Almost 30 years after Bill Watterson introduced the world to Calvin and Hobbes, one of the most beloved daily comic strips is finally available as a collection of ebooks. It's not quite the full series, which is available as a giant multi-volume book, but the ebooks on offer cover a fairly large range of strips. There are three in total: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, and The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes, each of which was previously released as a regular book.

Why the ebooks couldn't be released in numbered volumes is anyone's guess, but even with the obtuse naming, the trio still offer up a wider range of content than was previously available on mobile devices. Until now, the only way to...

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I'd been looking forward to this night's sleep more than most in recent memory. I'd heard that Nine Hours, a capsule hotel in Kyoto known for its stark sci-fi design and innovative sleeping technology, would be closing down at the end of October, and I knew I'd have to make the trip across Japan while I still had time.

Capsule hotels are up there with sushi and Hello Kitty in the pantheon of things that foreigners think about when they think about Japan, and yet I'd never actually stayed in one despite close to five years spent living here. They don't have the best image within the country — seedy, dirty, and often less than safe. They've been around since the '70s, and the majority of their userbase in the following decades appears...

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cartechboy writes "There are few places in the world outside of a race track that you can safely--and legally-- go faster than 130 mph, but the Autobahn in Germany is one of them. After Tesla announced it'll offer a future special 'autobahn' tuning package to improve the Model S's high-speed driving characteristics, one owner took his car for a high-speed run on the infamous Germany highway. He hit a maximum speed of 212 km/h, or 132 mph. With 416 horsepower on tap and full torque available from a standstill thanks to the electric motor, the Model S went from 60 mph to 100 mph in less than five seconds. (Given the included video is mostly focused on the speedometer, lets hope the driver at least glanced at the road.) Only once the car passed 100 mph did its acceleration begin to slow."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The title of this post is what we imagine safari guide Matthew Copham says whenever he tells people about his most recent adventure…. well, that or, “and then a cheetah tried to eat my GoPro.” As far as the response he gets, we expect it involves copious amount of Awwwww.

Copham is a guide with Safari Footprints, “a team of passionate wildlife enthusiasts who have chosen a career as private safari guides,” and he captured the video above on his GoPro Hero3 while out in the African bush.

As a safari guide, we imagine he captures some pretty awesome stuff on his GoPro on a regular basis. But still, this curious cheetah has got to be near or at the top of at least his “cutest footage ever” list.

True, there’s not much to it, but there’s something fascinating and even gripping about wild animals playing with or trying to eat action cameras. If you don’t believe us, look at the number of views this video has gotten in less than a week, or check out this video of a grizzly doing the same thing to another unsuspecting GoPro.

(via Huffington Post)

One device, all networks. That's been a fond dream through the iPhone and iPad lifecycle, and while the iPhone 4S remains a unified device (sans 4G LTE support), the iPhone 5c and 5s remain split into CDMA-enabled and pure GSM model numbers.

Enter the new slimness. The cellular-capable version of the iPad Air, like the forthcoming iPad mini with Retina display, actually ships in only one flavor: universal LTE. All the US carriers, major and minor (Bluegrass? Aio?) support wireless on the device, and it ships unlocked. Is it, you might wonder, possible to do a bit of gaming the system with nano SIM swaps and network shopping? Specifically, can you take an iPad bought under the banner of the "other 3" US carriers (VZW, AT&T or Sprint) but pop in and use a T-Mobile SIM with its 200 MB of free-for-life monthly data?

It seems that the answer is "yes, it is possible." NBC's Devin Coldewey dug into the subject and confirmed with reps from both T-Mobile and AT&T that the SIM swap is feasible, anytime you want to do it. For direct confirmation, MacRumors forums poster Picho affirms that he/she has indeed swapped SIMs from all US carriers into a new iPad Air, with everything working as it should. (Tapbot's Paul Haddad even got the swap to work with a Verizon iPad mini current gen, but it's not clear he's getting full-speed T-Mobile service.) T-Mobile's plan information page suggests that you may need to become a post-paid customer to get the SIM, but you shouldn't need to put any money into the account to get the free data. You can even buy the nano SIM online for 99 cents.

As Coldewey points out, plenty of iPad Air buyers may have gone with their primary carrier of choice for their new purchase, but may not intend to spin up data service soon or have it running most of the time. By picking up a T-Mobile SIM card -- you might get one for free, bring your iPad to your local T-Mobile outlet and see what they say -- it's simple to maintain a free account that credits you 200 MB of service for emergency or extremely light data use. Then, for those times when you want the primary network engaged, pop the old SIM back in and roll on.

Have you tried this maneuver? Let us know in the comments or on our Facebook page.

Get T-Mobile's 200MB free iPad data plan, even with a different carrier's device originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 02 Nov 2013 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It's no secret that the Healthcare.gov website — which is home to Obamacare's health insurance exchanges — hasn't had a smooth launch. The company that won the $93.7 million contract to construct the site is CGI Federal, a subsidary of a Canadian firm called CGI Group. Blame for the botched launch has largely settled on the company, the contractors it hired to complete the job, and the bureaucratic system that awards such contracts. The Washington Post has now profiled CGI Federal, and it turns out the IT company is a relative newcomer to US government contracts — and it doesn't have a spotless track record. You can read the full article here.

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An anonymous reader writes "Smart watches have arrived, and Google Glass is on its way. As early-adopters start to gain some experience with these devices, they're learning some interesting lessons about how wearable computing affects our behavior differently from even smartphones and tablets. Vint Cerf says, 'Our social conventions have not kept up with the technology.' Right now, it's considered impolite to talk on your cellphone while checking out at the grocery store, or to ignore a face-to-face conversation in favor of texting somebody. But 20 years ago, those actions weren't even on our social radar. Wearable devices create some obvious social problems, like the aversion to Glass's ever-present camera. But there are subtler ones, as well, for which we'll need to develop another set of social norms. A Pebble smart watch user gave an example: 'People thought I was being rude and checking the time constantly when I was really monitoring incoming messages. It sent the wrong signal.' The article continues, 'Therein lies the wearables conundrum. You can put a phone away and choose not to use it. You can turn to it with permission if you're so inclined. Wearables provide no opportunity for pause, as their interruptions tend to be fairly continuous, and the interaction is more physical (an averted glance or a vibration directly on your arm). It's nearly impossible to train yourself to avoid the reflex-like response of interacting. By comparison, a cell phone is away (in your pocket, on a table) and has to be reached for.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Light painting is something that takes a lot of time and patience. Even after many trial and error attempts, nailing the exact look you’re going for can be a challenge. pixelstick is a crazy new tool that aims to change all that, making mind-blowing light paintings something even artistically challenged photographers can create.

A basic description of it is: it’s a stick-like device that lets you print digital images into long exposure photos.

The pixelstick is a long aluminum housing that contains 198 separate full color LED lights. It comes with a separate controller that lets you adjust settings and choose images from an SD card.

On the back of the stick is a second aluminum sleeve that lets you spin the stick on an axis, and on the inside of the main stick is a battery compartment for 8 AA batteries.

Those images are prepared by the user beforehand inside an image editor such as Photoshop. Since each LED light corresponds to one pixel, your images will need to be resized to being 198 pixels tall.

Once the images are loaded into pixelstick, the device displays the image one line of pixels at a time. This means that by waving the stick across the scene in a long-exposure photo, you can “paint” the entire image into the frame.

Do this multiple times in a row, and you can create amazing time-lapse animation sequences.

Here are some sample photographs created using the pixelstick:

Here’s a video that introduces pixelstick and shows off some amazing light painting timelapses created using it:

The team behind pixelstick is currently raising funds for launch over on Kickstarter, where a pledge of $300 will preorder one of these devices.

pixelstick – Light painting evolved [Kickstarter via Colossal]

I learned some interesting things, like the GS4 has a monster screen.

Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius testifies before Congress on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

The new health insurance marketplace Healthcare.gov went down again this morning, the latest hiccup in a month of technical problems. The timing could not have been worse for the administration: Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius was in the middle of testifying before Congress.

"Let's put the screenshot up,"  Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said, referring to an image of the error message on Healthcare.gov today that reads, "The system is down at the moment."

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This week marks the one year anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, the most devastating storm of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season and the second most costly hurricane in the history of the United States. To capture how far New York City has come since being pummeled by Sandy, resident photographer Natan Dvir decided to re-shoot photographs that he captured last year after the storm.

The project was commissioned by The Weather Channel, and ended up comprising nearly 50 before-and-after pairs of images. Here are some of Dvir’s favorite pairs from the series:

In addition to recreating the framing and vantage point of the original shots, Dvir also aimed to match the original feelings by choosing weather conditions and times of the day that matched.

You can find the full series over on Weather.com and on Dvir’s website.

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Image credits: Before (2012) photographs by Natan Dvir/Polaris, and after (2013) photographs by Natan Dvir/Polaris for Weather.com

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Problems keep mounting in the administration's attempt to sell health insurance online. A data center critical to the operation of Healthcare.gov, the federal insurance marketplace, experienced an outage over the weekend. The failure affected the Healthcare.gov data services hub, which coordinates eligibility checks, and therefore also impaired local exchanges in 14 states and Washington, D.C.

The data center is run by Verizon's Terramark, which says the failure occurred during planned maintenance. Neither the administration nor Verizon has given an estimate for how long it will take to fix.

Healthcare.gov, the keystone of President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act, has had a long list of technical problems since launching on...

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Cheryl Campbell, senior vice president of CGI Federal, one of the prime contractors that built Healthcare.gov, testifying before Congress.

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama called for a "tech surge" to fix the problems with Healthcare.gov, the barely functional marketplace where Americans are supposed to buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The administration is being opaque about exactly how many new employees equate to a "surge," but details are slowly leaking out. And while the tech surge does sound like a substantial effort, it may also be complicating an already messy situation.

The surge is adding workers at all levels. The contractors that built Healthcare.gov are putting more employees on the...

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Thanks to the skyrocketing costs of college and the great burden of student debt, most of today's college grads won't be able to retire until the age of 73. Even worse, they'll only have about 11 years to enjoy retirement.

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POW!

Me: Okay, so when would be a good time for me to follow up with you next week?

Client: Uh… you know.  Whenever.  Whenever your instincts tell you it’s a good time.

Me: Okay…

Client: Yeah.  So when you just get that feelin’, uh, like, ‘it’s time,’ then you can just call me.

Me: Okay… I’m just going to call you on Monday, okay?

Client: We’ll see how you feel. 

cartechboy writes "Texas is known for having the nation's most draconian anti-Tesla rules, based on intense and cash-rich lobbying and political donations by Texas car dealers. What's amazing is what would-be Tesla owners still have to do to get their hands on--and maintain--a Tesla Model S. How do you buy a car the laws try to stop you from owning? By jumping through wacky hoops, it turns out. Tesla store staff, for example, can't tell visitors how much a Model S costs. They can't give test drives, and they can't discuss financing options. Tesla service centers are banned from showing the company logo — or advertising that they do Tesla warranty work or service at all. So how have 1,000 Model S cars been sold? That would be sheer persistence."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes that although many Linux users (and others) are at home with OpenOffice and LibreOffice, typical organizations are as addicted as ever to MS office formats. In 2011 13% of organizations had OpenOffice variants installed on some computers. Today that number has dipped to 5% according to Forrester Research. ... The poll included [shows totals] over 100% as many organizations have multiple versions of offices installed. Also surprising, Office 2003 is alive kicking and screaming as almost 1/3 of companies and governments still use it even though EOL for Office 2003 ends with XP on the same date! The good news is online cloud-based platforms are gaining traction with Google Docs and Office 365 which are not so tied to Windows on the client."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In recent years YouTube has become a wonderful platform for individuals to create a product and generate revenue from it, often from the comfort of their own homes. Many provide services such as hints, tips and tutorials on anything from baking to flying a plane, but growing in popularity are YouTube-based reviewers.

One guy who has gone down that particular route is John Bain, an Englishman known online as TotalBiscuit. Bain is a great success and has almost 1.3 million subscribers to his PC gaming YouTube channel. However he now finds himself in a copyright takedown controversy sparked by his review of Wild Games Studio’s first-person survival game Day One: Garry’s Incident.

There’s no way to sugar-coat Bain’s review – he hated it, and quite rightly so. The 21 minute review ripped apart the graphics, gameplay and presentation of the game and it was quite obvious from Bain’s tone this wasn’t going to end well. Aside from the odd element receiving a lukewarm reception, the review concluded that the game is a complete turkey.

The astonishing graphical excesses of Day One: Garry’s Incident

The video review became highly viewed very quickly, topping search results for the game on YouTube. But without warning it suddenly disappeared, only to be replaced by a copyright infringement notice, issued by none other than Wild Games Studio themselves.

At this point it’s worth pointing out that Bain is no stranger to the studio. They gave him a free key to access a review copy of the game on Steam and asked Bain to place a link in his review to where the game could be bought. It was perhaps appropriate then that the CEO of the studio decided to justify their takedown actions on the Stream forums themselves.

Well aware of the circumstances behind the review and his protections under copyright law to critique the game if he so chooses, Bain summed up the mess on Twitter.

“Long story short. Dev sends code, code used to make critique, dev dislikes critique, dev abuses system to censor critique,” he said.

“This happened 2 days ago, we contacted [Wild Games] for an explanation and have heard nothing. Giving them til Monday to respond before going nuclear. It should be pointed out that US Fair Use doctrine exists in particular to protect criticism from being censored in such a way.”

While Bain may have had the intention of not “goin nuclear” until today, things are now largely out of his hands. His follow-up video (embedded below) which explains events to date has already received more than 500,000 views and the backlash on Metacritic is something to behold, with the game currently receiving 0.6 out of 10 after 683 votes. It is very clear from the comments that the Metacritic reviewers know what the developer did to Bain.

“This highlights a wider problem and an issue that must be addressed. Look at how easily a company was able to censor the most-watched and prominent critique of their game by abusing YouTube’s copyright claim system,” Bain says. “Look at how they were able to completely flaunt the notion of networks policing their partners and using a shoot first, ask questions later form, to deny revenue to someone who they didn’t like.”

In order to draw attention to the issue, Bain says he will be donating all YouTube revenue generated by the ‘incident’ to the EFF.

In the meantime, anyone wanting to see the original review can find it on here on DailyMotion, ironically now being monetized by someone else.

Source: Game Devs Abuse Copyright to Censor Negative YouTube Review

Sriracha is everywhere, but David Tran — CEO of its maker, Huy Fong Foods — would hardly know it. In a profile of Tran, Quartz describes the reclusive CEO as caring far more about making a good hot sauce than simply making profits. Despite rising ingredient costs and increased demand, Tran hasn't once raised the wholesale price of Sriracha. The goal, he tells Quartz, isn't to be a billionaire, just "to make enough fresh chili sauce so that everyone who wants Huy Fong can have it. Nothing more."

Tran is almost obstinately against focusing on profits, according to Quartz. He doesn't know how widely his star product is being sold, doesn't advertise, and has turned down various buy-out offers. "People who come here are never...

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realized writes "Experian — one of the three national U.S. credit bureaus — reportedly sold SSNs through its subsidiary, Court Ventures, to the operators of SuperGet.info who then offered all of the information online for a price. The website would advertise having '99% to 100% of all USA' in their database on websites frequented by carders. Hieu Minh Ngo, the website owner, was recently been indicted for 15-counts filed under seal in November 2012, charging him with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, substantive wire fraud, conspiracy to commit identity fraud, substantive identity fraud, aggravated identity theft, conspiracy to commit access device fraud, and substantive access device fraud."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are a total of six piece types in the game of Chess, and Italian photographer Francesco Ridolfi has managed to bring each of them — in both black and white versions — to life in his creative fine art portrait project “Chess Portraits.”

Chess has been around for a very long time. In fact, the game we play today is said to have existed in something very similar to its present form as early as the 1470s, and the original version that evolved into that game might have been around as early as the 6th century.

But it wasn’t the game’s historical significance or universal familiarity that drove Ridolfi to create this project, he sees a deeper meaning in this battle between darkness and light:

Often, inside each one of us, opposing drives make themselves felt and alternate within as light illuminates and shadow darkens our minds. Black and White. Good plays Evil. Chess figures offer an opportunity to explore this dualism. They provide a set of archetypes that convey different aspects of human nature.

They throw us into relief; they highlight us in shadow and light. Blacks and Whites.

Here’s a look at the series (we’ve chosen to leave out the knight, as her portrait includes some partial nudity. You can find the full series here):

Six types of pieces, twelve portraits in all; in our humble opinion, Ridolfi’s series manages to capture the essence of each piece and its duality extremely well.

To see more from Ridolfi, be sure to head over to his website here. And if you want more information on how these portraits were shot, check out this behind-the-scenes video (Note: there is a little bit of nudity) that shows the whole process from drawing, to costumes, to makeup, to the actual shoot.

(via Visual News)

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Image credits: Photographs by Francesco Ridolfi and used with permission.

An anonymous reader writes "NFTables is queued up for merging into the Linux 3.13 kernel. NFTables is a four-year-old project by the creators of Netfilter to write a new packet filtering / firewall engine for the Linux kernel to deprecate iptables (though it now offers an iptables compatibility layer too). NFTables promises to be more powerful, simpler, reduce code complication, improve error reporting, and provide more efficient handling of packet filter rules. The code was merged into net-next for the Linux 3.13 kernel. Iptables will still be present until NFTables is finished, but it is possible to try it out now. LWN also has a writeup on NFTables."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is providing a new way for iOS and Android users to access their Windows PCs today. A new Remote Desktop app is now available for both operating systems, letting you simply connect to a Windows PC and control it. While a number of third-party solutions have existed previously, including Citrix and others, Microsoft's native support is the latest in its continued push to provide apps across Windows, Android, and iOS.

Remote Desktop, as the name implies, uses the same Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) that Microsoft has used for years across its Windows desktop and server releases to connect to a PC. The app will support all Windows PCs that have Remote Desktop turned on, an optional that's configurable in Control Panel.

The...

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When the government first launched Healthcare.gov as an informational site back in June, open source advocates were delighted to hear that the code would be available for anyone to see on the public programming library GitHub. "This new flagship federal .gov website is 'open by design, open by default,'" The Atlantic wrote at the time. "That's a huge win for the American people."

But after a storm of criticism over the healthcare exchange — the second, more complex part of Healthcare.gov that launched on October 1 — the code was removed from GitHub without explanation.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency administering Healthcare.gov, has finally responded to a query from The Verge about the change. The code...

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Want a quick boost of energy to help you get through the day? Sure, a cup of coffee will give you a jolt of caffeine, but some preliminary research indicates that a chat with someone you love may offer just as much of an energy boost, if not more. Essentially: Pick up the phone and call your mother.

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