firehose

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The "Hotel Transylvania" helmer revealed that changes within Sony Pictures caused him to rethink his involvement with the long delayed "Popeye" animated film.

Greece has been though some troubled economic times. But austerity and unrest aren’t what define the country. Perhaps that’s what recently-appointed finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and his wife were thinking when they agreed to pose for a photo spread in the glossy French lifestyle magazine Paris Match.

Unfortunately, that’s not how many people have taken the photo feature. Twitter and the European media were buzzing with criticism—and parodies.

Saving the country is easier, one commentator noted, when you have a terrace overlooking the Acropolis

Others immediately fired up Photoshop, superimposing an image in which Varoufakis lifts his partner Danae Stratou off her feet onto a scene of street riots.

Another depicted the couple as Roman emperor Nero and his wife/stepsister Claudia Octavia in front of a flaming Athens. Nero was the emperor who “fiddled while Rome burned.”

The Paris Match spread, headlined “Before the Battle,” shows the the couple clinking wine glasses and serving one another lunch, as well as Varoufakis holding a book entitled “Rational Conflict” and relaxing by playing the piano.

Defenders of the photo shoot note that the scenes are not particularly opulent nor out of the ordinary for many middle-class Greeks. The finance minister’s political party swept to power by promising to “restore the dignity” of the Greek people, and getting on with your usual daily life—eating lunch on the terrace, catching up on reading, practicing the piano—despite the turbulent economic times can be seen as a reflection of that.

But the “optics” of the photoshoot, in political terms, are particularly fraught when the country is in a state of near-permanent crisis. As another Twitter post put it:

TIME

Indian Bride Ditches Groom After He Flubs Math Test at Their Wedding TIME Here's an easy math problem: two lovebirds, minus one bride, is one lonely groom. That's what happened after an Indian bride ditched her soon-to-be groom at their wedding ceremony for failing to answer a simple arithmetic problem. At her wedding ... Indian groom rejected at altar by bride who tested his mathsDaily Mail 'Even a first grader can answer this': Indian bride walks out of wedding after ...National Post Marriage doesn't add up for brideNEWS.com.au Syracuse.com all 118 news articles »

Chron.com

Francis predicts his papacy to be 4-5 years, misses pizza Chron.com VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis on Friday marked the second anniversary of his surprise election by predicting that he won't be pope for long — and by calling a special Jubilee Year to focus the church on his top priority while he's still around: mercy. and more »

The nation diversifies. The bureau, not so much.

The priciest Ivy League education will cost you $63,000 a year.

In a recent video posted by Armando Ferreira, an “Apple engineer” opens up about the design of the newly announced MacBook that was unveiled at the same event as the Apple Watch. The “engineer” explains that Apple’s senior vice president of design Jony Ive simply forgot to include USB ports, but CEO Tim Cook loved it anyway.

via MetaFilter

WASHINGTON—Claiming that his operation would be “completely dicked over” by an influx of product, Vice President Joe Biden reportedly became increasingly worried this week that the recent legalization of marijuana in Washington, D.C.

Doughnut chain Krispy Kreme and the Wilmington Blue Rocks, a Delaware-based Minor League Baseball team, teamed up to create a hot dog topped with raspberry jam and bacon, all served on a Krispy Kreme doughnut bun. While the concoction will be served at Frawley Stadium this season, the team still hasn’t named the sugary creation and are asking for the public’s help via a naming contest running through March 17, 2015.

One bite, and I was in heaven! NAME THIS DOG! @WilmBlueRocks http://t.co/YvTUTtyrel pic.twitter.com/EfflFuHShY

— Nancy Johnson (@NancyJohnson937) March 11, 2015

image via Wilmington Blue Rocks

via Bleacher Report, Mashable

sandandglass:

Last Week Tonight s02e05

itwbennett writes: A Google software problem inadvertently exposed the names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers used to register websites after people had chosen to keep the information private. The privacy breach involves whois, a database that contains contact information for people who've bought domain names. For privacy reasons, people can elect to make information private, often by paying an extra fee. But Craig Williams, senior technical leader for Cisco's Talos research group, discovered that the privacy settings for domain names registered through the company eNom were being turned off right at the time when the domains were up for renewal, starting around mid-2013. Williams contacted Google, and in about six days the privacy settings had been restored. In a notice, Google blamed a "software defect." Cisco said in a blog post that some 282,867 domains were affected.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NEW TUTORIAL: Running OpenGL-based Games & Emulators on Adafruit PiTFT Displays

The Ideal: Adafruit’s PiTFT displays are razor sharp. Whereas small composite screens on the Raspberry Pi usually require some video scaling (resulting in blurriness), PiTFT uses the GPIO header, digitally controlled pixel-by-pixel for a rock steady image. Though not a lot of pixels, it works great for retro gaming (and the display neatly stacks above the board, no side protuberances for video cables).

The Downside: this GPIO link entirely bypasses the Pi’s video hardware, including the graphics accelerator. Many games and emulators rely on the GPU for performance gains. So the PiTFT has traditionally been limited to just a subset of specially-compiled emulators that can work and run well enough without the GPU.

The Solution: our latest PiTFT drivers, along with a tool called fbcp (framebuffer copy), careful system configuration, and (optionally) the much more potent Raspberry Pi 2 board open the doors to many more gaming options. Existing emulator packages (such as RetroPie, with dozens of high-performance emulators and ports) — previously off-limits to the PiTFT — can run quite effectively now!

The Plan

You’ll need:

• Any model of Raspberry Pi computer (Model A, B, A+, B+ or Pi 2).
• A 320×240 pixel PiTFT display (2.8″ resistive, 2.8″ capacitive, 2.2″ HAT). For gaming we won’t be using the touchscreen features, but still need to distinguish among the various models. The 3.5″ PiTFT (480×320) is not recommended for this project — more pixels means slower refresh.
• A 4GB or larger microSD card (or full-size SD for “classic” Model A or B).
• An HDMI monitor and USB keyboard are used temporarily during installation and setup.

Emulators require game ROM files. These are not included. RetroPie includes Pi-native ports of Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake and Quake 3 that work without additional software.
Steps will include:

• Download and setup RetroPie using the temporary HDMI monitor.
• Download and setup additional Adafruit software “over” RetroPie.
• Configuration to redirect game output to the PiTFT screen; HDMI screen is no longer needed then.

Though we focus on RetroPie, some of these steps should be applicable to other software.

See the full tutorial here!

Via Rochester, Minnesota's NBC affiliate:

Minnesota lawmakers introduced legislation that would require high school students to use the locker rooms and restrooms determined by their birth sex. Now, local transgender advocates are fighting back and the response is going viral. "I don't think any women want me walking into the bathroom with them,” laughed Michael Hughes. Hughes is a transgender man living in Rochester whose mirror selfies are drawing attention to a commode conundrum.

"So I come in, go right to the mirror with a female friend behind me, and we quick get the selfie, and get back out before anybody comes in and gets startled by my presence in the women's restroom,” Hughes said, pointing his cell phone at the mirror of the women's restroom at the People's Food Co-op. Just four days ago Hughes posted a photo of himself in a women's restroom with a female friend in the background. One glance can affirm – Hughes does not look like one of the girls.

Using hashtags like #Occupotty and the caption "Do I look like I belong in the women's facilities?" Michael Hughes is showing what it would be like if he was required to use the restroom determined by his birth sex. The response has been huge.

Hughes is interviewed in the below report.

jean-luc-gohard:

“When did slavery end in America?”

If you ask a white teenager, you might get the answer, “Four hundred years ago.” But that’s not the answer. Four hundred years ago was 1615, when the Jamestown colony had only existed for eight years and chattel slavery was just beginning.

Others might say, “When Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, of course.” But that’s not right either. That only freed slaves in Confederate territory seized by the Union. The Union slave states—Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and the then-in-formation West Virginia—were exempt and allowed to keep their slaves, along with Tennessee, which had more or less been returned to the Union, and Union-loyal areas of Louisiana (including New Orleans) and coastal Virginia. Because it was unenforceable in most of the Confederate states, only about 1-2% of slaves were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation.

“Well, then,” they might say, “it was definitely when the Thirteenth Amendment was passed.” And still, they would be wrong. While that pivotal law did free the vast majority of America’s slaves, the text of the law is this: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.“

So when did slavery end in America? The answer is, “Never.”

As discussed in the PBS documentary Slavery By Another Name (available in full by clicking the link), as the federal government withdrew funding and support for Reconstruction, the South began a system of leasing prisoners—allowed by law to be used as slaves—to the plantations to replace their free labor. Those affected by this system were treated even worse than those held in bondage under slavery before the Civil War, as slaves were an expensive investment—the $800 average cost of a slave in 1860 is roughly $21,000 in today’s dollars—but leased prisoners were replaced by the prison if killed and payment continued as scheduled, deincentivizing what little humane treatment was afforded slaves.

It was so profitable and in such high demand that, within ten years of its implementation, the stereotype of black people in America had changed. Prior to the Civil War, the stereotype of black people was that we were inherently docile, servile, and loyal. This only makes sense, because if we were viewed as inherently violent and thieving and criminal like we are today, why would they have trusted us with their livelihoods, their crops, and their children? (Side note: this is also where the stereotype of black people loving watermelon came from—the idea that if we were just given a cool slice of watermelon on a hot day, we would work forever). But once they were no longer allowed to own us outright and had to lease us from prisons, police and judges did everything in their power to make sure they had a robust source of free labor. Black people were arrested on false or trumped-up charges, and within ten years, the recorded arrest and conviction rate for black people had skyrocketed so much that the stereotype was entirely inverted from what it had been previously.

The prison system may have stopped leasing prisoners to plantations, but they still lease prison labor to corporations and local governments. Prisoners—primarily black, of course, because we are targeted—are forced to fight wildfires, manufacture consumer goods, and even make goat cheese for Whole Foods. Our economy was built on slave labor, and it still runs on it to a disconcerting extent. And to make that work, black and Latino neighborhoods are targeted by law enforcement and manipulated through things like school closings and schools being unfathomably underfunded to ensure an ever-growing population of prisoners, an ever-growing population of slaves.

So the next time someone asks you when slavery ended in America, tell them the truth. Tell them, “Never.”

Nick Benson is a self-professed train geek. He has chased trains around the Midwest. When he "catches" them, he takes their picture and shares them with other train enthusiasts online. One day he hopes to photograph trains in other parts of the world—in countries such as Switzerland, Chile, and Australia.

"It might seem a bit strange to someone who doesn't groove on trains," says Benson via email. "It's an interesting hobby and subculture."

To nudge along his dream of chasing trains, Benson created an online atlas of railway photography called the "railfan atlas" in 2014. The atlas plots geotagged Flickr rail images onto a world map so train-related pictures are in one, easily accessible place. It displays thumbnails of the most popular images based on the number of Flickr favorites and comments. The atlas also creates a heat map to give a sense of where train photos are taken most frequently.

Here are train photography hotspots in and around Philadelphia:

And here's a picture of a freight train raging through a blizzard in Philadelphia, taken in the winter of 2010, shown on the map as a thumbnail:

When planning a trip in search of a fresh and not-yet-photographed train, Benson and other "railfans" can look at the maps and get an idea of what they're getting into. "I wanted a tool that would allow me to find cool spots to take train photos in new places," he says. Benson says railway buffs are fascinated by an array of train features: tiny details such as the rivets (the grooves on the side of the car), or the entire locomotive.

"Some people are producing images that can stand on their own as fine art," he says.

Currently, the atlas has 450,000 images in its database—a  lot of them by fellow "railfans" who keep the site going. "While traffic to the site has been more of a steady trickle than a torrent, the people who do visit are spending a lot of time exploring," says Benson.

Teenagers at a high school in New Mexico have voted to make the theme of their prom communism and name the event “Prom-munism,” prompting the head of the school to plan a talk with the students about what communism really means so they can dec...

baddygrl:

This was the best episode of season 1

bigbigtruck:

if this doesn’t convince you to play persona 4 i don’t know what will

lady-banner:

tolkienillustrated:

Patterns for Numenorean carpets and clothes, as devised by J.R.R. Tolkien

#reblogging because who the heck sits around designing CARPETS for their tragic atlantis fanfiction #tolkien: lord of the procrastinators #what an inspiration

Ride-sharing giant Uber hasn’t had the greatest track record with women, so they’re finally doing something to try to turn it around—in PR terms, at the very least. They’ve partnered with the United Nations to hire 1 million female drivers by 2020.

Outreach for better employment equality is always good in general and even better in this case, considering that only 14% of Uber’s 160,000 drivers in the United States are women. The partnership with UN Women, a UN organization that works towards global gender equality, was announced on Tuesday with a joint statement in which Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, UN Women Executive Director, said that a cornerstone of gender equality is making sure all women have, “direct access to safe and equitable earning opportunities.”

But however great an opportunity it may be for the women who become drivers under the initiative, it’s hardly a solution to any of the problems with Uber, its customer security, and how it relates to women. There have been many reports of harassment by Uber drivers, and a reported rape by an Uber driver in India led to a temporary ban on the service in New Delhi and the addition of a “panic button” in the app.

“If women are being raped, throwing jobs at them won’t stop the problem,” an Uber user told the Daily Beast. “They need to make fundamental changes to their policies and who they allow to drive for them.”

A higher proportion of female drivers might cut down on the likelihood of these incidents, sure, but it won’t address the root of the problem—not strict enough background checks, not enough customer information security—to effectively stop them from happening.

(via Mashable, image via Adam Fagen)

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The rumor that I'm building a spaceship to get back to my home planet Mars is totally untrue

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 12, 2015

Read more...

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belladonnaq:

Sweet Jesus I found these while lost in the weird part of the Internet and almost choked to death.

Regulators say powdered alcohol is illegal in Massachusetts The San Luis Obispo Tribune BOSTON — A powdered form of alcohol is off limits for sale in the state, regulators warned on Thursday. The Alcohol Beverages Control Commission issued the advisory two days after a federal regulatory agency, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade ... and more »

allmyalbums:

Another album I can’t find any evidence of on Google. Did I accidentally connect my iPod to a computer in another dimension at some point? Anyway, this is yet another J.A. Seazer project that sounds like a great lost season of Utena.

Is it this?

Tenjo Sajiki’s “Shin Toku Maru (Poison Body Circle)” 1978 Victor Records
Composer J A Caesar

“The story of this cheerful theater drama is about a sad boy whose mother dies, and who is subsequently abused, imprisoned, and finally exiled from the family home by the new stepmother.  The sad boy steals, then wears, his dead mother’s clothes, and in full make-up, returns to the family home and murders his tormentors.“

Thanks to Dano for tipping us off to this really cool watch project from Njneer.

I used to get the feeling that it wasn’t obvious enough that I really enjoy working with embedded systems.  I decided to change that by designing a binary timepiece that is portable, easy to use, has long battery life, and has a very barebones “circuits and components” feel to it.  After wearing the final product for about a month now, I feel like I was successful on all of those goals:

I’m pretty proud of this project; the clasp is a ribbon cable that doubles as the programming interface for the PIC microcontroller that drives everything.  The time is displayed with superbright LEDs that are blinding at 15 mA, which means that I’m able to limit the power consumption considerably while still achieving a very readable display.  The watch is powered by the (ever so common and useful) CR2032 lithium coin cell, which gives it an estimated battery life of 3 months depending on usage patterns (still doing research and testing on the average for this… 2 months in and I’m still running on my first battery : )

I like this watch so much that I decided to make some for a few friends of mine.  From there, I figured that since I had gotten to a  point where I could make them without too much difficulty, I might as well sell them to see if I could recoup how much I’ve spent on component testing and PCB fabrication  The completed watch is available at my storenvy page.

Read more about the build here.

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Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!