2.2 from here on out. The One X was HTC's flagship device for 2012, and featured a 720p display, polycarbonate body, and dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor. The follow-up, the One X+, was designed as a souped-up version, bringing with it a larger 2,100mAh battery, more storage, a faster 1.7GHz Tegra 3 processor, and an updated front-facing camera. The news was confirmed by HTC's UK Twitter account earlier today, and comes just 14 months after the One X+'s release.
A new report from Mexico's El Universal sheds light on a network of deals made between US law enforcement agencies and the Sinaloa drug cartel, which in some cases saw active members of the cartel being given immunity in exchange for incriminating details about rival groups. The report, assembled from over a hundred interviews over the past year, breaks out a number of individual cases in which agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency or the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement deferred a Sinaloa member's prosecution, hoping to gain a mole with the organization, only to find the suspect return to Sinaloa and only offer information on opposing cartels.
Data dump from the now-shuttered photo service: “Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides for your perusing”. Interesting to me: their daily website traffic, which shows a nice bump from their first DF RSS feed sponsorship. Nice jump in sales, too.
