firehose

Her home, at times, was a shaded bench with a sight line toward the White House, in a tiny park used regularly by employees of the nearby World Bank.

Game Paused’s Everyday is Play

A new book by game-related design project Game Paused looks to collect inspired artwork in a lovely hardcover package. From the Kickstarter:

It will showcase the works of designers, musicians, artists, writers and developers that have taken inspiration from the art that we grew up with.

Through a series of features and interviews, covering everything from fan art to game modifications, we aim to provide not only a beautiful book but a wealth of creative play.

Not only is the book just really great-looking, but higher reward tiers include t-shirts, posters and other bonuses in a “Console Pack" meant to evoke game console boxes.

While there’s already an impressive list of participants, Game Paused is seeking submissions for the book. Pretty much anyone who does anything related to game stuff is welcome, from graphic design to “trick jumping."

My only reservation here is with the use of “everyday." Is that the right use? Am I being a huge jerk for bringing it up? Update: Designer Matthew Kenyon is updating the art for what is now known as Every Day is Play, in part because some jerk wouldn’t shut up about it.

New submitter Juggler writes "Mailpile, a new Free Software project out of Iceland, launched at the #OHM2013 hacker festival in Holland today. The talk's brief demo garnered rounds of applause and was followed by the launch of an Indiegogo campaign which, if funded, will allow them work full time on building a modern e-mail/web-mail client. The team's main goals are to address the usability issues that prevent non-technical folks from taking advantage of secure e-mail today, bring new life to FOSS e-mail development and provide a realistic alternative to keeping e-mail in the cloud."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ditch the détente. For elite clubs, this is a full-fledged sport, complete with rankings and rowdiness. Not everyone is happy about that.

chicksdaddy writes "Two researchers at the Black Hat Briefings security conference Thursday said Smart TVs from electronics giant Samsung are rife with vulnerabilities in the underlying operating system and Java-based applications. Those vulnerabilities could be used to steal sensitive information on the device owner, or even spy on the television's surroundings using an integrated webcam. Speaking in Las Vegas, Aaron Grattafiori and Josh Yavor, both security engineers at the firm ISEC Partners, described Smart TVs as Linux boxes outfitted with a Webkit-based browser. They demonstrated how vulnerabilities in SmartHub, the Java-based application that is responsible for many of the Smart TV's interactive features, could be exploited by a local or remote attacker to surreptitiously activate and control an embedded webcam on the SmartTV, launch drive-by download attacks and steal local user credentials and those of connected devices, browser history, cache and cookies as well as credentials for the local wireless network. Samsung has issued patches for many of the affected devices and promises more changes in its next version of the Smart TV. This isn't the first time Smart TVs have been shown to be vulnerable. In December, researchers at the firm ReVuln also disclosed a vulnerability in the Smart TV's firmware that could be used to launch remote attacks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

nypl:

It was 130 years ago this month that this image ran in The Peterson Magazine. Called, “The Kittens," the real point was to show off French fashion of the 1880s, but we’re now using it for Caturday. Everyone dresses like this to play with their cats, right? The August 1883 image is currently in our Mid-Manhattan Picture Collection, which (as we’ve mentioned before), is used by the costume designers of “Orange is the New Black." So vIsit Mid-Manhattan and get inspired! Anyone can use the Picture Collection (of course, for free). 

Note: these are my opinions only.

Another topic at breakfast this morning with Rex was the spying the NSA is doing on all of us.

I think, if the President decided that it was more important to level with us than continue to deceive us, which they have been doing, there's no way of denying it now (and they haven't tried to), this is what he'd have to say.

• The clock is running out on our civilization. Our financial system almost fell apart in 2008, and the only way we were able to get it functioning again was to throw a lot of bullshit at it, to re-inflate the bubble. Any other approach would have meant going into a kind of depression the world has never seen.
• While that's happening, we've done nothing about the changing climate. Our coastal cities are going to be underwater soon. There will be chaos when that happens, orders of magnitude greater than the chaos that ensued after 9/11.
• Also, our economy is now built around computer networks, whose security is a joke. One day, probably soon, hackers are going to get into the banking system and "disrupt" it. When you check your bank balance you'll see $0. No one will know who did this. It might even be the US government.

We can't change any of these things. We will have an economic collapse. The climate will disrupt our lives in unimaginable ways. And hackers will rule us. All this will happen. So if you believe this, how do you prepare for it, such that the people who control the US govt have a chance to survive with their lifestyles intact? That's why Obama supports NSA spying. His bosses ordered him to.

What should we do about it? Probably nothing. Both of us, Rex and I, are in our late 50s. This stuff will play out over the next 20 years or so. Neither of us has enough of a stake in it to devote serious energy to it, esp if the younger people, who really do have a stake in the outcome continue to be uninterested.

I thought it was notable that they blame us, the boomer generation, for the mess we're in. When we were younger we did protest. Study the history. We were even effective at stopping the war we objected to. Our crime, if you want to think of it as that, is that we became middle-aged, and decided to live our lives instead of trying to change the world. We created the networks they love so much, and think we don't understand. So on the whole, I'd say we did okay. Not great, but not too bad. The question is why are today's young people acting so middle-aged? :-)

BTW, the President going on camera and telling us a big truth is not unprecedented. Check out Eisenhower's farewell address. It's amazing how he laid it out there. If only we had listened. It's the beginning of an incredible movie called Why We Fight. Highly recommended.

This is now the second post in the same day about delicious barrel-aged farmhouse-style ales with brettanomyces funkiness, but that's just how your weekend is going to go. Assuming, as I always do, that you take my word as gospel and drink whatever I tell you to drink because you want to be a happy, productive human being.

Every year, Upright Brewing releases Flora Rustica, a summer saison spiced with flowers—yarrow, calendula, and of course hop flowers. It's always a highlight of the season and a total bouquet in a glass, the kind of beer that might have actually attracted bees in the days before Colony Collapse Disorder.*

This year, Alex Ganum and Co. decided to take some of that beer and let it get comfy and cozy and take a little nap in some of their deep, dark, brett-filled barrels. The result is a farmhouse ale that smells like meadows blooming over wet earth and packs a cool, bright tartness that shoots through you on the first sip like a ray of sunshine. So it's either a cure for grey, damp today or a companion to warm, sunny tomorrow.

Check your favorite bottle shops (Saraveza, Apex, The Hop & Vine, Bottles, Beermongers, Imperial, Tin Bucket, etc.), because it's on shelves now!

*Sorry if that's a downer about the bees. Stop being such a baby—it's just a harbinger of the downfall of the global agricultural system. At least you're getting stung less.

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Double Fine's rave simulator rhythm-driven Dropchord launched for iOS, Android and the Ouya this week for $3.

Dropchord assigns ends of a line to each of a player's fingers and tasks them with gathering notes and dodging scratches. The game focuses on getting the highest score possible and its leaderboards encourage competitive play with friends. Dropchord's neon visuals pulse to the beat of its electronic soundtrack and switch styles with each song.

The game's Standard Mode moves players through stages while gradually adding new gameplay mechanics, while a Full Mix Mode supplies an endless session that gradually becomes more difficult.

Dropchord previously launched on PC and Mac for the hands-oriented Leap Motion.

Double Fine's Dropchord entrances iOS, Android and Ouya users originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 03 Aug 2013 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Each week, Big Issues focuses on a newly released comic-book issue of significance. This week, it’s Batman Incorporated #13. Written by Grant Morrison (Supergods, The Invisibles) and drawn by Chris Burnham (Officer Downe, Nixon’s Pals), the concluding issue of Morrison’s seven-year Batman epic honors the myth of the character while showcasing the qualities that have made this run spectacular. (Warning: major spoilers ahead.) 

All things come to an end, unless you’re Batman. That’s one of Grant Morrison’s enduring messages at the conclusion of his seven-year run writing the Dark Knight, highlighting the misery of existence for a superhero whose fight never stops. No matter how hard Bruce Wayne tries, he will never completely win the war against evil as long as Batman continues to make money for his corporate overlords, and over the past 74 years, he’s never seen rest, just reboots and ...

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Raspberry Pi and Arduino to get cellular access with SIM card add-on http://ars.to/145O5TR

NPR

Bulger foe was poisoned; attempted murder charges filed Boston.com Stephen “Stippo” Rakes, a potential witness in the trial of James “Whitey” Bulger who was found dead two weeks ago, was allegedly poisoned by a business associate who owed him money and who laced his McDonald's iced coffee with potassium cyanide, ... 'Whitey' Bulger Potential Witness Poisoned With CyanideABC News DA: Bulger witness poisoned, but unrelated to trialUSA TODAY Man accused of poisoning Stephen Rakes pleads not guiltyNECN New York Daily News -Los Angeles Times -CNN all 74 news articles »

msmoriarty writes "Google's Don Dodge, GitHub's Tom Preston-Werner, New Relic's Lew Cirne and others recently got together in San Francisco on a panel called 'The Developer is King: The Power Behind the Throne.' According to coverage of the event, the panelists all agreed that programmers — both independent ones and those employed by companies — have more power, and thus opportunities, than ever. Even the marketing power of developers was acknowledged: 'The only way to convince a developer is by giving them a demo and showing them how it's better,' said Preston-Werner. 'The beauty is, you plant these seeds around the world, and those people will evangelize it for you. Because another thing that developers are great at is telling other developers what works for them.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Heard is a smartphone app that allows users to record audio that happened up to five minutes in the past. In order to do so, the app constantly records a buffer of audio, but deletes the information unless the user decides to save it before it is replaced by newly recorded audio. The app is currently available to download from the iTunes App Store and an Android version is in development.

image via Heard

via Netted, Boing Boing

 

I am rushing a lot before I leave my house. I forget a lot of things. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve left my cell phone at home or my lunch. I will tell you one thing. I NEVER, I REPEAT NEVER leave home without my leather top hat.

In the ridiculously adorable photo series “My Daughter Kanna,” Japanese photographer Nagano Toyokazu poses his daughter Kanna in whimsical costumes and scenarios. Humorously, in many of the photos Kanna appears to be in the midst of yelling. Toyokazu has many more whimsical photos of his family on his Flickr.

via Ufunk.net, Don’t Hate Curate, My Modern Metropolis

fuckyeahdementia:

fuck it, its friday!

buzzfeed:

You might want to get that translated before you actually get the tattoo. 

Every time you see a video shot in portrait mode on YouTube or Facebook, you should weep for humanity and its inability to teach individuals how to shoot video so it fits properly into the same shape as the TV they watch in their homes.

So yesterday we heard a rumor that Man of Steel director Zack Snyder is looking to put an old Bruce Wayne in his Batman/Superman movie. Now Snyder is planning a sit-down with comics creator Frank Miller to talk about the crossover film.

Read more...

Google portrays itself as the sort of responsible internet giant that pushes back against intrusive federal requests for user data and is not a collaborator in the US government’s program to eavesdrop on the internet traffic of pretty much the entire world. But merely by providing ever more ways to record our actions, the company is assuming the risk that the US or other governments will simply compel it to give up that data, or else acquire it by other means.

Take, for example, the latest report that the FBI can activate the microphones in smart phones that run Google’s Android mobile operating system, in order to conduct surveillance. Nor is this ability unique to Google’s products. It can apparently be done with the microphones and cameras of laptop computers (this isn’t specified by the Wall Street Journal’s report, but they were probably running Microsoft Windows). And in 2002, the FBI tapped the microphone of a vehicle’s emergency call system.

But Google, more than perhaps any other company, is aggressively putting sensors and the software to activate them into our environment. The just-unveiled Moto X phone from Google subsidiary Motorola has a custom microchip that allows it to listen for voice commands literally all the time, even when the phone is “asleep”. Google’s Chrome web browser now supports voice commands; that means it’s also rolled into every Chrome OS notebook computer, which run Google’s answer to Windows. Google’s face-based computer, Google Glass, responds to voice commands. Even though it was Apple that took voice control mainstream with the Siri system on its iPhone, voice is a dominant theme in the future of Google, and is clearly slated to make its way into every product the company makes.

If anyone is smart enough to know how to protect user privacy, it’s the engineers at Google, and that’s probably one reason why so many of us trust Google with what amounts to our entire online lives. But as I mentioned earlier, there are two problems with this trust:

1. Governments can listen in on just about anything…

Thanks to the recent revelations by Edward Snowden, we now know that the US National Security Agency—and its overseas equivalents—has the ability to tap just about all internet traffic within the country’s borders. Most of the processing of Google’s voice control systems is done in the cloud, because it’s faster to ship a compressed version of your voice to remote but enormously powerful servers than it is to try to parse the same data on, say, your phone. This data, like most of our transactions with companies online, is probably encrypted, so even if the NSA were slurping it up, it could be extremely difficult to unscramble. But that encryption often often has loopholes, and some companies are less good at avoiding them than others.

2. … and if they can’t, they can always force companies to give it up

One reason Google and other internet companies periodically erase old data they have gathered about us is that they know that simply having that data around is a liability. If data exists, governments can compel internet companies to give it up. As Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt put it, when it comes to complying with national laws, however much Google doesn’t like it, “they have guns and we don’t.”

Given these two principles—and even leaving aside the times when users accidentally expose their own data by using weak passwords or getting caught in phishing and other attacks—there is a moral question that Google’s leaders do not seem to be discussing, at least in public: Is the simple act of recording ever more data morally defensible when there is always the possibility it can be mis-used for ever more intrusive surveillance?

This is a debate worth having. But the direction of all of Google’s recent products, from the self-surveillance required to enable Google Now to the lack of a simple affordance (like a recording light) on Google Glass to let others know whether or not you’re recording at any given moment suggest that Google isn’t sufficiently worried about how its actions appear. Of course, that could just be because the public demonstrably doesn’t care about privacy itself.

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Gay bars across the world are taking a stand against Russia’s recent anti-gay laws by swearing off Stolichnaya, a brand of Russian vodka made from wheat and rye. But there are some pretty good arguments for why the boycott is misguided.

The NYT sold the Boston Globe to the owner of the Boston Red Sox for $70 million.

• Manny Ramirez had an 8-year contract worth $160 million with the Boston Red Sox.
• The highest paid actor in 2013 is Robert Downey Jr who earned $75 million.
• HootSuite, a Twitter and Facebook utility, raised $165 million in its Series B round.
• RockMelt, widely viewed as a failed software company, sold to Yahoo for between $60 and $70 million.

$70 million was an incredibly good price for the Globe. Media properties are worth a lot. For example, according to Forbes, the Red Sox are worth $1.3 billion.

everydaylouie:

wow i have done a lot of animation today