Purdie4

Plus, Paul Giamatti discusses his "problematic" character on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

So you've finally decided to quit X. If the boosting of paid blue checks and monetized hate didn't do it, and the stupid name change didn't do it, maybe the recent changes to how blocking works on X were the last straw to get you to ditch the former Twitter. Or maybe you just spontaneously decided you were done with X on Nov. 6, for no particular reason.

Whatever your motivation for looking for a new social media home, you're not alone: In the weeks since the U.S. election, more than 2 million people appear to have decided to become X-pats. At least, that's how many new users have since joined Bluesky, the decentralized social media app that originated as an in-house Twitter product and is now one of the best and fastest-growing alternatives to what we all used to affectionately call the "hellsite" (before the name became truly apt).

There's just one problem: How to find the crowd of followers and followees you spent years cultivating on the Other Site, so you don't feel like you're posting into the void. Well, there's an extension for that.

Sky Follower Bridge makes switching to Bluesky easy

I signed up for Bluesky shortly after everyone first started freaking out about Elon taking over Twitter, back when it was still invite-only. Unfortunately, though lots of people I followed there talked about going to Bluesky, no one actually seemed to be using it all that much, and searching for and adding people to follow was a time-consuming endeavor. So I mostly didn't use it, and felt stuck in the quagmire, wanting to leave X but not wanting to lose touch with all those folks.

These days, that's no longer an issue thanks to Sky Follower Bridge, an extension for Chrome (and coming soon for Edge, Firefox, and GitHub) that makes it, if not seamless, then at least much less tedious to find your crew at Bluesky.

Here's how it works: Once you've added the extension, head to your X profile and click on the link for the list of people you're following. Once on that page, open up the Sky Follower Bridge extension from your browser's toolbar. A popup will appear that will prompt you to log in to your Bluesky account, so have that username and password handy.

Once you've logged in, the popup will begin populating a list of people you follow on X who have matching Bluesky accounts, based on a trio of parameters you can click on or off: Same handle name (meaning the person uses the same @ on both sites), Same display name (meaning the name that displays on their profile, regardless of their @), and Included handle name in description (for people who have added their Bluesky handle to their X profile).

Once the search is complete, you'll be taken to a separate window where you'll see a list of all of your matches. You can scroll through it and choose which folks you want to follow on Bluesky with a click. There's also a Follow All option in the left hand menu, though I found it useful to choose people one by one so I could pare down my following list, which got pretty bloated over the 15 years (ugh) I was on X/Twitter.

Once you've gone through the list of people you're following, click back to X and switch tabs to the list of people who follow you and run through the exercise again.

Finding your fellow refugees this way isn't necessarily an exact science, as you'll only see matches for people who have actually shared either their display name or handle across services or put their Bluesky name in their X bio, but these days it seems like most people use the same identifiers across multiple sites, so your success rate should be pretty decent. (The developer, Kawamata Ryo, has released his developer notes here; you can also contact him if you're having problems with the extension or would like to make suggestions for new features.)

Personally, I found a few hundred of both my followers and people I follow on X over on Bluesky, and suddenly my feed there looks a lot more vibrant—which makes it that much easier to stay off of X. (And now that you've found your former followers, there are a few tools to help you find new people to follow who post about stuff you think is cool. Then you can import all your old X posts to Bluesky and forget X ever existed.)

Many of our parents’ computers are essentially held up with duct tape. How these ancient behemoths manage to power on each day is an eternal mystery. But if your parents are running an old version of Windows, specifically Windows 7, 8, or 8.1, be warned: Google Chrome is about to get rocky.

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Matthew Byrd

The PC Classic will make you wonder if mini consoles have gone too far.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is shaping up to be the biggest movie of the year, which shouldn't be a surprise. The highly anticipated new episode of the Star Wars saga will premiere on December 18th around the world, with preorders having already smashed through existing records. Even so, Disney’s marketing team is heavily promoting the movie with new commercials being released on a regular basis. Furthermore, director J.J. Abrams and some of the cast have already appeared in various interviews detailing the making of the huge movie.

A brand new sketch for Saturday Night Live might be one of the best marketing stunts Abrams and Co. pulled off yet. In the short clip, the director shows some of the auditions for the movie featuring several different celebrities trying out for various roles.

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People love finding out that they have a famous relative, or they’re descended from royalty. Thanks to genetic testing services like 23AndMe , it’s easy to send your spit away and get a rundown of your potentially regal DNA. But being related to long-ago kings doesn’t make us special—it just makes us human.

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 Lots of people have dabbled with Google Earth to fly around their neighborhood or poke around a 3D version Paris — but how many dropped $400 (per year!) for a Pro subscription? Whatever the case, it’s now free! Read More

SternisheFan (2529412) writes with this story at the Verge about an approach being considered by NASA to overcome some of the difficulties in moving a wheeled or multi-legged ground vehicle around the surface of Mars, which has proven to be a difficult task. Rover teams still have a tough time with the Martian surface even though they're flush with terrestrial data. The alien surface is uneven, and ridges and valleys make navigating the terrain difficult. The newest solution proposed by JPL is the Mars Helicopter, an autonomous drone that could 'triple the distances that Mars rovers can drive in a Martian day,' according to NASA. The helicopter would fly ahead of a rover when its view is blocked and send Earth-bound engineers the right data to plan the rover's route.

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BarbaraHudson writes Those free soft drinks at your last start-up may come with a huge hidden price tag. The Toronto Sun reports that researchers at the University of California — San Francisco found study participants who drank pop daily had shorter telomeres — the protective units of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes in cells — in white blood cells. Short telomeres have been associated with chronic aging diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and some forms of cancer. The researchers calculated daily consumption of a 20-ounce pop is associated with 4.6 years of additional biological aging. The effect on telomere length is comparable to that of smoking, they said. "This finding held regardless of age, race, income and education level," researcher Elissa Epel said in a press release.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you're interested in learning Apple's newly announced Swift programming language, Apple is giving you the chance with a free eBook on iTunes.

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It's only been four years since the Lost finale, but co-creator Carlton Cuse already thinks ABC will likely reboot the series. "We have to go back to the island!" an ABC executive will presumably scream.

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What would happen if Aaron Paul popped up in "Frozen" as Jesse Pinkman? There's only one way to find out.

"Lost" celebrated its 10th anniversary with a panel at PaleyFest in Los Angeles. Check out 10 revelations from the producers and stars.

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Baseball Renders Tardy Tribute to a Great Man Now Old and Sick — Headline from the May 12, 1947, issue of LIFE magazine

In April 1947, the most famous and, arguably, most beloved ballplayer of all-time was honored at Yankee Stadium on “Babe Ruth Day.” Sixty-thousand fans filled The House That Ruth Built to pay tribute to a player who, even then, had already transcended the sport and become not merely a national icon, but an international star — a man whose eye-popping numbers (714 career home runs, more than 2,800 hits … a .342 lifetime batting average, fer chrissake!) and larger-than-life personality captivated grown-ups and kids, alike.

Here, seven decades after that April day when baseball stadiums everywhere stopped play and a nation listened to a broadcast of the heartfelt ceremony in the Bronx, LIFE.com presents pictures made by photographer Ralph Morse — including many images that were never published in LIFE — from Babe Ruth Day, as well as from the Babe’s last public appearance a year later, in June 1948, mere months before he died.

LIFE magazine, meanwhile, in its May 12, 1947, issue, reported on Babe Ruth Day thus:

On April 27 in baseball parks all over the nation the fans met to honor their greatest hero. Everywhere the game was held up while spectators listened to a broadcast from Yankee Stadium. There Babe Ruth, sick and old at 52, received eulogies, scores of gifts and an ovation that almost brought tears to his eyes. It was a big, dramatic ceremony.

This was fitting. Everything George Herman Ruth did was big and dramatic. His powerful bat earned the money to pay for Yankee Stadium, ‘the house that Ruth built.’ His warm, expansive personality gave baseball respectability after the [1919] Black Sox scandal has almost ruined it. To every boy in the land the great, wide smile and booming voice of the Babe were a personal inspiration.

Last week the booming voice had died to a hoarse murmur as the ailing Babe thanked his fans for their tribute. Then, with the thundering cheers of the crowd still ringing in his ears, Babe Ruth returned to his memories of a past glory.

For his part, explaining the reasons why the photos he made in 1948 a) are in color and b) never ran in LIFE, Morse reminded LIFE.com that the magazine “had one page a week dedicated to [breaking] news. All the other stuff — art, fashion, lifestyle — was printed a week in advance. But we had one page that was held open for a news picture, and when an editor called me that morning at home and told me to head over to Yankee Stadium, he asked if I had any black and white film. ‘I got two rolls of color,’ I told him. ‘That’s all I have in the house.’ ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Go ahead, shoot it in color.’ And that’s it — that’s why the shots I took that day are in color.

“I took the pictures, and headed down to the LIFE offices with the film,” Morse recalls. “But when I got there, Ed Thompson, the managing editor, says, ‘Sorry, Ralph. We couldn’t wait for you. We closed the page.’ That was that: the issue was closed, and I lost the page I was shooting for. I think they ran some Hollywood crap in there, instead. But that sort of thing happened all the time.”

Discussing specific images, like his photo of an obviously close-to-death Babe Ruth seated on a bench in the locker room, a coat draped over his shoulders (see slide #3 in the gallery), Morse muses that the picture “works so much better in color than it would in black and white. Because with black and white, you might get a sense of how frail Ruth was, but you wouldn’t really see it the way you do here. In black and white, you wouldn’t see how gray his face looked, how the cancer had really destroyed him. Frankly, Ruth wouldn’t look as sick in black and white as he does in color. The man was dying, after all — and it showed.”

(Coming back into the locker room after addressing the crowd on that June day in 1948 — so the story goes — Ruth was offered a beer by his old teammate, “Jumping Joe” Dugan, who asked the Babe how he was doing. Ruth took the beer, looked Dugan in the eye and said, “Joe, I’m gone.” Then he broke down in tears.)

“Everyone knew he was sick,” Morse said. “He’d been sick since 1946, when he was diagnosed with cancer — but when they held ‘Babe Ruth Day’ at the stadium, he didn’t even put on a uniform. Just came out in a suit, a long coat, that wool cap, and thanked the crowd. But those of us down there on the field, taking pictures — we could see how old he’d gotten. He wasn’t the Babe Ruth everyone remembers. He put a brave face on it, but he was ravaged.”

The Yankees retired Ruth’s famous No. 3 on June 13, 1948. (Ruth’s Yankee teammate, the great Lou Gehrig, was the first major league player so honored, when his No. 4 was retired in 1939.)

“It was moving,” Morse says, “being there in the locker room that day, knowing that Ruth’s number was going to be retired, that it was never going to be worn again on another Yankees jersey. But another thing, purely from a photographer’s point of view, is that the Yankees’ lockers were a bright, bright red, which in my experience was unusual. The color gave that quiet scene a bit of excitement. I mean, here’s this man — once an incredible athlete, but now literally gray, sick, trying to get his clothes on — with this great big number three on a bright red locker behind him. It was just such a striking scene.”

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Shoe companies have been mass-producing sneakers since the Converse All Star first appeared all the way back in 1917, and their designs have changed immensely since. But how did we get from no-frills kicks to Jeremy Scott's garish winged monstrosities? A print from PopChartLabs shows the evolution over almost a century of sneaker design.

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Moms are at the absolute best. They brought you into the world, they raised you, they loved you, they took care of you, they Mom'd you. In fact, what they're not the best at is a very short list. Actually, it's just one thing: Computers. No matter how easy it is to use a computer, Moms will always find a way to freeze the screen and/or forward cute e-mails.

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Crying because your DVR's hard drive can't hold an entire season of Antiques Roadshow? If you're a Comcast subscriber, there may be hope on the horizon. At The Cable Show in Washington, D.C., Comcast announced its next Xfinity-branded cloud solution: the X2 set-top box. Available later this year, the X2 will eschew hard drive saves in favor of storing recorded programs online. Additionally, both the forthcoming X2 and soon-to-be updated X1 are said to provide greater interface customization, smarter personalized recommendations, additional web content and enhanced multiplatform integration. If this news tickles your fancy, you can find more screenshots at the source link below or read the press release after the break.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

Comments

Source: Comcast

Like, duh. If you have a lot of Iron Man suits, you use those Iron Man suits to blow things up. Especially bad guys. If you don't enjoy doing that, then don't be Iron Man! Go be Peace Corp Man instead.

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You may not know it, but when airlines bump you from flights or lose your luggage, you're actually entitled to cash payouts to make up for the damages, not vouchers or free tickets for future travel on their airline. All you have to do is ask for them, and insist if they try to offer you something else.

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mvar writes "Various sources report that a few days ago at CinemaCon Disney announced their plan to release, following the 2015 JJ Abrams Episode VII, a new Star Wars movie every 1 (one, uno, une) year. Yep, get your stomachs ready, because that's a lot of Jar Jar Binks."

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