Christopher.kantos

insanidadeartificial:

In a parallel universe…

What do you collect when you travel? I have an acquisitive soul; linens and tiny ceramics and jewelry just happen to get squirreled away in my bags. But I've found that the best souvenirs of travel are the lightest to carry. When I travel, I look for new things to learn, like the soufflé I picked up in Paris, and the duck magret in Nice. My husband and I have also acquired cocktail recipes quite often in our travels, and I hardly need to tell you that these are my favorites. 

We just picked up a new one, a very summery cocktail from an unexpected place. It's a fizzy concoction of mint, lime, rum, and a hit of grapefruit from my favorite neon orange bottle. It's a little sweet, a little bitter, and totally, totally refreshing. This is my cocktail of the summer, folks. 

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I don't know anything about wine, but I like the looks of Vinport's limited-edition Star Trek wine featuring label art by Juan Ortiz. The labels represent classic ST episodes: "The City on the Edge of Forever," "Mirror Mirror," and "The Trouble with Tribbles." Star Trek wine (via Laughing Squid)

no, no, No, No, NO!

It all started innocently enough this morning when Dave Caolo pointed out a Tumblr page devoted to GIFs from an app named Stilly (US$1.99). Now, thanks to Dave's keen eye for the absurd, I have wasted untold minutes looking through a long page of GIFs and started making my own with Stilly.

The app is simple, making an animated GIF of whatever motion happens to flash in front of your iPhone camera when you push the large red and yellow shutter button. You really have only one setting -- you can choose to change colors between your images, resulting in an even more jarring GIF than usual.

The eyebrows of doom!

Your final product is stored to the Photos app camera roll, and you have a choice of sharing the GIF to Tumblr or sending it as a message. Note that choosing the Tumblr destination actually gives you the opportunity to send your images to many more places: other camera apps, Google Drive or Dropbox, Path, and more.

The jittery GIFs won't be popular with everyone; some of them are almost enough to make you want to cough up a hairball. But Stilly is just enough fun to be worth the two bucks.

The Stilly-est camera app ever originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 05 Jun 2013 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yub and nub, my friends. Lego will release a massive, almost-2,000-piece Ewok Village set this September. It'll run you $250, is over a foot tall, and will include a speederbike, 15 minifigures (some of which have reversible faces with different expressions — angry Leia is amazing), and an Imperial helmet drum kit.

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Ohio State president Gordon Gee, who joked that Catholics couldn't be trusted and the SEC couldn't read, and spent $64k on bow ties, will retire. [Columbus Dispatch]

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Have you noticed an unusual battery drain on your iPhone or iPad lately? German iOS developer Sebastian Düvel has, and he decided to get to the bottom of it. He used Apple's Instruments OS X app, which allows developers to analyze and test iOS code, and found that Facebook's apps were the root of his battery drain problem.

In short, Düvel discovered that Facebook's apps are not shutting off like they should when they are in the background and not in use. Düvel found that the main Facebook app would become active for about 10 seconds and then go back into a sleep mode before becoming active for another 10 seconds again -- this happens continuously, all day long. The same thing happens with Facebook's Messenger app.

The way iOS apps are supposed to work is when they are not in the foreground -- that is actively being used by the user -- they go to sleep and are not active again until the user brings them forward. Facebook's apps do not do this, and are activating in the background, thus draining battery life.

Apple's rules require that most apps do not actively run in the background. However, it does make exception for some apps, most notably audio apps like Spotify and Pandora that play music in the background when you're in another app; location-based navigation apps like TomTom; and VoIP apps like Skype.

Facebook actually meets the criteria of an audio app and a VoIP app, so it's not breaking any of Apple's rules -- but as such, Facebook's apps could be eating through your battery life. Düvel says his aim in publicizing the battery drain Facebook's apps put on your iPhone was not to embarrass the company, but so that hopefully they can fix the problem in their code so the apps don't activate as much in the background and thus can save the user battery life.

[via Cult of Mac and iClarified]

Developer suspects Facebook app is behind iPhone battery drain originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 04 Jun 2013 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We're used to seeing modern landmarks in their completed glory, but we gain a new appreciation for those familiar monuments when we see them in progress, and remember all the labor that went into bringing them to life.

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A heads-up, if you happen to be near Rotterdam, in the Netherlands — ornithologist Kees Moeliker (watch his TED Talk) and friends will be celebrating the annual Dead Duck Day on June 5, at 17:55, on the lawn outside the glass-enclosed wing of Rotterdam’s Natural History Museum. Attendance is free. At this year’s event, Moeliker will unveil a plaque, to be placed near the crack in the window that, as the plaque explains:

marks the spot where, on June 5th 1995 at 17:55h, a mallard duck (Anas platyrhynchos) died after colliding with the building. Immediately after falling to the ground, the dead duck was mounted by a (live) duck — also of the male sex. The copulation took 75 minutes, and became known in the scientific community as ‘the first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard’. The victim is on display in the museum.

Read about last year’s Dead Duck Day, which featured a special message sent by ornithologist and bird-watcher Tim Birkhead. Moeliker tells us this year’s message comes from an equally distinguished source. Look for an excerpt of that message on the TED Blog on the big day.

This thoughtful, articulate young fellow explains why he doesn't want to eat octopus. (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

From A Hamburger Today

Burger King Puerto Rico celebrated its 50th anniversary by treating 50 of its most loyal customers to the Hands-Free Whopper Holder. Because, damn it, you shouldn't have to deny yourself the pleasures of eating a Whopper just because your hands are tied up playing a guitar/giving someone a tattoo/walking a pack of dogs/painting your nails/riding a bike/etc. The Whopper-eating never has to stop! Never!

Watch the video below:

Spanish Version

[Video: rafaelsosauriarte on YouTube]

English Version

[Video: Creativity Online]

This campaign was brought to you by advertising agency DLC/Ogilvy & Mather.

[via Eater]

(My mind immediately went to The Onion's fast food feed bags: "It's hot steamy food in your face right now.")

About the author: Robyn Lee is the editor of A Hamburger Today and takes many of the photos for Serious Eats. She'll also doodle cute stuff when necessary. Read more from Robyn at her personal food blog, The Girl Who Ate Everything.

This month AT&T started charging a monthly "Mobility Administrative Fee" of $0.61 to mobile customers. If you want to get out of your contract early, you can use this fee increase to cancel the contract without paying an early termination fee.

This fee offers a rare chance to fight back against a corporate giant. You can use the administrative fee as a loophole to break your contract, without having to pay any costly early termination fees.

Even if the monthly fee isn't a big deal to you, upgrading your phone early probably is. By canceling your contract, you can get a new Samsung Galaxy S4 or HTC One with AT&T or another wireless carrier at the cheaper subsidized pricing.

Nelson Aguilar at Wonder How To describes how to do it

A 15-year-old vandal carved the words 'Ding Jinhao was here' in Chinese in the 3,500 year old Luxor Temple in Egypt. Back home in China, his fellow countrymen replied online: "Christ, what an asshole." (Image: Weibo)

For the past few weeks, I've been in Boston, hanging out at WGBH as Miles O'Brien and the PBS science program NOVA worked to put together this documentary on the science and technology inside the Boston bombing manhunt and investigation. It airs tonight, and it's pretty phnomenal. "Manhunt—Boston Bombers" premieres Wednesday, May 29th at 9PM/8c (check local listings).

Above, PBS NewsHour has a breakout piece related to the documentary: Understanding the Bombs Used at the Boston Marathon. It's a visit to the nation's most active explosives testing facility in New Mexico to learn more about how the Tsarnaev brothers made the pressure cooker bombs used at the Boston Marathon. Investigators often use the center to test theories and find new ways to defend against future attacks. Below, the PBS NOVA trailer. From the description:

At 2:50 pm on April 15, two bomb blasts turned the Boston Marathon finish line from a scene of triumph to tragedy, leaving three dead, hundreds injured, and a city gripped by heartbreak and terror. Less than five days later, the key suspects were identified and apprehended with one dead, the other in custody. How did investigators transform the chaos of the bombing into a coherent trail of clues, pointing to the accused killers? NOVA follows the manhunt step by step, examining the role modern technology—combined with old-fashioned detective work—played in cracking the case. Given hundreds of hours of surveillance and bystander videos, how did agents spot the suspects in a sea of spectators? Why couldn't facial recognition software I.D. the criminals? How much could bomb chemistry analysis, cell phone GPS, infrared imagery, and crowdsourcing reveal about the secrets behind this horrific crime? With the help of top criminal investigators and anti-terrorism experts, NOVA explores which technological innovations worked—and which didn't—and how the world of crime fighting could be transformed tomorrow.

Executive produced by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, The Act of Killing is a documentary directed by Joshua Oppenheimer about a group of Indonesian mass murderers.

In The Act of Killing, Anwar and his friends agree to tell us the story of the killings. But their idea of being in a movie is not to provide testimony for a documentary: they want to star in the kind of films they most love from their days scalping tickets at the cinemas. We seize this opportunity to expose how a regime that was founded on crimes against humanity, yet has never been held accountable, would project itself into history.

And so we challenge Anwar and his friends to develop fiction scenes about their experience of the killings, adapted to their favorite film genres -- gangster, western, musical. They write the scripts. They play themselves. And they play their victims.

Wow. (via @aaroncoleman0)

Tags: crime   Joshua Oppenheimer   movies   murder   The Act of Killing   trailers

Can't wait.

via http://fuckyeahdementia.com/

An Ottawa morning TV show welcomed Henry the Hockey Hound to pick the winner of yesterday's Senators-Penguins game. He chose neither, because there was bacon in the studio. [TBL]

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Because monkeys. (thanks, Tara McGinley!)

Usborne's 1983 classic Introduction to Machine Code for Beginners is an astounding book, written, designed and illustrated by Naomi Reed, Graham Round and Lynne Norman. It uses beautiful infographics and clear writing to provide an introduction to 6502 and Z80 assembler, and it's no wonder that used copies go for as much as $600. I was reminded of it this morning when @amanicdroid tweeted me with a link to a PDF of the book's interior. I'd love to see this book updated for modern computers and reprinted.

@doctorow Have you read "Introduction to Machine Code for Beginners"(1983)? gomsx.net/hansotten/msxd…Illustrations excellent, ages 10(?)-up

— Dr. Chronobiologist (@amanicdroid) May 16, 2013

The New York Times has a lovely interview up with Steve Wilhite, the inventor of the illustrious GIF file. Wilhite wants you to know that the White House is wrong:

He is proud of the GIF, but remains annoyed that there is still any debate over the pronunciation of the format.

“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Mr. Wilhite said. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

Gizmodo’s Casey Chan pretty much sums up my view on this, in an article so elaborately ridiculous it brings joy, “He’s saying we, the people of America, are wrong. It is a soft ‘G’, pronounced ‘jif’. Sir, why did you not name it JIF like the peanut butter then! End of story. I have long thought the story was over too, but I’m guessing we’re reading different books.”

Chan and I and the US President are just going to ignore Wilhite and just continue pronounce it with a hard ‘G,’ like ‘gift’ without the ‘T.’ Because no one on the planet pronounces it ‘jif.’

End of story.

About this video, which shows a Pygmy Marmoset noshing on a macaroni, Meredith Yayanos says: "The tinier the primate, the deeper the Uncanny Valley." I don't know anything about the conditions under which this video was shot, but obviously monkeys belong in their natural habitat, not in someone's home eating macaroni. Still, wow: how amazing and adorable the creature is.

A new restaurant is on its way to the North End of Boston, and it will be moving into the space recently vacated by another dining spot, which is moving a short distance south.

NorthEndWaterfront.com is reporting that Ward 8 is going to be opening on North Washington Street in the former Nebo spot (Nebo plans to open at Atlantic Wharf soon). The article mentions that the owner of the eatery is Nicholas Frattaroli, whose family is behind Ducali, Filippo, and Lucia.

Expect a summer opening for Ward 8 Restaurant and Bar.

The address for this upcoming restaurant in the North End is: Ward 8 Restaurant and Bar, 90 N Washington Street, Boston, MA, 02114.

Thanks to the Boston Hospitality and Tourism Industry Blog for bringing this to our attention.

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Surprisingly entertaining article about better choices for the state birds of each of the 50 US states.

4. Arkansas. Official state bird: northern mockingbird

Christ. What makes this even less funny is that there are like eight other states with mockingbird as their official bird. I'm convinced that the guy whose job it was to report to the state's legislature on what the official bird should be forgot until the day it was due and he was in line for a breakfast sandwich at Burger King. In a panic he walked outside and selected the first bird he could find, a dirty mockingbird singing its stupid head off on top of a dumpster.

What it should be: painted bunting

More hilarious science journalism, please. Yes, in addition to the excellent What If? (via @jessamyn)

Tags: lists   science   USA

Man, sports are just the fucking worst, aren't they?

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Dive in.

Luxe! The Revere Hotel opens its rooftop lounge and pool on May 19, and we've got the menu. Snag a cabana ($150) and start snacking! And remember: The roof (cabanas, pools and all) is free until July.

Rooftop Menu

Read more posts by Kara Baskin

Filed Under: pools, boston, menus, revere hotel

ABC News: "An American Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing when a female passenger refused to stop singing Whitney Houston songs."

Come for the rendition of "I will always love you", stay for the bogus and futile "DO NOT TAKE PICTURES ON THE AIRPLANE!" demands from the flight crew. [Thanks, Michelle Fox!]

We've seen beer-pouring robots before, but MIT has recently put together a smartphone-controlled robot bartender, with three robot arms that can pour and mix up to 100 different alcoholic and non-alcoholic flavors. The Makr Shakr lets you order up a drink directly from your iPhone, and then it will make the drink and deliver it to you as requested.

The robot will be officially unveiled later this week at Google's I/O conference, and for now it's just an interesting robotics project, so it's unlikely you'll see your own robot bartender in a local watering hole any time soon (plus, who would you flirt with if there was a robot pouring you drinks?). But this is a fascinating idea -- it would save bars time and money to have a robot behind the counter, and the fact that nearly everyone has a iPhone in their pocket these days means there's an easily accessible interface ready to go. You can order your drink at Starbucks from your iPhone, so why not order up a drink at a bar, from a robot or anyone else?

MIT makes a smartphone-controlled bartender originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 13 May 2013 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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VIEW SLIDESHOW: 14 Ramp Recipes To Celebrate The Season

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

There are some folks out there who really don't like the culture of ramps. I get it. They're seasonal. They're expensive. They're only available on the East Coast, where they're basically limited to those willing to get up early to beat the crowds at the farmer's market, or the lucky few who have them growing in their backyards. These are all valid reasons to dislike the mythos built up around something that is, in the end, really just another onion.

I myself am not a fan of this mythos. At the same time, I'll admit to the hypocrisy of being one of its biggest contributors.

It all reminds me of my awkward middle school years. I'd say to myself, hey, I think that girl is pretty awesome and, as an outsider, I'm probably the only one who thinks so because I just get her like nobody else does. Maybe she'll think I'm awesome, too! Then I'd realize that everybody thought she was awesome, and she thought I was creepy.

What I'm saying is that if ramps could emote, they'd think my love and desire for them is kinda creepy.

Why can't he just enjoy my mildly grassy, garlicky aroma and sweet onion flavor like normal people do?, they'd ask. Why must he collect photos of me in various savory and unsavory situations and then post them in a slideshow online? Maybe I should take down those Facebook photos before he figures out where I live...

Well, ramps, unfortunately you can't talk and have no real natural defenses (like a quirky smile or cute hair flip) to catch me off guard. You will be consumed again this year. Oh yes, you will.

Here are just 14 of the ways in which it may happen. Click through the slideshow above, or jump straight to a recipe below.

• Ramp Drop Biscuits
• Bacon and Ramp Dumplings
• Girlled Ramps
• Ramp and Chorizo Quesadillas
• Extra-Rampy Ramp Risotto
• Puffy Ramp Frittata
• Asparagus and Ramp Soup with Yogurt
• Orange-glazed Carrots with Ramp Barley and Spinach
• Mapo Dofu (Tofu) with Ramps
• April Bloomfield's Toasts with Ramp Butter and Fried Quail Eggs
• Spring Salad of Asparagus, Ramps, Snap Peas, and Peas, with Poached Egg and Lemon Zest Vinaigrette
• Ramp Gibson
• Fried Eggs with Bacon and Ramps
• Pickled Ramps

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

Sometimes it's cool to live in the future. Take Philips Hue, an energy-saving lightbulb that can be controlled by your iPhone or iPad. If you're coming home at night with an arm full of groceries and didn't leave the lights on, you can turn them on before you get into the house. They allow you to control the color, power and brightness of your lighting from anywhere in the world. Now with the latest update to their iOS app, Philips has brought geofencing support to their already brainy smart bulb.

The geofencing feature allows you to activate a scene in your room automatically when you arrive at a location, without having to do it manually each time. Come in from a long day at work and have your house know you've come home by greeting you with an illuminated living room. The alarm settings have also been improved, so whether you're using the alarm to make it look like someone's home when you're away or simply to wake up, you're in luck.

The update also includes some minor support fixes, improved colors in the LivingColors system and other tweaks to the alarm system, including support for a weekly alarm schedule. Head over to iTunes to grab the new app, or over to Philips to learn more about this system.

Philips Hue iOS app adds geofencing support originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 14 May 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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