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Fashion Week

Mojang, the folks behind Minecraft, have officially released Minecraft: Pi Edition. This free version of the popular game is optimized to run on the Raspberry Pi hardware, and has an API that exposes the game’s internals to a variety of programming languages.

Mojang intends this release to be an educational tool for teaching and learning programming. Since the API provides instant feedback in the game, it could be an interesting way to make learning to code fun for people of all ages.

Having access to the API on a RPi also means that the game can be connected to the real world. For example, using Python and the RPi.GPIO, pins on the GPIO header can be used for output or input. This creates a slew of possible hacks that interface with the game.

Any ideas on what you’d like to do with Minecraft on a RPi? Let us know in the comments. Also, we coincidentally just printed a minecraft pick on our 3d printer. There’s a time lapse video of it after the break!

Filed under: Raspberry Pi

San Francisco Chronicle

The Navy SEAL Who Shot Osama Bin Laden Is Insured, But Still Screwed Slate Magazine (blog) Yesterday's big non-Pope story was the engrossing Esquire profile of the Navy SEAL who shot and killed Osama Bin Laden. But one specific detail—that the shooter was apparently left without health insurance after leaving the military—has been criticized by ... Metallica Urged U.S. to Stop Using Their Music for Torture, Says SEAL Who ...SPIN The new story of the death of Osama bin LadenCNN International No surrender: Obama was ready to 'rain hell' on Pakistan during bin Laden raidTimes of India ABC News -The Takeaway -Patheos (blog) all 220 news articles »

Calligraphuck

It’s the ultimate low-maintenance houseplant: a spiderwort that waters itself.

David Latimer, a retired resident of Surrey, UK, created this self-sustaining garden “out of idle curiosity.” In 01960, he decided to fill a large glass carboy with some compost, planted a seedling, and gave it a quarter pint of water. He watered it once more in 01972, then sealed the container shut. Since then, the spiderwort has developed its very own, independent ecosystem.

As the Daily Mail explains, this microgarden refreshes its own air and provides its own water; all it needs is a bit of solar power. Sunlight provides the energy required for photosynthesis – the process whereby a plant sustains itself by converting water and carbon dioxide into nutrients and oxygen. Bacteria in the soil offer a little help in driving this cycle of energy conversion: consuming that oxygen, they digest dead leaves that fall to the ground, and release carbon dioxide back into the air.

But what truly allows it to nourish itself is the enclosed spiderwort’s remarkably efficient ability to recycle water. Its roots draw moisture from the soil, which is then transpirated back into the air by its leaves. As this moisture condenses, it is reabsorbed into the soil, and ready to begin its cycle all over again.

Latimer’s self-sustaining microcosm demonstrates plants’ remarkable efficiency in recycling natural resources and surviving in isolated environments. There is much we can learn from this – and indeed, NASA has indicated an interest in experimenting with such gardens in space.

“Plants operate as very good scrubbers, taking out pollutants in the air, so that a space station can effectively become self-sustaining … This is a great example of just how pioneering plants are and how they will persist given the opportunity.”

Interested in bottling your own garden? The daily mail offers a video tutorial to get you started.

The US intelligence community has concluded that America is the target of a massive cyber-espionage campaign that is threatening its competitiveness, The Washington Post reported.

If you have certain interior design tastes, some types of PC case mods may not quite suit your decor. That's where Jeffrey Stephenson comes in, this time with a fanless home theater PC featuring an art-deco style Mahogany shell that slides right over the aluminum chassis. Inside, there's an Intel Core i3-3225 processor running Windows 8 with 8GB RAM, an Intel Cherryville SSD, 150W Pico PSU and Silverstone HE02 passive heatsink. While able to handily perform most media chores (and generate a little heat!), it stays in keeping with his other tasteful, retro designs for those of you who eschew Thermaltake Level 10-type PC cases. Or, almost all of you, anyway.

Filed under: Desktops, Home Entertainment, Intel

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Via: Fanless Tech

Source: Jeffrey Stephenson

Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock. Learn How Men Become Pope The mysterious process comes to light! A powerful educational game for teachers, youth groups, and families Board game, cards and playing pieces Fun and exciting each time you play it!

Before we get to the Grammys and Downton Abbey and Fashion Week and all that other stuff that kept us up till 1 am and then had us springing (rolling, really) out of bed at 6 am, let us start the day off with a prayer. Helen Mirren attends the 2013 BAFTA Awards in a [...]

Actual Sunlight is a bleak, tough experience. It’s not difficult to play – but it can be hard to motivate yourself to keep playing. That’s the point. Designer Will O’Neil crafted an “essentially autobiographical” game about a depressed and alienated young man named Ethan. For many, this will hit very close to home.

“I think some players have interpreted it as a cautionary tale, and I appreciate that”, says O’Neil, “But my primary objective was just to give a seething, honest and unromantic account of a kind of life that I don’t think gets much representation."

- - -

"This isn’t to say that the things you see in Actual Sunlight are entirely non-fictional - a lot of what happens consists of people and events that I’ve amalgamated and fused together for the sake of telling a coherent story - but nothing, save for the things that the character is entirely making up himself, is untrue."

"And, of course, even the things that he makes up are just the things that I’ve made up. Even those things are just the lies that tell the truth.”

It was a tough, personal endeavor for O’Neil, who threw out the entire project and started from scratch more than once throughout its 6-month development. At one point, he cut himself off entirely from home internet service. He only really got on track after publishing an essay at McSweeney’s and deciding to use the piece as a framework for the game.

The piece, titled "The Society of Pain," details a fictional chat room for people suffering from a host of mental and physical ailments. Knowing O'Neill's story adds a bittersweet note to the otherwise humorous fiction. At one point, the moderator of the fake chat changes the subject to “Pseudoscientific Salsa Recipes That Spur Extremely Brief Analgesic Placebo Effects.” The community replies.

suzy22: The pain is just unending
petey: Same here
sally: Same here
mrmanic: Same here
petey: I really would not have spent so much time on the internet doing nothing if I’d known it would degenerate me to the point that I would hurt myself and not be able to do anything but spend so much time on the internet
sally: Yeah well
mrmanic: LOL I would’ve
suzy22: Hey what drugs are you guys on lets all switch

That sadness punctuated by humor is O'Neill's trademark and you can tell that he is looking for some type of clarity through creativity. “Throughout the development of it, I had to remind myself that I wasn’t doing it purely for the sake of trying to viciously rip myself into as many pieces as I possibly could.” he says. “It certainly felt that way sometimes, but that wouldn’t have been honest either: I think life is funny and beautiful, too, and I have a lot of good things, even if I’ve screwed some of them up. I think most people feel this way.”

“Basically, I had to make sure that the game wasn’t just a giant black hole, even if part of me was trying to convince me to make it that way.”

Developing a product with honesty proves difficult to most, especially games. Creators cede so much control to their players and communicating values through games is exceedingly tough even for those with near-infinite resources and talent. For the new crop of designers like O'Neill, the ability to push through deeply personal experiences represents a holy grail of sorts and great promise for the future of the medium.

“I just want the experience to ring true for people, and for them to understand [...] what depression is like."

“I just want the experience to ring true for people, and for them to understand the perspective that it presents: What depression is like, what being fundamentally physically unattractive is like, what trying to make a living in the present is like, plus a million other things that speak to how a person who is this way becomes this way.”

It’s an experience that will resonate for many people, far outside of the “internet commenter” trope that Ethan falls into. Intentionally, the character can come off as kind of a jerk – at the very least someone who isn’t self-aware. It was important for my own personal understanding of the game to know that O’Neil made a conscious decision to portray his protagonist in this way.

“I wanted to show that there were some things that happened to this guy that were his fault, and some other things that weren’t. You do get dealt a hand, and we often see that in ourselves but don't understand it about others.”

There's a pause. 

"I just wanted to leave it all as a question, I guess. You are who you are: Now what?”

Pope Benedict XVI becomes the first pontiff to resign in nearly 600 years, saying his health is deteriorating.

Tolles Chrome-Experiment: Der Loop Waveform Analyzer visualisiert MP3s im Browser. Man muss nur ein bisschen aufpassen, dass man dabei keinen Anfall bekommt, oder sowas.

The Loop Waveform Visualizer uses a combination of level and waveform data to produce a circular audio visualization of any MP3. Use the mouse to tilt and the mousewheel to zoom.

To run this, you need a WebGL capable machine and the latest Chrome. Also be aware that it won’t look as good when running under Windows, since Chrome’s WebGL implementation on Windows does not suport line thickness (among other issues). It works better if you use a track that has a high dynamic range (meaning the volume of the track changes a lot over time).

Loop Waveform Visualizer

Today’s project: a tiny tablesaw for reclaiming broken solar cells.

WHERE WALLACE AT

sirmitchell:

Cowboy Metalheads of Botswana are my new favorite thing. 

“The drone war has come home to America. Wanted fugitive Christopher Dorner, the homicidal former cop currently at war with the LAPD, has become the first known human target for airborne drones on U.S. soil. Their use was confirmed by Customs and Border Patrol spokesman Ralph DeSio, who revealed the government’s fear that Dorner will make a dash for the Mexican border.”

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Christopher Dorner is first drone target on U.S. soil

This case just keeps getting increasingly intense. 

(via clambistro)

If this episode feels long and clunky, that’s because it is—this long PBS episode are in fact the last two episodes of the British season, lumped together. (We get their two-hour Christmas special as our season finale, next week.) It feels like a bifurcated episode, especially because both parts have a clear climax and resolution; and the end of the episode feels like a very strong resolution, because British viewers waited a month or two before the Christmas Special. But overall, the two-hour format works well this week. And I think that’s because it has a somewhat minimal focus on two of its theoretically most important characters. How did it come to pass, that the strongest parts of the episode are the parts without Matthew and Mary? I have grown accustomed to those two carrying the rest of the show—especially in season two, when it felt ...

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Call in sick

What did you expect?

TIME

All eyes on Frank Ocean as Grammy Awards approach U.S. News & World Report Fun., who anthemic and semi-dark jam dominated the charts in 2012, was named song of the year. Gotye's massive and oddball pop hit, "Somebody I Used to Know," picked up record of the year. And folk-rockers Mumford & Sons won album of the year for ... Mumford & Sons, Black Keys, fun. topsPhiladelphia Inquirer Grammys 2013: Mumford & Sons win top prizeThe Guardian Mumford & Sons' Big Win And The Problem With The GrammysForbes Reuters -Billboard -Chicago Sun-Times all 520 news articles »

“One Man’s Trash” is everything people who hate Girls hate about Girls. It’s like the show read all of the criticism about season one—a self-indulgent show about over-privileged white people and their stupid, pointless problems, with a self-absorbed woman possessing no self-awareness at its center, and she keeps taking off her clothes—then decided, “Fuck it! Let’s just make an episode that lives up to every single one of those criticisms, and make it an episode where absolutely nothing happens, and dare people to like it!” This is almost certainly going to be the most divisive episode of the season. I can’t possibly imagine the show doing anything that would match up to it, unless there’s an episode where Lena Dunham never wears a stitch of clothing and throws water balloons at people of other races or something. This is the part where I ...

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For his Masters Thesis in Packaging Design at Pratt Institute, Aaron Mickelson created a series of eco-friendly packages that are designed to be consumed with the products they hold such that no waste remains. Per his description of the Disappearing Package:

Every year, we throw away a ton of packaging waste (actually, over 70 million tons). It makes up the single largest percentage of trash in our landfills (beating out industrial waste, electronics, food... everything). Figures released by the EPA indicate this problem is getting worse every year.

As a package designer (and grad student—meaning I know everything and can solve every problem, naturally), I was concerned about where this trend is going. Of course, many talented designers working in the field have made great efforts over the past few years to reduce the amount of packaging that goes onto a product. However, for my Masters Thesis, I asked the question: Can we eliminate that waste entirely?

To that end, Mickelson has come up with five potential solutions that either incorporate water-soluble materials and/or printing directly on products as hypothetical but largely feasible alternatives to superfluous paper and plastic packaging. "I realize each presents its own manufacturing or distribution challenge; however, each also presents opportunities available to package designers right now."

As in Diane Leclair Bisson's Edible Containers, the packaging is generally designed to be consumed with its contents, leaving nary a trace of excess.

Hit the jump to see his solutions for GLAD garbage bags, Twinings teabags and Nivea soap...

(more...)

Switzerland-based designer Tomas Kral's Homework Desk is unusual: Made from cast aluminum sandwiched between two sheets of ash, it contains a sort of gutter that runs around three edges. Rather than being for drainage, it's meant to store desktop items, well, off of the desktop. For his part, he describes the wraparound as "A toolbox to store documents, objects, photos that you need or simply desire to work." No drawers necessary.

Here's a shot of an early mockup made with cardboard and particle board:

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Here in the American northeast we've got a bit of a storm on, with six to twelve inches of snow projected to fall on Core77 HQ. That sounds like a lot of snow, until you put it in perspective by looking at the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route, which connects the Japanese municipalities of Tateyama and Omachi.

(more...)

10 Jobs where you're most likely to hook up with co-workers: Artists Cooks Welders Stock...

New York Daily News

3 Reality TV Crew Members Killed In Helicopter Crash LAist Three men working on a reality TV show were killed in a helicopter crash early this morning in Acton. The crash happened around 3:40 am on Polsa Rosa Movie Ranch and all three occupants were pronounced dead at the scene, county firefighters told City ... 3 killed in California helicopter crashCharlotte Observer all 26 news articles »

Plague

Fun with sexism