This isn't some random angry fan -- this is a councilman throwing an egg at his own mayor for deciding to move the home of the Changwon NC Dinos baseball team from Jinhae to neighboring Masan.
If there's anything Korean politics has taught us, it's that violence solves everything.
h/t @MyKBO
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A group of Scottish and British artists led by photographerJon Parker Lee have erected a fake passport checkpoint on the border of Scotland and England as a humorous statement on the current issue of Scottish independence (see previously), which will be brought to a vote on September 18th, 2014.
Lee posted a photo of the crossing to Twitter.
Fog cleared. Border open. pic.twitter.com/kYOBpdNVjC
— Manchester photo (@jonparkerlee) September 15, 2014
Whether such a crossing would actually be put into place should Scotland vote to become an independent country is not clear. According to Channel 4, it is unlikely, but some UK politicians have said such crossing checkpoints would be needed to prevent a “soft route” for immigration to the UK through Scotland.
Back to the Future 2's self-lacing, future Nike shoes have always been bananas expensive. But not anymore! Someone has finally made a knock-off version of the power lacers for under a $100.
A very self-assured Brittany Spaniel named Amelia raises her paw and gives a knowing wink in response to her human Eric Anderton‘s earnest question “Who’s the best the best dog in the world?”.
via reddit
firehose'Where do you take your loved ones with expensive taste, a love of local/organic, and "grown up urban outiftters" stylings?'
to hell
So...
My husband's birthday is coming up and so we're taking a weekend trip to Portland. My problem is that my husband is wayyy cooler than me. He has run a cocktail bar, managed a craft beer/wine bar, and now works for a brewery (sales). Super extrovert and always manages to find really unique/cool spots.
I am not like this. Before I met him going out to eat meant Applebees (I know I'm pathetic, don't judge). Problem being now that I am trying to plan a cool trip involving brewery hopping (this I got covered) and then bar hopping/ a nice dinner. But I am hopelessly uncool and unhip.
Can any of you locals suggest your favorite local hipster hangs (are they all hipster hangs in Portland?)? Do you have a restaurant that specializes in Charcuterie? Swanky cocktails? Where do you take your loved ones with expensive taste, a love of local/organic, and "grown up urban outiftters" stylings?
firehoseNOTO NOTO NOTO NOTO NOTO NOTO
BLACK WIDOW #13
firehose'they've put a silvery swoosh under it and a type on a curve over it with a sunburst that makes you want to throw soft cheese at a wall'
"Philadelphia (also known as 'Philly') is the world's most popular cream cheese. Available in regular, light, at-free and flavored varieties, Philadelphia cheese comes in regular and snack sizes."
NOTE: This rollout is for the European markets. It's hard to tell if it will also apply in the U.S.
Design by: Dragon Rouge (London)
Opinion/Notes: Mass-market packaging has never been my cup of tea or, in this case, my tub of soft cheese. It rarely manages to go beyond swooshes and gradients at its worst and some custom lettering at its best. This is a perfect example of that. The new "Philadelphia" lettering is relatively nice; the pompadour on the "A"s is attractive and the triple shadow works well. But then they've put a silvery swoosh under it and a type on a curve over it with a sunburst that makes you want to throw soft cheese at a wall. The packaging is your standard swoosh-plus-food-photography approach that is interchangeable with any other product on any aisle of the store.
Related Links: Dragon Rouge news item
Select Quote: The logo has been carefully crafted to work when overlaying the brand photography and across various print and digital channels that range from the recipe booklets that will accompany each pot of Philadelphia to the brand’s Facebook page. We’ve introduced a colour system that complements the flavours and generates visual impact in store and at each touch point with Philadelphia customers.
firehose"a new restaurant in Dallas from Yum! Brands", the company behind KFC and Taco Bell
firehose'digital adoption has been stymied by its music industry's reluctance to license for digital. And counteracting that, CD sales have also been bolstered by fan competitions that encourage people to buy multiple copies of the same CDs. That also means that CD sales are huge for a specific niche of music listeners — particularly fans of J-pop groups like AKB48 — and that they don't necessarily represent the country's standard way of listening'
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firehoseCourtney Stanton (q0rt) went and had a great rebuttal to XOXO, but she only sent it to her mailing list.
"I was in Portland, Oregon for what felt like the conference equivalent of a post-divorce "I'm your pal, not your 'parent'!" court-mandated visitation. (My spouse spoke at XOXO, an event whose runners felt comfortable announcing "lower your expectations" and labeling everything an "experiment" while charging all 1,000+ attendees $500.) This is, in fact, what I'm like when I sort of like something -- somewhere in there is a worthwhile experience, I think? I would go back (for free) again...maybe."
A place where ideas are dangerous and culture matters
Then a lone protester trespassed onto the festival grounds to voice his complaints about Anita Sarkeesian, the cultural critic whose analysis of video games has resulted in death threats against her, and who spoke at the festival on Saturday. Next thing you know, Portland PD had been called, and the man fled the scene, leaving behind only a screed he had typed up arguing his view that women are more abusive than men and likely to round up the patriarchy into concentration camps. (The screed really said that.) After the incident was announced on stage, to somewhat nervous laughter, it seemed to encapsulate much of what has made XOXO one of the most interesting gatherings in technology. It’s a place where the ideas are dangerous, where culture matters, and where art, not commerce, lies at the center of everything.
Portland is at ease with its own strangeness, and XOXO happily took it up a level. Andy McMillan, one of two Andys who organizes the event, calls it "a beautiful catastrophe"; the other, Andy Baio, prefers "consensual hallucination." It took place at the Redd, an abandoned iron works in east-central Portland recently converted into an events space. The Andys had the exterior painted with murals, then surrounded it with food carts, rental drones, and a library of old photography equipment. Nearby blocks played host to rock concerts, a film and animation series, an evening of storytelling, and an indie arcade. During the conference portion of the event, mostly independent writers, artists, and other makers of web culture step forward to confess their biggest problems. Between talks, everyone hugged.
XOXO is an embrace of independence and creativity, but it’s also a rejection: of soulless day jobs in corporate America; of the received wisdom of the TED talk; of the glib startup hucksterism of TechCrunch Disrupt. Rachel Binx, a designer who specializes in data visualization, gave a talk about how freelance culture-making can leave you perpetually on the brink of financial ruin. She illustrated her point with a looping GIF of a dolphin rising out of the water only to splash down in the jaws of a shark. In this world there is no safety net. "Be your own fucking hero," she said.
Andy McMillan (left) and Andy Baio.
The actual program at XOXO is a reflection of the kind of coolhunting that Baio has been doing on his blog, Waxy.org, for more than a decade. Baio popularized the supercut; created an 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis called Kind of Bloop, and was an early adviser and chief technical officer to Kickstarter. (More recently, he began working on the re-lauch of Upcoming.org, a social calendar.) Baio was one of the earliest link bloggers, and he frequently shares art projects, essays, and other bits of web culture at Waxy. XOXO can feel like a link blog come gloriously to life — strange pieces of the web are everywhere at the festival, and they are meant to get lost in.
An evening of tabletop games included Marrying Mr. Darcy, a board-game version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Two Rooms and Boom, a turn-based party game where you played Secret Service agents trying to stop a bomber from killing the president. A venue devoted to film and animation showed off Empire Uncut, a fan-made remake of The Empire Strikes Back. And during the conference, creators described their own strange obsessions. Edna Pirahna described the rise of Meatspace, a chat network where you log in with your face. And Joseph Fink detailed the unlikely success of Welcome to Night Vale, his fictional podcast about a desert town populated by aliens and ghosts.
Edna Piranha
The number of people who experience XOXO in person is small: the festival is limited to 1,000 attendees, including 750 with all-access passes, and 250 who attend nighttime events but not the talks during the day. Each year it becomes a bit harder to attend; this year, for the first time, the Andys used a lottery system. The limit is a bid to make the festival retain its intimacy.
XOXO draws lots of designers and artists, particularly of the freelance variety, along with a significant number of Silicon Valley tech employees: this year there were attendees from Google, Adobe, Pinterest, and Kickstarter, among others. The twist is that they’re sitting in the audience; this is likely to be the only conference where you see tech CEOs listening to a freelance jewelry designer talk about her struggles paying the rent. The attendees include many people who helped to shape Web 2.0 — Matt Haughey, who founded Metafilter; Anil Dash, an early blogger; Gina Trapani, founding editor of Lifehacker, and Stewart Butterfield, who founded Flickr and Slack.
When speakers talked about more traditional topics, they tended to approach them from oblique angles. Trapani built a data-mining app to ask questions of her Facebook and Twitter feeds that those companies never would answer for her. How often do we say "thank you" online? How often do we engage with men, vs. how often we engage with women? Trapani told the audience that the app she’s building with Dash, called ThinkUp, is a way to help us make better use of the time we spend online. "These are facts that Twitter and Facebook won’t ever reflect back to me, but it’s stuff that I want to know," she said.
"We just want more people making amazing things."
The Andys say they’re not sure whether there will be another XOXO. The planning process is all-consuming, and the events themselves can be emotionally draining. But every attendee I spoke with believes there will be another one next year — and if there is, here’s hoping more people get to see it.
"Independence is hard," Baio told the crowd at the festival’s end. "Independence is lonely. And it takes a unique kind of bravery to create something and put it out in the world in this unfiltered way that is enabled through technology." The overarching theme, he said, is that creators are not alone. "Every one of you needs to remember this when you are getting pummeled out there by morons. It’s so easy to be the knee-jerk contrarian, the anonymous internet commenter that tears you down. And it’s so hard to make something new. And that’s a lot of what we’re celebrating here. We just want more people making amazing things and pushing through the noise."
The government cut corners when building Healthcare.gov, the federal marketplace for health insurance, and security was no exception, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office that will be presented to Congress this week.
The team building the site skipped some privacy risk assessments and did not conduct comprehensive security testing, according to the Wall Street Journal.
That should be no surprise to anyone who's been following the news. The Healthcare.gov launch was a mess: a combination of shoddy, inbred contractors; compressed deadlines; and changing specifications due to politics. It crashed immediately after it launched. On the first day, only six users got through.
The less-visible broken parts were lower priority
There was a scramble to fix the extremely visible broken parts of the site, but the less-visible broken parts were lower priority. Numerous security holes have been revealed by people just looking at the site from the outside, including a vulnerability that exposed user email addresses and a vulnerability that allowed a hacker to upload malware onto a Healthcare.gov server.
Neither vulnerability resulted in user data being compromised, but the revelations showed an unconscionable sloppiness. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that oversaw the development of the site, failed on numerous levels to protect consumers. Password-strength requirements were insufficient. At least one contractor hadn't secured its administrative network. There was "inconsistent application of security patches." There are too many to list.
Private companies that fail to protect their customers are deplorable. Governments that fail to protect their citizens are worse.
firehoseXSS bug in the old AOSP browser that's no longer shipped on new Google phones
A bug quietly reported on September 1 appears to have grave implications for Android users. Android Browser, the open source, WebKit-based browser that used to be part of the Android Open Source Platform (AOSP), has a flaw that enables malicious sites to inject JavaScript into other sites. Those malicious JavaScripts can in turn read cookies and password fields, submit forms, grab keyboard input, or do practically anything else.
Browsers are generally designed to prevent a script from one site from being able to access content from another site. They do this by enforcing what is called the Same Origin Policy (SOP): scripts can only read or modify resources (such as the elements of a webpage) that come from the same origin as the script, where the origin is determined by the combination of scheme (which is to say, protocol, typically HTTP or HTTPS), domain, and port number.
The SOP should then prevent a script loaded from http://malware.bad/ from being able to access content at https://paypal.com/.
Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments
firehose"in day to day use the Note 3 definitely feels smaller"
"The iPhone 6 Plus is the first iPhone that looks and works better in a case"
"it’s a totally new resolution for an iOS device, so apps that aren’t updated for the 6 Plus simply get zoomed up to fit the screen. Apple says the 6 Plus has a "desktop-class scaler" to make this all work seamlessly, but if you’re paying attention you’ll spot the difference between scaled apps and updated apps every time: the status bar at the top of the screen gets way bigger when a scaled app is open"
"the speaker situation on the iPhone is starting to get a little silly. There’s still just the single mono speaker on the bottom, right where your hand goes when you’re holding the phone in landscape. The iPhone 6 Plus already demands that you contort your hands when you’re actually using it, but having to adjust your grip so you can hear the speaker when you’re watching a video or playing a game is asking a little too much. HTC and Motorola have solved this problem by putting stereo speakers on the front of their phones"
"Safari is pretty crashy in landscape, especially on responsive sites like The Verge, and some apps like Weather don’t take advantage of the extra space at all."
"The landscape keyboard also requires some serious adjustment; I kept hitting the right arrow key when I mean to hit delete, and the emoji and numbers buttons are swapped from the portrait keyboard and iOS 7 landscape keyboard, which is just cruel."
Big things have enormous beginnings
I have really big hands.
It’s not something I usually think about; you don’t ever really think about your hands. Those are my hands, you might idly remark to yourself from time to time. I wonder if I can use them for anything good.
But using a smartphone with a huge screen, like the iPhone 6 Plus, forces you to constantly consider the size of your hands. This phone looks huge, even in my admittedly large hands, you might think to yourself. Or: Dammit, I can’t reach that button without using my other hand.
Or: If my children and my children’s children and their children and all the children after that keep contorting their hands to use phones like this for generations, will our hands evolve to have gigantic thumbs?
It is not often that a new iPhone threatens to alter the course of human evolution, is what I’m saying. But here we are.
I have really big hands.
The iPhone 6 Plus isn’t beautiful, the way the iPhone 4 was beautiful. No one’s going to hold it up and say it reminds them of a gorgeous old Leica camera. It’s not sleek and dangerous-looking, like the black iPhone 5. It’s not flashy like the gold iPhone 5S. My review unit is silver and white, and with its rounded edges and the aluminum back it reminds me of nothing so much as the first-gen iPhone, scaled up. The white front panel makes the phone seem even bigger than it is; the space gray version has a black front panel that blends more seamlessly into the frame, which makes the entire thing appear smaller. But there’s no escaping the sheer size of the thing. The screen itself is bigger than an entire iPhone 5S, and it dwarfs even the new larger iPhone 6. I found myself carrying it around almost like you’d carry a Moleskine notebook, tucked into the curve of my fingers. After a while you begin to realize that Apple had no choice but to move the sleep / wake button to the side of the phone; you’d never be able to reach it otherwise.
No one's going to compare the iPhone 6 Plus to an old Leica
The iPhone 6 Plus a big phone because it has to be; Apple made a big phone in 2014 because consumers have demanded big phones. Samsung’s empire is built on gigantic phones that keep getting bigger — the Galaxy S5 is 5.1 inches, while the Note 3 and Note 4 are 5.7 inches — and while Apple initially derided screen size as an unworkable gimmick, it turns out that bigger sells. (Steve Jobs famously called big phones "Hummers," but it turns out that’s only an insult in California.)
Big phones like the Note 3 work because they defer almost the entire front of the phone to the display; you don’t need to put a lot of stuff around a screen that big. But the iPhone 6 Plus has large top and bottom bezels that make a big phone even bigger. Apple’s tied to its iconic round home button, while Samsung can get away with a rectangular home button that takes up less space.
The extra height increases the surfboard-like nature of the 6 Plus — it’s a well-balanced package, but it’s so long it can feel top-heavy if you don’t grab it in the middle. It’s less stable to hold in one hand than Samsung’s Note 3, which is a bit more squat and squared-off. It’s a tiny difference in spec-sheet dimensions, but in day to day use the Note 3 definitely feels smaller. (Samsung’s upcoming Note 4 is a tiny bit taller and skinnier, but it’s not out yet, so it’s hard to judge.)
Huge phones get to have huge batteries, and the iPhone 6 Plus is a huge phone with a huge battery: I consistently got about two days of battery life from the 6 Plus in regular daily use — slightly more than the day and half we got from the iPhone 6, and basically the same as the Note 3. iPhone battery life tends to fade quickly, however, and I dread the day I inevitably stuff 6 Plus into a battery case and make it even bigger.
Apple manages to make up for the slightly more awkward dimensions of the 6 Plus with finer materials than the weird fake-leather plastic of the Note 3. The back of the iPhone 6 Plus is a smooth aluminum, marred only by the protruding camera lens and an ugly set of of plastic lines at the top and bottom that allow the phone’s various antennas to speak to the world. That aluminum feels quite nice, but it’s also a little slippery, especially when you factor in the size of the phone and its rounded sides. The iPhone 6 Plus is the first iPhone that looks and works better in a case — I’ve been using Apple’s leather sleeve and it makes the phone easier to hold, evens out that camera bump, and hides the weird lines on the back.
But enough about sides and backs; let’s talk about the screen. Where the iPhone 4’s Retina Display was a quantum leap past the competition, the Retina HD Display on the 6 Plus is more of a thoughtful step around.
I haven't seen another phone display that looks this immediate
The 6 Plus has an absolutely stunning displayt’s a 5.5-inch 1920 x 1080 panel, which works out to 401 pixels per inch. That’s the highest-density display Apple’s ever shipped, but there’s a whole range of Android phones out there with big and great-looking high-density screens: the 5.1-inch Samsung Galaxy S5 at 432ppi, the 5-inch HTC One M8 at 441ppi, the 5.7-inch Galaxy Note 4 at 515ppi, and the 5.5-inch LG G3 at an insane 538ppi.
Of course, it’s debateable whether your eyes can even perceive any of these higher pixel densities, and driving all those extra dots takes a toll on battery life. Apple seems to have aimed firmly at the middle ground with the iPhone 6 Plus: it’s a great-looking display that’s plenty sharp, but it’s not so crazy high-res in the service of specs that it needs a bigger battery to keep it lit up all day.
Apple’s using some other tricks to make the display look amazing, though: there’s a new polarizer that makes the phone easier to see in sunlight, wider viewing angles with more accurate color reproduction, and overall higher contrast than previous iOS screens. And perhaps most importantly, the entire display stack is thinner, so it looks more like you’re touching the pixels directly than ever before. It’s like the screen is painted on. This, more than anything, is what makes the iPhone 6 Plus display pop — I haven’t seen another phone display that looks quite so immediate. It would be nice if there was a spec-sheet number to describe this quality so the rest of the industry could race to improve it; that seems to be how these things work.
The bigger screen comes with a tradeoff, though: it’s a totally new resolution for an iOS device, so apps that aren’t updated for the 6 Plus simply get zoomed up to fit the screen. Apple says the 6 Plus has a "desktop-class scaler" to make this all work seamlessly, but if you’re paying attention you’ll spot the difference between scaled apps and updated apps every time: the status bar at the top of the screen gets way bigger when a scaled app is open. YOU HAVE THREE BARS OF AT&T LTE, announces the iPhone 6 Plus when you open an older app. IT IS 11:07AM AND YOUR BATTERY IS AT 65 PERCENT. It’s comedy gold, if you think big things are funny. (They are.)
The app scaling also affects various apps differently, and most of them definitely need to be updated to look better. Twitter looks fine, with sharp text and only moderately soft icons. (It’s hilarious that you can only see four tweets at a time, though.) Instagram photos look terrific, but the text is a little soft. Facebook and Gmail are pretty fuzzy all around. Text in the Kindle app is headache-inducing soft; it definitely needs an update to be readable. FIFA 14 looks solid, but Madden Mobile glitches out with a totally misaligned screen on load. Whoops.
Scaled apps are comedy gold, if you think big things are funny
But you have to be looking to spot these flaws, and it’s a safe bet that popular apps will be updated in short order. In the meantime, even scaled-up apps benefit from simply being bigger: Instagram is awesome on the iPhone 6 Plus. So are Facebook photos. Watching video on the 6 Plus is tremendous — the display is almost as big as the iPad mini showing 16:9 videos since the mini has to letterbox those videos to fit its 4:3 screen. I watched a lot of football using the Sunday Ticket app last weekend; I never once wanted to find a TV. I could spend days banging through YouTube and Vevo on this thing. If you’re a traveler who carries an iPad just for movies on the road, the 6 Plus is going to be your best friend.
But while the screen is terrific for videos, the speaker situation on the iPhone is starting to get a little silly. There’s still just the single mono speaker on the bottom, right where your hand goes when you’re holding the phone in landscape. The iPhone 6 Plus already demands that you contort your hands when you’re actually using it, but having to adjust your grip so you can hear the speaker when you’re watching a video or playing a game is asking a little too much. HTC and Motorola have solved this problem by putting stereo speakers on the front of their phones; it might be time for Apple to take that cue from the competition as well.
Apple’s built a few new hooks into iOS 8 that let updated apps lift a few ideas from the iPad when the phone’s in landscape mode: there’s a new two-paned mode for apps, a new keyboard with dedicated arrow keys and formatting buttons, and even a new landscape home screen. These are all interesting ideas, although only Apple’s apps make full use of them right now, and some of the implementations are frankly a bit messy. I’m not sure Apple put a huge amount of effort into how this iPad mini-mini should actually work, and it shows in various ways. For example, starting an email in landscape involves a new-document sheet sliding up along with the busy landscape keyboard, leaving the screen a busy mess of inactive interface elements. Safari is pretty crashy in landscape, especially on responsive sites like The Verge, and some apps like Weather don’t take advantage of the extra space at all. The 6 Plus could be the start of an entirely new platform for Apple, but it’s going to take a little more work to get there.
The landscape keyboard also requires some serious adjustment; I kept hitting the right arrow key when I mean to hit delete, and the emoji and numbers buttons are swapped from the portrait keyboard and iOS 7 landscape keyboard, which is just cruel. And let’s not even talk about the paste icon, which is ridiculous. First of all, it’s a glue bottle. Second of all… look, let’s just move on. Having a better landscape keyboard is a great idea, but this one needs a lot more work.
A better landscape keyboard is a great idea, but this one needs a lot more work
Apple’s also built in a small concession to using the phone one-handed called Reachability. Double-tapping (not pushing) the home button slides the screen down so you can hit buttons at the top more easily. It sounds silly — and it is — but once you get used to using it, it’s nice to have, and easier to understand than Samsung’s tiny-one-handed-phone mode on the Note 3.
The other new software features on the iPhone 6 Plus all come courtesy of iOS 8, which will be available on many other iOS devices as well. iOS 8 is a welcome update to the ambitious sweep of iOS 7, which redesigned much of the familiar iPhone experience but left some jagged edges in place. Everything about iOS 8 is smoother and faster, and it especially flies along on the A8 chip in the 6 Plus. There are loads of features small and large and a new sense of openness about the system that make iOS 8 perhaps one of the most important iOS updates ever. You can quick-reply to messages from the notification shade (small) and you can replace the stock keyboard entirely (huge). You can send quick audio messages to your friends (small) and when the next version of OS X comes out you’ll be able to seamlessly switch from working on iOS to working on a Mac using Continuity (huge). You can now use Spotlight to search across the web and various services like Yelp (small) and you can share all your iTunes purchases with up to six family members (huge).
You get the idea. There’s so much to iOS 8 that we’ll have a full separate review shortly; it’s that big.
The iPhone 6 Plus camera is the best smartphone camera I’ve ever used. Apple’s holding firm at 8 megapixels while everyone else is racing to put ever-bigger numbers on spec sheets, and it feels like the right decision: the iPhone 6 Plus focuses faster, works better in low light, and generally produces the best photos I’ve ever seen from a phone.
The 6 Plus has the same basic shooter as the iPhone 6, but it adds optical image stabilization to the mix, which improves low-light performance even more. It’s not going to help you when you’re shooting anything that moves, like people, but for sunsets and skylines, it’s clutch. It basically lets the camera hold the shutter open a little bit longer than it otherwise could without causing a blurry image, so more light hits the sensor. If you’re like me and you mostly find yourself taking photos at dusk and in dark rooms, you’ll end up with many more usable shots. Until you take too many shots and everything gets blurry regardless.
The best smartphone camera I've ever used
The iOS 8 Camera app is also much improved; I love the feature that lets you instantly adjust exposure by dragging up and down on the screen. And the new time-lapse and 240fps slow-mo modes are pretty fun — slow-mo works really well, and while the time-lapse mode isn’t quite as good as Instagram’s Hyperlapse app, it’s still pretty good. There’s also a new feature called Cinematic Stabilization which does an impressive job of smoothing out unwanted motion in video clips; it’s strong enough to make a meaningful difference but subtle enough that you won’t notice the effect until you’re looking for it.
It’s also easier to take photos and videos with a huge screen helping you frame your shots. No wonder people insist on using their tablets to take photos; having a screen this large paired with such an excellent camera is revelatory. The iPhone has long had a better camera than just about any Android phone, and it’s always had a better ecosystem of editing and sharing apps than any other platform. The iPhone 6 Plus should just increase that lead.
I’m going to buy an iPhone 6 Plus. I’m taken with it; it feels like an entirely new kind of device for Apple, and it has such a killer camera I can’t say no. It’s every bit as good a phone as the iPhone 6; I’m docking it a little because Apple has a few software glitches to clear up. But I’m confident that will happen.
There’s nothing here that competitors aren’t doing with their big phones — Samsung in particular is pushing the envelope with its S Pen stylus and multiple-app features — but the overall package is so good it’s hard to ignore. The smaller iPhone 6 feels like just the next iterative update to the iPhone, but the 6 Plus feels like something else entirely; with a few more software tweaks and some love from developers, it could really be my main computer. It’s as much iPad as iPhone.
But while Apple’s early attempts to bridge the iPad and iPhone experiences on the 6 Plus are a little hit-or-miss, they point to a future where the regular-size iPhone, a bigger iPhone like the 6 Plus, and the iPad all turn into very different things. I can’t see myself ever using my iPad mini again after having the 6 Plus, and it’s getting harder and harder to justify pulling out my iPad Air. With the right software changes, I could basically use an iPhone 6 Plus all day long, for everything from sending messages to editing documents to watching videos. A do-everything phone like the 6 Plus would eventually allow Apple to push the iPad even further towards becoming the true laptop replacement it was always meant to be.
It’s all just potential right now, but it’s extremely obvious potential. And if Apple doesn’t do it first, it’s pretty clear Samsung is headed down that road as well.
We’re going to need bigger hands.
Photos by Michael Shane
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firehoseaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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firehose'The iPhone 4S was Apple's last to use the original 3.5-inch iPhone screen size, which is now the smallest of four different phone screens that Apple supports. iOS 8's new stuff is all about fitting more information on those larger screens, whether we're talking about predictive typing, new Mail sorting options, Notification Center widgets, or Spotlight suggestions. The 4S' screen has always been small, but iOS 8 can make it feel cramped.
By holding off on iOS 7, you were mostly just missing out on a redesign, but with iOS 8 there's good stuff here that you're going to want if you can get it. Ideally you wouldn't have to trade features for performance, but in our opinion getting the new stuff is worth putting up with the small slowdowns you'll experience.'
iPhones have about a year to be top-of-the-line. Then they have a year to be the modest-but-capable midrange model. After that, they become the free-with-contract choice. And then, in their last year, they enter that no-man's-land where they're still getting software updates but are no longer being sold.
2014 is the year the iPhone 4S was told to pack up its things and move to the retirement home. As a going away present, Apple gave it iOS 8, which in all likelihood will be the last major version upgrade it gets.
For the last two years, we've taken the oldest phone supported by each new iOS update and looked at what you stand to gain (and lose) by installing the update. We were impressed by iOS 6 on the iPhone 3GS, but iOS 7 on the iPhone 4 came with some serious compromises. The 4S has stayed pretty speedy over the years, but how does iOS 8 treat it?
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firehose'Generally, iOS 8 is noticeably slower and choppier than iOS 7, in everything from opening apps to typing. Back when we switched from iOS 6, we complained about how we could get 10 characters into typing something before the keyboard realized what was happening. This problem has returned with a force in iOS 8, especially on first opening an app. Screen rotation is stuttery, and any time some part of the OS needs to slide into place (text centering, apps minimizing), it can't do it smoothly.
IOS 7 was overall slower at opening apps than iOS 6 last year, but a lot of the difference could be attributed to the sweeping and slow animations that Apple introduced between the two versions. Even after Apple expedited the animations in newer versions of iOS 7, iOS 8 is still one half to a full second slower to complete certain tasks than iOS 7 on the iPad 2. Cold boots take a couple seconds longer, too.
None of these opening times are huge roadblocks, but they add up to a noticeable poky feeling that wasn't there (or wasn't as strong) coming from iOS 7.
iOS 8 has convinced us that things can, in fact, be worse. Not a whole lot worse, and not all the time, but it's enough of a regression with few enough upsides that acquiescing to the "download software update" prompts may actually be a bad idea.'
In case you've been so content with your iPad 2 over the last few years that you've drifted away from paying attention to the Apple product cycle, here is some six-month-old news: Apple finally stopped selling the iPad 2 model back in March. After it hung on at the bottom of the tablet product line for a couple of years to be a rock for the education and corporate markets, Apple kicked the iPad 2 out and resurrected the iPad 4 as the new full-size budget model.
But for now, Apple is continuing to update the iPad 2, in part because it has so much in common with the non-retina iPad mini, including the Apple A5 processor and 1024x768 display. But the iPad 2 hung around so long because it's also a legacy device. There are students depending on updates, as well as companies who used the iPad as a default device, like Square.
iOS 7 didn't do a whole lot of damage to the iPad 2, and even improved it in some aspects, like how fast the browser could load webpages. But this time around, the new version of iOS 8 appears to make the start of a much bigger decline, not only in performance, but in appearance.
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firehose"Hyrule Warriors is a surprisingly good use of the Zelda license. It's not a particularly deep or challenging game, but it's mindless fun with plenty of moments and details that longtime fans of the series will pick up on. It's crazy, sure, but crazy enough that it works."
It's an exciting time for Legend of Zelda fans. Following the release of last year's brilliant A Link Between Worlds on 3DS, Nintendo is working on a brand-new, open-world Zelda that's shaping up to be Link's most exciting adventure in years. But while Wii U owners anxiously await that game's 2015 release, Nintendo is launching something a whole lot weirder this month: Hyrule Warriors, a game that blends the Zelda universe with an obscene amount of action. It's not what you'd expect from the series, but it can be a lot of of fun.
Hyrule Warriors is actually a mash-up of two different games. It's part Zelda, and part Dynasty Warriors, an action series that dates back to 1997. What's most surprising about Dynasty Warriors' lasting appeal is that all of the many, many games are basically the same, and they feature some of the most simplistic combat around. In most cases you can just mash the attack button without actually thinking about what you're doing. What makes the games interesting, though, is their sense of scale; Dynasty Warriors is basically a game version of those insanely huge battles from the Lord of the Rings movies, except you play as a massively overpowered character that can take out dozens of enemies in a single move.
If this doesn't sound anything like a Zelda game, that's because it isn't
This remains unchanged in Hyrule Warriors. To give you a sense of just how crazy things get, in my very first mission, less than 15 minutes into the game a pop-up appeared announcing that I had already defeated 1,000 enemies. I hadn't even faced off against the first boss yet. The combat is simultaneously thrilling and tedious, but it's helped along by some light strategies that force you to take over different areas of the map before you're completely overrun by bad guys. There are also some cool — and, of course, gigantic — boss creatures that require you to do things like aim and dodge instead of just mashing a single button.
If this doesn't sound anything like a Zelda game, that's because it isn't: Hyrule Warriors is developed by the team behind Dynasty Warriors and features virtually identical gameplay. What makes it Zelda is all of the fan service thrown in. There's a huge line-up of characters you can play as, from Link to Sheik, and you'll be battling across iconic Hyrule landmarks like Death Mountain and those colorful floating islands from Skyward Sword. You'll even hear the all-too-familiar "hey, listen!" to alert you to action happening elsewhere in the level. It's little more than a Zelda-themed coat of paint, but it's surprisingly effective: I've always found the Dynasty Warriors games to be bland and tedious, but it's a whole lot more interesting when you're playing as Princess Zelda and wielding familiar weapons like bombs and boomerangs.
Nintendo has a very spotty history when it comes to letting other developers handle its properties — Other M is definitely not the Metroid game I was hoping for — but Hyrule Warriors is a surprisingly good use of the Zelda license. It's not a particularly deep or challenging game, but it's mindless fun with plenty of moments and details that longtime fans of the series will pick up on. It's crazy, sure, but crazy enough that it works.
Hyrule Warriors is coming to the Wii U on September 26th.
A legendary loyal solider is frozen in the war-stricken past and reawakened in the present to face his ultimate nemesis. Sound familiar? It should, because The Iceman — a Hong Kong martial arts flick that went grossly overbudget and bowed earlier this year to poor reviews — is actually a remake of a more beloved 1989 martial arts film called The Iceman Cometh (proving it's not just Hollywood that has a chronic remake/reboot addiction these days). But for all its faults, The Iceman (2014) surely doesn't get cold feet when it comes to staging elaborately cartoonish action sequences, including this midair fist bump.
Starring Hong Kong action icon Donnie Yen as the titular cold storage warrior (who bears no relation to the X-Men character of the same name, sorry), the movie even manages to weaponize a pencil holder.
Of utmost importance to the equine fiends of the internet, however, is the scene in which the Iceman gamely drops a horse-headed assailant.
All this and more are featured in the trailer Neflix posted today to announce the film's streaming availability beginning this Thursday, September 18th. Whatever you think of it, also recall it's not the only recent program on Netflix to prominently feature a horse
firehoseKC Green be killin me with his frames
where is my KC Green tv shows
Pages 33 & 34
Let’s have a drink and talk about our troubles, okay?
firehosemeanwhile, in Portland
The Rise Of Open Source Hardware @ Popular Science.
Emile Petrone founded Tindie for selfish reasons. “The basic idea was that there wasn’t a marketplace for the things I was interested in,” he says. At the time, those things were his latest DIY hardware obsessions—specifically, kits to support Arduino and Raspberry Pi. “Ebay’s not really right, and neither is Amazon. Hardware projects had no natural home.”
So in the summer of 2012, Petrone (then an engineer at a Portland startup) launched a site where flexible matrix boards and laser motion sensors could be sold alongside build-it-yourself weather monitoring kits and robot birds. Almost immediately, Tindie began attracting favorable attention from the indie hardware community—and then expanded from there. Today, around 600 inventors sell more than 3,000 different hardware products, which have shipped out to more than 80 countries around the world. Some customers are hobbyists like Petrone, but others are large entities like the Australian government, Google and NASA. These days, Petrone says, “NASA’s purchasing department just calls my cell phone.”
firehosePre-installed extruder, onboard software with touchscreen, 0.1mm resolution, 9x6 bed. Proprietary software runs on Win/Mac/Ubuntu. "Available exclusively at Home Depot, Amazon.com and Canadian Tire."
Big news from MakerCon – Breaking news – Dremel is releasing a 3D printer.
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We aren’t getting even entry-level jobs, which could enable us to pay our own bills. Not only are we not buying houses, many of us aren’t renting, either: About a third of millennials still live with their parents, earning us the irksome epithet “boomerang generation” — a play on “boomer generation,” the presumed victim here.
