Devin Sarno

LOS ANGELES — Police barricades prevented traffic from flowing down Hollywood Blvd. on Monday night, as the famous Chinese Theatre played host to the premiere of Expendables 3. While Hollywood mourns the loss of Robin Williams, life on the famous block keeps moving, unlike the people — mostly tourists — lining the street, hoping for an eventual glimpse of a movie star.

Outside a souvenir shop, though, behind an imposing wall protecting a red carpet, there's a traffic jam. Camera men, moments from live shot for the nightly news, crowd around a single spot on the ground — Williams' star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, that hours before was not surrounded by flowers, notes or drawings. Read more...

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Advertorial content: For Michael Williams, staying busy is never a challenge. His immensely influential menswear and lifestyle blog A Continuous Lean (ACL) was one of the early standouts in the category when it...
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Disney is the latest entertainment company to have orders of its forthcoming releases blocked by the retailer.

Hathaway-Sycamores Child and Family Services will honor a La Cañada Flintridge couple when it holds its annual fundraiser, the Celebrating Childrens Awards Reception, at Dodger Stadium on Sept. 16, beginning at 5 p.m.

A stunning photograph by photographer Fefo Bouvier: Noctiluca bioluminescence in the Atlantic Ocean at Barra de Valizas, Uruguay. Above, the Milky Way, seen in a gloriously dark sky free of man-made light.

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This animated short, produced for the PBS series Blank on Blank, features Philip Seymour Hoffman talking about Life, Death, and Happiness. Animated by Patrick Smith, Produced by David Gerlach. For more information and other Blank on Blank episodes, visit blankonblank.org

Cast: Patrick Smith

Tags: Patrick Smith, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Blank on Blank, PBS, animated short, animated doc, documentary short and short film

As of Monday, Apple Stores are conducting on-site iPhone 5s screen replacements, allowing customers to have their damaged displays assessed and repaired in as little as one hour.

It’s around this time of year, when we flip our calendars from July to August, that my friends and work colleagues begin to lament the end of summer. “Where did the season go?” they might ask, sighing heavily. I’m most definitely guilty of saying such things, too, but you guys—we need to calm down. Last I checked, the official end of summer is in late September, so you’ve still got a whole two months left to soak up the sun, get outdoors and take part in one of our all-time favorite summer activities: picnicking! And don’t worry—if you’re a bit late to the picnicking game this year and don’t have all the fixings for a great outdoor meal, we’ve got you covered. Today, Grace is sharing some of her favorite picks for picnicking in a special sale over at One King’s Lane! Check out the sale here, plus Grace’s exclusive travel guide for One King’s Lane here! Happy weekend (and happy picnicking), everybody! —Max

• We really love these brass kitchen accents at Remodelista— a nice spin on the traditional silver options we usually get.
• A great tour to a great city! Say hello to Charlotte, NC!
• Jess Lively’s “Intention Tattoos” are a great way to stay present with your work (and life) goals.
• An inspiring peek inside the beautiful home of the owners of Schoolhouse Electric.
• One of Amy’s favorite NYC getaways is Edith Warton’s home The Mount in the Berkshires. It is a breathtakingly beautiful historic home. This lady knew what she was doing when it came to decorating and entertaining. Here are her tips for entertaining summer guests.
• Speaking of summer entertaining, Martha Stewart just threw a fabulous party for Dom Perignon and Vogue has the scoop. We plan on living vicariously through these photos all weekend!
• Lastly, we know this video of a dog nearly passing out from sheer joy has probably made its way to you by now, but we would be remiss if we didn’t include this crazy adorable clip in our best-of list!

Below is a summary of this week’s highlights:

• Must Read: 5 Videos + Talks Guaranteed to Inspire You
• Trend Watch: Postmodern Revival
• A Day In The Life: Mara Hoffman
• City Guide: 24 Hours in Asheville, NC with Macon York
• In the Kitchen: 5 Easy No-Bake Meals in Under 20 Minutes 
• Behind the Bar: Prairie Rose’s Brighton Beachcomber
• Biz Ladies: 3 Tools You May Not Be Using in Your Email Marketing
• Biz Ladies Profile: Louise Youngson-Klasfeld of Viyet
• Past & Present: Behind Mud Cloth
• Upholstery 101: 10 Projects to Get You Started
• DIY Project: DIY Marbled Coasters, DIY Papier Mache Cacti
• Sneak Peeks:  Scandinavian Style in New Zealand, Rustic Elegance in Savannah, A Potter’s Studio, Gardens and Home in Connecticut, Our 10 Favorite California Homes, Greenpoint Fish & Lobster Co.

“Disobedient Objects” is a new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on the role of objects in social movements since the late 1970s. The exhibition features a variety of objects from movements from around the world, including banners, defaced currency, and experimental activist-bicycles. As part of the exhibition, the museum has released downloadable guides on how to make improvised tools used by protesters. “Disobedient Objects” is open through February 1, 2015.

images via Victoria and Albert Museum

via Nerdcore

NASA unveiled its plans for the 2020 Mars rover on Thursday, and though its design may look familiar, it's got a lot of new gadgets under the hood.

The new rover will be based on the same framework as Curiosity, the two-ton rover that landed on Mars two years ago and is currently driving around, picking up dirt samples and drilling into rocks

However, what makes the next rover special is that it will take all those same samples and store them for a possible return to Earth by a future — perhaps manned — mission to Mars

Image: NASA/JPL

Curiosity currently stores small samples, but keeping them impedes her arm movement, and she has to regularly dump them and move on. NASA engineers and scientists didn't think about this problem when building the rover Read more...

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Small, spiky and adorable — humans give hedgehogs a lot of breaks

But what kinds of motives and personalities do these critters really have?

AC Stuart, creator of Noob the Loser, has revealed the shocking truth about hedgehogs in this "behind the GIFs" comic.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments. Read more...

More about Comics, Cute Animals, Gifs, Watercooler, and Hedgehog

With a lockout increasingly likely, the show may not actually go on this fall at the Metropolitan Opera.

Jonnie R. Williams Sr. testified at the corruption trial of former Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia and his wife, Maureen, that Ms. McDonnell told him the couple were desperate for money.

WASHINGTON — A nonpartisan congressional investigation has concluded that management failures by the Obama administration set the stage for the computer woes that paralyzed President Barack Obama's health care program website last fall, officials told The Associated Press.

The findings are in a report to be released Thursday by the Government Accountability Office, which has spent months investigating the health law's chaotic rollout. GAO is the nonpartisan investigative agency of Congress.

Investigators found that the administration kept changing the contractors' marching orders for the HealthCare.gov website, creating widespread confusion and leading to tens of millions of dollars in additional costs. Read more...

More about Obama, Us World, Politics, Us, and Healthcare.Gov

It's a special year for Supernatural star Misha Collins' worldwide charity scavenger hunt, GISHWHES. (Short for the modest title, Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen.) It's their fourth year, they're looking to add three more world records to their existing five, and this is the first year the event features celebrity-led teams

The latter point is arguably the most thrilling, because no longer are the teams competing against fellow fans — they're up against the likes of William Shatner

"He’s got some heavy hitters; it’s no joke," says Collins, who runs the annual event via his charity Random Acts. "He basically had people apply to be on his team. It was a full-on recruitment drive." Read more...

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The court ordered Washington, D.C., to allow residents to carry handguns outside their homes and to let nonresidents carry them as well.

Under the plan, Palestinian and Israeli officials would cease fighting on Sunday and begin negotiations on the principal economic, political and security concerns about Gaza.

News & Notes:

• Is there a difference between Boyle Heights and East L.A.?

• CBS2 has more information on Friday’s hold up of the Meadow Maid Market in El Sereno  in which one of the suspected robbers was fatally shot by his partner. Both men are believed to be gang members.

• Councilman Gil Cedillo will celebrate his first year in office with a clean up today focused on Elysian Park, Solano Canyon and the Sunset Boulevard corridor.

• Bloggers don’t live on comments alone! Support the Eastsider today with a Reader Sponsorship.

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Google’s "smart contact lens" just went from patents to partners

The Google X project is now officially in lock step with healthcare giant Novartis, the parent of Alcon, which produces some of the most-widely used contact lens products on the market, including Air Optix, FreshLook and Dailies. Novartis will work on turning Google's lab project into smart contact lenses for people around the world.

A product of Google Research, the smart lenses look like traditional contact lenses. The company's eye care division, Alcon, will license Google's smart lens and co-develop them for a variety of ocular medical uses Read more...

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Ready for meat? On a stick? Yeah, it's happening right now for the next sixty minutes, so brace. Skewers, kushiyagi, anticuchos, and even some tasty round balls of meat, all punctured by a stick. Also, a tidy little roundup of 12 spots to get meat on a stick around town. [Meat On A Stick Power Hour]

Thousands of Spaniards and tourists from all over the world gathered in the streets of Pamplona, Spain on Sunday to celebrate the start of the famed San Fermin "running of the bulls" festival, which will fill the city's streets with bulls and wine-fueled partygoers for more than a week

Dressed in traditional white outfits, red bandanas and cummerbunds unique to San Fermin, festivalgoers kicked off the event in Pamplona's main Consistorial square, with many onlookers flooding nearby narrow streets. In his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway immortalized the festival, turning it into what is now the most internationally renowned Spanish fiesta. Read more...

More about Tradition, Spain, Festivals, Us World, and World

The prolific Japan-based musician who melds noise and beats, atmospherics both constructed and field-recorded, and who goes by the name Corruption has been rapidly expanding his SoundCloud presence, with 414 tracks at last count (at soundcloud.com/corrption). The producer has been mentioned here at least twice, once for the percussive prickles of “Lukewarm”, once for some Roppongi street noise, back when the file count was a mere 324. For a long time there was no additional information about Corruption associated with the uploaded tracks, but now there is a link to the small label damade-web.com. And now one of the Damade labelmates has posted a single track composed entirely of elements from Corruption tracks. It is a remote form of dub, just a slithery, shuffling beat below what could be a raspy melodica sample. It pulses and flows, occasionally filled out with distant synth chords, watery bubbling, and sonic cloud formations. But at its core it is hard, static dub.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/damade.

Between Google acquiring Songza and the first Android Wear apps hitting Google Play, you may have overlooked some of this week's best new apps.

Luckily, Mashable creates a roundup each weekend of our favorite new and updated apps, so you won't miss out.

This week's list includes a new competitive word game, Civilization Revolution 2, and a freshly updated TripAdvisor app.

Check out the gallery, above, to see all the apps that made our list of top picks. And if you're looking for more, check out last week's roundup of can't-miss apps.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments. Read more...

More about Android, Tech, Android Apps, Ios, and Ios Apps

We've seen many, many mockups of the purported iPhone 6 over the past half year — tons — and even though all of these mockups are just that, as time progresses, they may actually be getting closer to what the final end product could be.

As we get closer to the manufacturing start date of Apple's next smartphone, supply-chain leaks tend to become more accurate. We saw it with the iPhone 5, iPhone 5S and the iPad Air

That's why it's worth looking at the latest round of iPhone 6 mockups, this time from Japanese newspaper Nikkei. As pointed out by 9to5Mac and translated by GforGames, these mockups offer a "rough idea" of the final product. Read more...

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Google announced Sunday that it would shut down Quickoffice, its app for editing Microsoft Office documents, because it had expanded the capabilities and features of its other productivity apps.

"With the integration of Quickoffice into the Google Docs, Sheets and Slides apps, the Quickoffice app will be unpublished from Google Play and the App Store in the coming weeks," the company said on its official apps updates blog. "Existing users with the app can continue to use it, but no features will be added and new users will not be able to install the app."

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Israel’s security crackdown has raised questions about the asymmetry of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the value of lives on both sides.

The latest FAA rules on UAVs are so broad that they class adorable toy quadcopters as drones and require special permits to operate them. Meanwhile, hot air balloons and unpiloted model aircraft are fair game for unlicensed play. The drone hobbyists are pissed: Read the rest

At a news conference, three of the five men whose convictions were overturned praised Mayor Bill de Blasio for settling their lawsuit against New York City.

California's favorite footwear giant announces yet another a killer collaboration for the coming months. While May 2014 saw the introduction of the coveted Star Wars collection, today it's the impossibly cute Vault by Van +...
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Google must have missed an essential lesson from Hamlet in high school English class: "Brevity is the soul of wit."

The search giant hosted its annual developers conference, Google I/O, on Wednesday. The keynote speech, led by Sundar Pichai, a Google senior vice president who oversees Android, Chrome and Google apps, lasted two hours and 31 minutes — much to the dismay of those watching at the conference and via live stream.

Although it may have felt like the longest tech conference keynote to date, it wasn't. That title, though, does belong to Google; the I/O keynote last year clocked in at a whopping three hours and 25 minutes. We took a look at the lengths of the keynotes for Apple's WWDC conferences, Microsoft's Build conferences and previous Amazon press conferences, including its recent Fire phone announcement, to see how they stacked up. Google should take a hint. Read more...

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