firehose

HARRISBURG, PA—After experiencing the intoxicating, extreme high of watching a 56-car freight train pass before his eyes last week, 3-year-old junkie Logan Gunter reportedly became instantly hooked on looking at rail transport, demanding to be taken...

The amazing new "Relationship Pro" video game controller lets both members of a couple pretend they are in a healthy relationship.

PHILADELPHIA—A voting panel of journalists and prominent sports figures elected the D battery to the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame Sunday, honoring the alkaline storage cell’s many achievements in pelting players from visiting teams.

DENVER—In a stunning revelation Friday that sent shockwaves through the NFL, Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning announced during an emotional press conference that he is gay for football. “For many years I’ve struggled with hiding this s...

We like the look which [Emmanuel] achieved with his Raspberry Pi based Squeezebox client. It’s got that minimalist slant that makes it seem like a commercial product at first glance. But one more look at the speakers without grates, the character LCD, and the utilitarian buttons, knobs, and switches tips us off that it’s filled with the hardware we know and love.

Since Logitech announced that it was terminating the Squeezebox line we’ve seen several projects which take up the torch. We’ve seen the RPi used as a Squeezebox server and several embedded Linux systems used as clients. This follows in the footsteps of the latter. The RPi is running Raspbian with the squeezelite package handling the bits necessary to talk to his server. The controls on the front include a power switch, rotary encoder and button for navigating the menus, and a potentiometer to adjust the HD44780 LCD screen’s contrast. The speakers are a set of amplified PC speakers that were liberated from their cases and mounted inside of the wooden box that makes up the enclosure. The in-progress shots of that case look pretty rough, but some sanding and painting really pulled everything together. As you would expect, we’ve embedded the demo video after the jump.

Filed under: digital audio hacks, Raspberry Pi

“The Manda Packing Company recall announced this past week now includes 468,000 pounds of roast beef, ham, turkey breast, tasso pork, ham shanks, hog headcheese, corned beef, and pastrami. The agriculture department said Friday the products were recalled because of possible contamination with Listeria monocytogenes. The products were shipped to retailers in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.”

- Louisiana company recalls 468K pounds of meat - Yahoo! News

thepeoplesrecord:

The House I Live In
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Youtube

The People’s Record
Tumblr | Facebook | Twitter

chicksdaddy writes "Social Media Widget, a free plug-in for the WordPress blogging platform with more than a million downloads, was restored to WordPress's official plugin directory on Thursday, days after it was found injecting WordPress websites with spam links to web sites offering Pay Day Loans. In a post on a support forum for Social Media Widget (SMW), Samuel Wood, a WordPress administrator, said that WordPress was willing to give SMW and its owner a second chance after he claimed to have been the victim of a contract developer gone rogue. 'Naturally we do take a very hard line on spam, and obviously an author putting malicious code into a plugin is enough grounds for us to bring down the ban hammer,' Wood wrote on Friday. 'But there are natural circumstances where an author may not be at fault.' SMW appears to be such a case. It is one of the 20 most popular WordPress add-ons and allows WordPress web site operators to include links to their other social media accounts. Brendan Sheehan, the owner of SMW, said, 'We trusted the wrong people with our plugin code and take full responsibility. We are a marketing company at heart and are not actually developers, so in order to provide major updates and improvements, we had to seek outside help. Some of these people deceived us and abused our trust and naivety...We will not make this mistake again.' Wood said the folks at Wordpress decided to accept that story — but that they're watching SMW closely. 'Basically, the current maintainer is not a professional programmer, and put his trust in the wrong freelancers to do the coding work for him...We'll be watching the plugin for changes,' he said. 'The plugin is back up for now, and as long as it stays clean, it's fine.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Science fiction is full of inventions that become reality, like killer drones and 3-D printers. So maybe if we wrote more social science fiction about innovations that could help end poverty, those would become real, too. That's what the founder of microcredit believes, anyway.

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juliedillon:

Sketches from Middle-Earth: Visions of a Modern Myth by Donato Giancola. More sketches can be seen at his blog post on Muddy Colors.

Wow!

dofistandroidgirls:

robbiepan:

bad fucking ass.

IT’S A FREAKIN TABLE, WHAT

Two years after joining Facebook, designer Nicholas Felton is leaving the company. In a Facebook post yesterday, Felton said he was "extremely proud of the projects I worked on" and called his time at Facebook a high point in his career, but that he would be "moving on" and returning to New York. Felton is best known for working on the Facebook Timeline, a major overhaul that gave profile pages a new look and a new way of organizing information. He leaves just as Facebook introduces another new tool: Home, an Android launcher that makes Facebook posts and messaging central to a phone's user interface.

---

Felton's plans for the moment are unknown, but he has a long pre-Facebook history. His widely read Personal Annual Reports, a chart from which is shown above, collect details captured by relentless lifelogging, creating a revealing portrait of himself. Those reports would later be credited as an influence on Timeline. He's also seen his brand of life-tracking and analytics become more popular; last year, he described his desire to put his data in context now that "half my friends are wearing FitBits."

• Via TechCrunch
• Source Nicholas Felton (Facebook)
• Related Items nicholas felton lifelogging facebook timeline facebook timeline employee departure design designer

photo via Edinburgh International Science Festival

“Pisces” by artist Jason Hackenwerth is a 40-foot-tall double helix made of 10,000 balloons. Commissioned by the Edinburgh International Science Festival, the sculpture took Hackenwerth and his team six days to construct. It is on display at the National Museum of Scotland through April 14, 2013. There are many more photos of the sculpture on Flickr. Hackenwerth has more of his balloon sculptures on his site.

photo by Dave Morris

photo by Royan

photo via Edinburgh International Science Festival

via Colossal

Xbox Live is currently experiencing a significant service disruption, with many users reporting to sign in to Microsoft's online gaming service. The outage — which inconveniently comes during peak weekend gaming hours — has subsequently rendered a large part of the console's functionality useless for the time being. Many of the most popular apps on Xbox 360 (including Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu, and YouTube) are tied to Xbox Live Gold subscriptions; if you're unable to sign in, you won't be able to access any content. Microsoft has confirmed the ongoing issue on its Xbox support website, pledging that "every available resource" is currently working to get players back online. In the meantime, the company is providing status updates every 30 minutes.

• Source Microsoft
• Related Items xbox live xbox live gold outage service disruption Microsoft Home consoles

zolotoivek:

Portrait of two Armenian fighters during the Hamidian Massacres, 1895.

If you can look at this picture and tell me that this isn’t one of the sweetest photos of a dude with a ‘stache that you’ve ever seen, then you obviously need to learn a little something about facial hair and being awesome.  This picture alone makes the guy badass, even if you didn’t know the story behind it. Fridtjof Nansen decided he was going to become the first person to reach the North Pole.  He developed a pretty ingenious tactic for doing so – he built the famous, ultra-hard wooden ship Fram, lodged it into the ice pack off the coast of Siberia in 1893, and let it drift in the ice while the tides of ocean carried him across the pole.  This was a tactic that would be used by great explorers from Scott to Shackleton to traverse both Arctic and Antarctic climes, and this guy pioneered that shit.

Nansen and his crew drifted for 18 months, somehow surviving in the freezing-ass cold temperatures, but unfortunately the tides of the Arctic Sea decided not to cooperate with Nansen’s plan, no matter how good it was or how intensely he tried to stare it down.  Realizing that he was drifting too far from the pole and wouldn’t cross it, Nansen obviously did the badass thing – he and one other guy jumped out of the drifting boat, jumped on a dog sled, and rushed 140 miles across open ice to get there.

In the video, the founders of Photoshop — John Knoll, Thomas Knoll, Russell Brown, and Steve Guttman — sit down around a table and talk about the series of coincidences and circumstances that led to the creation of the tool that has visually redefined our times.

Jenna Marbles is the reigning queen of YouTube and the particular delight of teenage girls.

The Debian Project is pleased to announce that, according to the terms of the new trademark policy, Debian logos and marks may now be used freely for both non-commercial and commercial purposes. The Debian Project encourages wide use of its marks in all ways that promote Debian and free software.

Animal as Sláine; Mark Chilcott

An anonymous reader writes "In late 2011, Cornell University won a prize from NYC Mayor Bloomberg's contest to design a new science school. Google donated some space in Manhattan, and since January this year students have been enrolled in the school's 'beta class, a one-year master's program in computer science.' The beta curriculum is designed to equip the students with all the knowledge they need to jump right into a tech startup: there's a mandatory business class, the U.S. Commerce Department stationed a patent officer on-site, and mentors from the private sector are brought in to help with design. 'The curriculum will not be confined to standard disciplines, but will combine fields like electrical engineering, software development and social sciences, and professors will teach across those boundaries. In fact, no professor has an office, not even the dean, and Dr. Huttenlocher insists they will not when the campus moves to Roosevelt Island, either. Instead, each person has a desk with low dividers, and people can grab conference rooms as needed — much like the headquarters of a small tech company.' It's a long, interesting article about how they're trying to turn 'tech school' into something a lot more rigorous and innovative than something like ITT Tech."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Tetris Stackable LED Desk Lamp is a modular lamp that comes with seven Tetriminos, or Tetris blocks, in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and pink. The LED blocks light up when stacked together, and turn off when the lamp is disassembled. The creative homage to the classic video game Tetris is available for purchase from ThinkGeek.

images via ThinkGeek

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

The 2009 Star Trek reboot was a huge hit among U.S. audiences, restoring the classic series to much of its past glory. But overseas, not so much. At a time when tentpole movies draw more of their box office from foreign markets, Paramount aims to conquer the real final frontier: Asia and Europe.

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Archaeologists have discovered a massive 54,000 ton pile of basalt under the Sea of Galilee off the Israeli coast. The cone-shaped structure may have been an ancient burial ground.

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It's hard to imagine, given Batman's popularity and ubiquity over the last 80 years, that someone would not know the basic concept behind the caped crusader. And yet, not only do some people not know what Batman is all about, those people apparently all work in ABC Family's promo department, which made the above commercial for their premiere of Batman Begins.

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It's Yuri's Night! Tonight, space enthusiasts the world over will kick off celebrations to commemorate 52 years of human space exploration by recognizing the anniversary of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's historic flight into space (not to mention the 32nd anniversary of the very first Shuttle launch).

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Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released maps of American obesity that pegged the country's Southern states as the fattest at Fat Camp USA. Now, a study out of the University of Alabama at Birmingham is taking the CDC to task. Southerners aren't the fattest, the study concludes, they're just more honest about their height and weight.

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Well, then I am your man.

And there is why I love John Watson.

This week in the world of cartoons, we are treated to an amazing Archer season finale that blends two of the best cartoons of the past decade. We also get a very comic book-friendly episode of Ultimate Spider-Man as well a pillow fort vacation on Adventure Time. Gravity Falls is off this week, but will return next week. As always - minor spoilers ahead!

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Shark-Shaped Laundry Basket

(laughter) WANT.