Fatbob

If you didn't see Cabin In The Woods that was stupid of you. It's really great. Scary, meta and pretty gutsy. And like all good things, well okay like all things, its brilliance is being exploited for a theme park attraction. But it sounds awesome. Some sort-of-not-really spoilers ahead.

Universal Orlando is adding the cabin as part of its 23rd annual Halloween Horror Nights event, which runs on and off from the end of September until November 2. Visitors do a walk through of the cabin, the Facility, and the cube cells and there's more background on the mythology surrounding the movie. Michael Aiello from Universal says:

We are building the cabin completely. You’re going to walk through a forest to get there. You’re going into the cabin. You’re going to go into the cube cells. We’re literally taking everything we can in the film and giving you a kind of best-of montage of the film with this kind of linking story. You’re going to be in the control room when merman attacks.

Creepy, fascinating and terrifying. Sounds pretty much perfect. [The Mary Sue, Zap2It]

(Video Link)

In this impressive, high quality production, trials bike champion Danny MacAskill recreates a young boy's obstacle course made of toys. You can find behind-the-scenes information about this perfectly staged video at the link.

Content warning: there's some foul language at the end of the video. At least, I think there is. It's hard for me to understand the woman's accent.

Link -via 22 Words

This is the last call for everyone to migrate off Google Reader before it shuts down July 1. Follow these guidelines to put Google Reader behind you and get setup with one (or more) of the services that are ready and raring to become your new RSS home.

Back up your Google Data

Back up your Google Reader subscriptions and save them offline. You can use Google's Takeout backup service or a more powerful tool that'll save all your Reader data, including starred items, tags and more. Once you have your data saved offline, you can import it into any app or service you choose.

Select another RSS Reader platform

There are several platforms from which to choose if you want to replace Google Reader.

Digg Reader: Digg Reader is a web app with an intuitive, minimalist design. It has fast syncing with mobile apps for the iPhone and iPad. The service integrates with Digg and is free to use, though a premium option may come sometime down the line. Even though it lacks search, Digg Reader is the service I'm going with for now. Read our review of Digg Reader.

Feedly: Feedly has excellent third-party app support and a good web-based client. It's also free to use and is the service that many developers and users are adopting the most right now. This is my second choice behind Digg Reader, with one caveat -- without a monetization strategy, Feedly may not be able to sustain itself as it grows, and you may find yourself having to find another RSS solution again. Normally, these financials wouldn't enter my mind, but the abrupt shutdown of Google Reader has me questioning the longevity of each new service I try out.

FeedBin: Feedbin has a Google Reader-like web interface and syncs with Reeder for iPhone, Mr. Reader and Readkit for Mac. It costs a reasonable $2 per month. You can read more about Feedbin in this excellent review from TidBits. Feedbin is my third choice because of the third-party apps, built-in Readability option and support for tags.

NewsBlur: NewsBlur offers its own apps for the web, iPad and iPhone, but lacks third-party app support. Within its own apps, it has an intelligent filtering option and support for comments from the NewsBlur community. You can sign up for a free account that is limited to 64 feeds or opt for the paid version, which is $24 per year. You can read more about NewsBlur in this excellent review from TidBits.

Feed Wrangler: Feed Wrangler has a great web UI and third-party app support. It uses smart streams to make RSS reading easier. Priced affordably, the service will cost you $19 per year. You can read more about Feed Wrangler in this excellent review from TidBits.

AOL Reader: AOL Reader is the new kid on the block and is not as feature-filled as its competition. No mobile apps and no search are its biggest detractors. It is free to use , but has small, sidebar ads. Read our review of AOL Reader.

NetNewsWire 4: NetNewsWire 4, the first version of the classic reader from current owner Black Pixel, is a polished OS X app with many convenient features like tabbed reading and a built-in browser. No native mobile apps and no third-party apps are a dealbreaker for me. NetNewsWire is free to use while it is still in open beta. You can save money by pre-ordering now for $10. The app will cost $20 when the final version with syncing is released. Read our review of NetNewsWire 4.

Fever: Fever is a self-hosted solution that'll meet your RSS needs as long as you don't mind getting down and dirty with PHP and MySQL. The server build has a $30 one-time fee.

Download some apps

Most of the services above have their own OS X or iOS apps that you can use on your Apple devices. If you want something different, there are a handful of third-party apps that'll sync with services like Feedbin, Feedly and Feed Wrangler. You can browse through those third-party apps in our rundown of current RSS readers.

Last Call: Everything you need to prepare for the Google Reader shutdown originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 30 Jun 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

On Monday, Google will pull the plug on Google Reader, despite much general online despair about the death of the most popular RSS reader.

While this is definitely the most popular tool Google has put on ice, it's certainly not the first. The company is known for dabbling in all sorts of products, and dropping the ones it didn't feel were well-supported

So if you were ever a fan of Google Wave, Google Labs or maybe even Google Buzz, you're probably a little nostalgic for the services of Google's past

If you want to take the trip down memory lane, check out the infographic below, courtesy of Wordstream. Read more...

The campaign to resurrect Mega Man Legends 3 won't die, and I honestly hope it never does. The fans continue to surprise me with the myriad ways they demonstrate support, from producing a concept album to launching a replica of Roll and Tron's rescue rocket.

I guess the next logical step is to make a game.

At the Mega Rock Fan Fiesta, a Mega Man fan event held this past Saturday in Shibuya, Tokyo, the "Get Me Off the Moon" Facebook group announced an awesome new joint project with the group's Japanese equivalent, the Rockman DASH 3 Reboot Team. Since Capcom decided not to release the completed Mega Man Legends 3: Protoype Version on eShop, these two groups will simply remake it and release it online for free. Or rather I should say, they will demake it.

But this is not your typical fan production. They've actually got two former Capcom staffers to on board: Hideki Ishikawa and Makoto Tomozawa, character designer and composer for the Legends series, respectively. Ishikawa will create the game's box art, while Tomozawa will contribute a couple of songs to the soundtrack. That is... just... wow.

Even the most amazing accomplishments of modern-day science will never be able to hold a candle to the impossible powers promised by alchemy. It never delivered, but old-school alchemists weren't discouraged by failure, and now a new-school alchemist is taking a look back to figure out what the hell they were doing that whole time.

Larry Principe of Johns Hopkins University isn't quite an alchemist, but as a science historian, he knows how to think like one. By digging through tons of old manuscripts, he's been able to piece together some of the failed experiments of old and bring them into the modern day. So far, no philosophers stone. So far.

RSS isn't rocket science. And while Google Reader is gasping its last breaths—after this weekend, it's gone forever—there's already a veritable army of newcomers vying to replace it. There's even a good chance one of them will be better than the dead-end Google Reader ever could have been. That's great and all, but even the perfect RSS reader can't fill the void. Google Reader wasn't just a service; it was a place, and I'll miss being there.

The Internet—and computers in general—create a very weird sense of location. A website is not a place you can physically be, and neither is your desktop, but we talk about them like they are because that's how it feels. It's why your desktop is called a "desktop," and why there's that icon of a little computer sitting on it. It's why you have folders, and why people have actually uttered terrible phrases like "information superhighway" out loud. Say it with me: Cyberspace.

And with a place like Google Reader, that illusion is stronger than ever. Do you remember where you were during the SOPA blackouts? Or when MegaUpload got taken down? Or when the Apple vs. Samsung verdict came in? I do; I was in Google Reader. It's where I relearned how to use the Internet. It's the reason the "J" key has worn off my keyboard.

Every day I bounce between dozens of sites, each with its own purpose, its own content, its own look and feel. But inside Google Reader, the Internet—the carefully curated Internet I built, pruned, and tweaked—comes to me. And, more often than not, I don't even have to leave its comfortingly familiar little interface to ingest what my little intranet has to offer. At its best, it's my virtual study, a private reading room. At its worst, it's a closet with a slop bucket on the floor. But it's still my slop bucket close. Or it was.

It's equally strange and accurate to say Googs and I were intimately familiar. I've barely been a working blogger for two years, and yet hastily scrawled napkin math suggests that I've spent upwards of 1,000 hours at www.google.com/reader. I've spent more time with Google Reader than I have with some humans I consider to be friends. In a weird sort of way, it feels like I grew up there.

Maybe someday Google Reader will wind up sitting alongside other long-lost places of the past, like the backseat of the garish red Subaru hatchback my parents got rid of right before I turned 16, or the college dorm room where I learned the basics of spending entire hungover Sundays in bed. You know, the places you forget until you're taking stock of memories, but think of fondly on that rare occasion that you think of them at all.

It's a strange sort of nostalgia you start to feel for a place—even digital ones—for the sole reason that you'll never be back there again, one that it makes it all the tougher to say goodbye. For now, there's a hole in my heart, and it feels 1000+ unread items wide.

So-called copyright-trolling in the file-sharing space was an activity pioneered in Germany around eight years ago.

Ever since, many hundreds of thousands of Internet users there have been plagued by threats from rightsholders of almost every kind of media, with many settling for amounts up to 1,200 euros a shot.

As we know, these pay-up-or-else schemes also spread to the UK and then to the United States, proving particularly popular with porn companies out to prop up their failing business models. One such outfit, Malibu Media, has filed dozens of lawsuits in the United States and recently made efforts to export their project back to Germany. It didn’t go well.

Last year, Malibu issued complaints in Germany that Internet subscribers had illegally shared eight of their X-Art movies including “Flexible Beauty” and “Young passion”. As a result the company wanted to obtain the identities of Internet subscribers behind the IP addresses it held on file in order to extract settlements from them.

However, as outlined in a recently published ruling by the District Court of Munich, the complaints proved problematic.

Firstly, Malibu claimed to be the creator of the movies but the District Court said that the company’s name was nowhere to be found on the videos in question, only references to the X-Art brand. As a result Malibu were unable to convince the Court that they held the rights.

Next there was the issue of distribution. Although Malibu claimed that the movies had been released worldwide, it failed to demonstrate that they had either been released locally on DVD or via an online platform. On that basis the District Court found that the works had never been released in Germany and were therefore ineligible for protection under the Copyright Act.

Finally, the District Court said that the actual content of the videos raised issues under Germany’s Copyright Act. The Court noted that the videos showed “only sexual processes in a primitive way” and are therefore classified as “pure pornography.” As such, the productions are not a “personal intellectual creation” and are not entitled to protection under Germany’s Copyright Act.

The District Court’s ruling is definitely a setback for Malibu in Germany but it should be noted they have been extremely persistent in the United States following earlier problems. They’ll probably be back after some fine-tunes, there’s simply too much money at stake to give up now.

Source: Porn Films Don’t Get Copyright Protection in Germany, Court Rules

Big smiles at the Cabinet Office, if nowhere else

The Ministry of Defence renewed a three-year Microsoft Enterprise Agreement late on Friday with Software Box Ltd (SBL) for 180,000 seats in a deal that sources value at roughly £15m per year.…

Using an X-Acto knife, animator Joaquin Baldwin folded a 6 mm sheet of Gampi paper into a crane. He posted it on reddit and then cracked occasionally disturbing jokes in the comment thread that followed.

Link -via Twisted Sifter

Android: We've covered several Android alarm clocks, but WakeVoice is different. Instead of waking up to music, WakeVoice rings, then speaks to you when it's time to get up. It can play a personalized message, read the news headlines, or fill you in on the weather for the day, all while you drag yourself out of bed.

Read more...

We hope you've had time to say your goodbyes, because Google Reader bows out today, ending its eight-year existence. The search giant gave a two-month warning, with many users incensed that they'd be losing their defacto RSS reader -- their favorite way to absorb news and internet goings-on. We'd like to hear why Reader managed to pull in such a devoted following, so leave us your memories in the comments below and let us know which service you've moved your feeds to, because some of us haven't decided yet.

Filed under: Internet, Google

Comments

Welcome to this morning's edition of "First To Know," a series in which we keep you in the know on what's happening in the digital world.

Today, we're looking at three particularly interesting stories. Monday is the last day for Google Reader. In a move to curb the anger of power users everywhere, Google released several new features for its news service. In smartwatch news, Apple filed for the “iWatch” trademark in Japan. Finally, four new slides from the PRISM program have been revealedThe Washington Post explains how data is acquired, analyzed and stored

Check out the video above for more on these stories. Read more...

Mozilla announced the first two smartphones based on its operating system, Firefox OS on Monday: the ZTE Open and Alcatel One Touch Fire

The two devices will soon be available through Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom. Telefonica announced that the ZTE Open will be offered in Spain starting on July 2 for 69 euros ($90).

Individual partners will release the dates of availability for each market. Mozilla said that the first Firefox OS will launch in Central and Eastern Europe under the wing of Norway-based Telenor "this year."

Mozilla's Firefox OS, which was one of the main topics during this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, is a HTML-based, open source mobile OS that should provide a user-friendly alternative to Android, especially on entry-level handsets. Mozilla hopes to conquer much of Central and Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America with Firefox OS — most of which are currently dominated by cheap Android devices Read more...

After withering in the dry heat for the last four months, Google Reader will quietly disappear into the horizon later today. It’s a sad day, but the sun will rise tomorrow, and the Internet will keep on spinning. Thankfully there are a lot of fine Google Reader alternatives to keep feeding your RSS addiction.

For the past month, a daily popup has reminded Google Reader users to back up their data. Google is essentially zero’n the drive tomorrow, ridding itself of millions of OMPL files. Stop procrastinating and take 5 minutes to export your data.

There are several options.

Google Takeout is by far the easiest way to export your Google Reader data. The Google service is designed to export not only Google Reader data, but also data from Buzz, Hangouts, Contacts, Drive, Goggles, and YouTube. If you just choose Reader, the export file should be less than a megabyte and only take a minute or so to process and download. Once downloaded, this OMPL file can be used in most RSS readers.

If you choose all of the services, the process will take a lot longer, but Google Takeout will email you when the exported data is ready to be downloaded.

However, Google Takeout doesn’t export all of your Reader information. As Mihai Parparita explains through his persistent.info site, it leaves behind tagged items, comments, and read items. He created this tool to export everything through Reader’s API.

It grabs:

• All your read items
• All your starred items
• All your tagged items
• All your shared items
• All the shared items from the people you were following.
• All the comments on shared items
• All your liked items
• All items you’ve kept unread, emailed, read on your phone, clicked on or otherwise interacted with.
• All items that have appeared in one of your subscriptions
• All items that were recommended to you
• All items in the (English) “Explore” section
• All the profiles of the people you were following before the sharepocalypse.
• All your preferences.

The tool takes a bit of command line work, but if your Reader data is precious, it’s worth the time and effort. The step-by-step instructions are here.

Alternatively you could just move on from RSS and embrace Twitter.

For those of you who think that only posting comics on Monday, Wednesday and Friday is silly (or if you simply hate the number 3), we have good news.  We’re going to draw up some extra material from time to time and post them to our facebook page, like this one Will posted yesterday.

If you're still looking for a Google Reader replacement, time is running out! We have some alternatives, but Feedspot is a new contender that offers a simple webapp for reading the news, sub-feeds for tags, starred items, and favorites, and tons of social features for sharing stories with friends.

Read more...

image by Constantine

The Google Reader shut down is imminent, and RSS app developers are scrambling to move their apps away from the Google sync service. Some third-party apps have selected Feedly or Feedbin to drive their syncing, while others have decided to go it alone with their own syncing solution. Still others have decided to become a standalone reader with no syncing until they have time to evaluate which syncing service is the best for their customers.

Here is a list of popular third-party RSS reading software and their current syncing status:

iOS Reader Apps

Mr. Reader [iPad; $3.99] Syncs with BazQux Reader, Feedbin, FeedHQ, Feedly, Feed Wrangler and Fever.

Reeder for iPhone [iPhone; Free] Syncs with Feedbin and Fever now. Also standalone/local RSS without syncing. Feedly and Feed Wrangler (No support for smart streams yet in Reeder) in version 3.2, which is pending approval.

Reeder for iPad [iPad; Free] App will be pulled until a new version with syncing is available.

Slow Feeds [iOS Universal; $2.99] Syncs with Feed Wrangler, Feedbin, FeedHQ and NewsBlur.

Newsify [iOS Universal; Free] Syncs with Feedly.

Byline for iPhone [iPhone; $2.99] Syncs with Feedly.

Byline Universal [iOS Universal; Free with IAP] Syncs with Feedly.

Favs [iOS Universal; $2.99] Syncs with Feedbin.

Readlines for Feedbin [iOS Universal; $0.99] Syncs with Feedbin.

Bulletin for Feedbin [iPhone; $0.99] Syncs with Feedbin.

Pulse [iOS Universal; Free] Now a standalone reader, but you should import your Google Reader feeds as soon as possible using these instructions from Pulse.

NewsBar [iPhone; $3.99] Standalone reader with iCloud sync. iPad version coming soon.

OS X Reader Apps

Readkit for Mac [OS X; $4.99] Syncs with Fever, NewsBlur, Feedbin and Feed Wrangler. Also standalone RSS capabilities.

Favs [OS X; $9.99] Syncs with Feedbin.

Reeder for Mac [OS X; Free] App will be pulled until a new version with syncing is available.

Caffeinated [OS X;$5.99] Now a standalone RSS reader. Follow these instructions if you are updating from version 1.3 of the app.

NewsBar [OS X; $4.99] Standalone reader with iCloud sync to the iPhone.

Leaf RSS Reader [OS X; $4.99] Now a standalone reader, with possible syncing in the future. Read this post about Leaf's migration away from Google Reader.

For those who have chosen a Google Reader replacement and are looking for apps, here is a list of third-party RSS Readers organized by service.

• Feedly: Mr. Reader, Reeder for iPhone (pending App Store approval), Newsify, Byline for iPhone and Byline Universal.
• Feed Wrangler: Mr. Reader , Reeder for iPhone (pending App Store approval), Slow Feeds and Readkit for Mac.
• Feedbin: Mr. Reader , Reeder for iPhone, Slow Feeds, Favs, Readlines for Feedbin, Bulletin for Feedbin and Readkit for Mac.
• Fever: Mr. Reader , Reeder for iPhone and Readkit for Mac.
• NewsBlur: Slow Feeds.
• Standalone: Pulse, Caffeinated for Mac, Leaf RSS Reader for Mac and NewsBar for iOS and OS X.

Third-Party RSS Readers-- Which ones are ready for the Google Reader shutdown? originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 30 Jun 2013 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Tis the season for annoying bug bites, but a surprisingly simple remedy exists that can eliminate all of the itch within minutes.

Read more...

(YouTube link)

Mainly because Samuel L. Jackson said so. He explains how he came to use a purple light saber in the Star Wars prequels when he appeared on The Graham Norton Show. Since this is Samuel L. Jackson on the BBC, you can expect NSFW language. -via Tastefully Offensive