We can’t call giant panda Jia Jia the oldest panda in the world, because there are around 1,600 wild pandas roaming around out there. We can, however, salute her new title as “Oldest Panda Living in Captivity,” which she does at Hong Kong’s Ocean Park. She’s 37* today and that “cake” is made of flavored ice**.
Mjoll the Lioness is a character from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and like many characters in the fantasy game, her costume is suited for the life of a traveler. She’s a Nord vigilante and wears a mix of leathers, furs, and armor, and cosplayer April Gloria incorporated all the different textures and materials in her adaptation of the costume. She started with patterns for the armor and then made the finished pieces from Wonderflex – you can see the progress in below photos. Please note the use of googly eyes for the rivets. April followed this process to achieve the weathered metal look on the armor:
I used a mix of silver, pewter and bronze spray paint for the base coat, then did the details in a mix of brown and black. For the darkened areas I brushed on some black paint, then wiped most of it away with a thick paper towel until it had the look I wanted. I made some rusty areas with some shades of brown. I might go in with a lighter color and highlight a few of the edges. I know the in game armor might not have as crazy of weathering as I did but I think this is just my style.
'The publisher also announced Dragon Quest Heroes II, a sequel to the Dynasty Warriors-style hack-and-slash'
Oh yeah, Dragon Quest Builders ⊟
I keep forgetting to mention Dragon Quest Builders, the Minecraft-inspired set in the same world as the series’ original game, coming to PS Vita, PS3, and PS4 in Japan at the end of the year. But we now have a trailer, via Gematsu:
This looks cute! I would play this! It’s up to Square Enix if we get to in the West, though! The publisher also announced Dragon Quest Heroes II, a sequel to the Dynasty Warriors-style hack-and-slash already about to release over here in October. This follow-up hits the PS Vita, PS3, and PS4 in Japan next Spring.
Joe Loreto uploaded a video of a super strong cyclist who encountered a small car blocking the bike lane and then proceeded to lift the car by hand to move it out of the way, clearing the path for other bikes.
Exactly 63 years ago today, the Melbourne Argus became the first newspaper to print in full color. The Argus wrote, “Here’s a picture that makes news–and newspaper history, too.” And as noted in a State Victoria Library post, “The front page banner was printed in garish alternate blue and red block letters, which hopefully has never been repeated.”
This isn’t official or anything, and let’s hope that something gets worked out, but sources have told The Wrap that Channing Tatum is in the process of walking away from Gambit.
what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do
Between her upcoming HBO special and the Netflix documentary that was recently released about her, comedian Tig Notaro is having a 2015 that’s a hell of a lot better than her 2012, when a series of personal catastrophes came very close to ending her life. Now, another major streaming service is expressing interest in her story, with Amazon ordering a pilot for a semi-autobiographical TV series from Notaro, screenwriter Diablo Cody, and producer Louis C.K.
Notaro will write the pilot with Cody, best known for her breakout script, Juno, as well as her Showtime series The United States Of Tara. The as-yet-untitled Amazon show will come out of C.K.’s Pig Newton production company, which also produces the comedian’s critically acclaimed show Louie. (C.K. is a long-time friend of Notaro’s, and was the one who convinced her to release her landmark set, Live, in ...
Daphne Wysham with the Center for Sustainable Economy says the group is will hold a vigil and plans to try to keep the Fennica from leaving port to head back to the Arctic, where it would commence exploration for oil drilling.
“Scientists tell us we can’t drill in the Arctic if we want to avoid dangerous climate change and sea level rise that threatens three-quarters of the Earth’s major cities in the next few decades," Wysham wrote in a news release. "Nevertheless, Shell is putting its corporate profits ahead of the future of the planet and preparing to drill in a region where an oil spill cannot be cleaned up. Portland kayaktivists are the last phalanx of resistance to this insanity."
"In Portland and across the Northwest, we have the unique opportunity and responsibility to act as a chokepoint in the transport of dirty coal, oil, and gas. For years, Portland has demonstrated powerful resistance to the shipping of coal and oil by rail, as well as tar sands mining equipment by road," says Meredith Cocks of Portland Rising Tide. "We view the arrival of Shell's icebreaker in Portland as another chance to disrupt new oil development and demonstrate that any and all new fossil fuel exploration and extraction is an unacceptable risk to our climate and future."
The Coast Guard before the ship's arrival designated a barrier area around the ice breaker, and encouraged protestors to stay between the public boat ramp, North Ensign Street, and Vigor Industrial.
This eTape Liquid Level Sensor is a solid-state sensor with a resistive output that varies with the level of the fluid. It does away with clunky mechanical floats, and easily interfaces with electronic control systems. What separates this from our other eTape Liquid Sensor is the hard plastic jacket that makes it less susceptible to damage.
The eTape sensor’s envelope is compressed by the hydrostatic pressure of the fluid in which it is immersed. This results in a change in resistance that corresponds to the distance from the top of the sensor to the surface of the fluid. The sensor’s resistive output is inversely proportional to the height of the liquid: the lower the liquid level, the higher the output resistance; the higher the liquid level, the lower the output resistance.
This is a very unique sensor, we haven’t seen anything else that is affordable and accurate for measuring liquid level. This particular sensor is the 12″ model. It comes with a 3-pin JST connector.
Since the sensor is resistive, it is easy to read it using a microcontroller/Arduino ADC pin. Check the tutorials tab for a quick-start pointer.
'In Windows 10, it's... different. Windows creates a per-user database containing all the entries that are in Start, both the live tile portion and the All apps portion. This database is (inexplicably) maintained by a system service running as the super-privileged SYSTEM identity. And at the time of writing, this database has the oh-so convenient feature of being limited to around 500 entries. On fresh Windows 10 installs you'll probably never notice the difference, since it'll take some time to build up 500 or so entries. On my main PC with a full install of Office 2016, the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio 2013, and many more applications besides, I blew right past this number. The result? The All apps view didn't show all my programs. This would be tolerable if that's all that happened. Stupid and annoying, but tolerable, because since Windows Vista, I've launched apps from Start in exactly one way: by typing the name of the app to search for it. I don't really care about All apps at all.
Except that searching breaks, too. For search-to-start apps, Windows appears to use the same database. If that database is incomplete (because you have too many entries) then too bad, so sad; it won't find your apps and you'll have no good way of launching them.
Better yet, even if you reduce the number of apps to below 500 or so, it doesn't fix anything. There's no easy way to make it re-read all the short cuts in the Start menu directory (that still exists, because it's where installers expect to put their icons) to regenerate the database. This problem has bitten me and a few others.'
I'm more conflicted about Windows 10 than I have been about any previous version of Windows. In some ways, the operating system is extremely ambitious; in others, it represents a great loss of ambition. The new release tries to walk an unsteady path between being Microsoft's most progressive, forward-looking release and simultaneously appealing to Windows' most conservative users.
And it mostly succeeds, making this the best version of Windows yet—once everything's working. In its current form, the operating system doesn't feel quite finished, and I'd wait a few weeks before making the leap.
Windows 7 was a straightforward proposition, a testament to the power of a new name. Windows Vista may have had a poor reputation, but it was a solid operating system. Give hardware and software vendors three years to develop drivers, come to grips with security changes, fix a few bugs, and freeze the hardware requirements, and the result was Windows 7—an operating system that worked with almost any hardware, almost any software. It was comfortable and familiar. Add some small but desirable enhancements to window management and the task bar, and the result was a hugely popular operating system, the high point of the entire Windows family's development.
For a recent event I wanted to get some local/microbrew root beer, and I thought I would pass along my research for others.
I was inspired by this thread, which gave me a good list of places to try.
Cheapest Empty Growlers*
The cheapest empty growlers I found were at Safeway (I went to the one on SE Hawthorne) for $3.50 (64 ounce). They are undecorated (no Safeway logo), so they're not interesting, but they're cheap.
Local Root Beers
Hopworks on SE Powell sells their own root beer. Cost to fill a growler: $12
Lucky Labrador on SE Hawthorne sells their own root beer. They will not fill a growler, it is sold by the glass only.
Laurelwood on SE Sandy sells their own root beer. Cost to fill a growler: $10.
Growlers on Hawthorne on SE Hawthorne sells Crater Lake root beer. Cost to fill a growler: $9
Green Dragon Pub on SE 9th and Belmont sells Rogue Brewing root beer. Cost to fill a growler: $9
Results
I ended up getting a growler each of Hopworks and Rogue (from Green Dragon). They were both good, but noticeably different (to be expected). I look forward to trying the others in the future.
If you know of any other local/micro root beers in Portland, please leave a comment.
She had been living on the grounds of the governor's mansion since April
Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin’s adult daughter will move her trailer off of the governor’s mansion ground, Fallin’s spokesman said Tuesday, in response to public concerns over her living on taxpayer-funded land.
Gov. Fallin revealed on Sunday that her daughter, Christina, has been staying in a trailer home linked to the mansion’s utilities since April, and is pleased to have her nearby as she seeks a permanent place to live, The Oklahoman reported.
One resident summarized the public’s concerns: “That is state property! Who is paying her bills? Oklahoma taxpayers?”
The governor addressed the furor on Tuesday, stating that her daughter’s trailer was not abusing state resources. “She would be using that electricity if she lived in the house, or if she got a drink of water out of the faucet, or if she flushed the toilet in the house,” Gov. Fallin told KFOR, an Oklahoma City television station.
Alex Weintz, Gov. Fallin’s spokesperson, added that neither Christina nor her mother had violated a state law. However, due to “an administrative rule” stating that trailers are not allowed on state property, Weintz explained, Gov. Fallin’s office has advised the trailer’s removal.
“We’re just like any family, any American family, any Oklahoma family,” Gov. Fallin said. “If I’m 80, if she comes to me and says, ‘Hey mom, I need a temporary place to stay, I’m going to let her stay with me.”
'Dubouis’ latest arrest for bike theft was on Sunday night. Sanders said the video allowed them to identify Dubouis and go pick him up. Now Sanders is working with the Deputy District Attorney to see what type of charges might apply. In Oregon, property theft becomes a felony if the stolen items are worth over $1,000.
Even if Dubouis gets the felony charge, his jail sentence won’t amount to much and he’ll soon be back on the street. Even Leroy Parsons, a man the PPB call the “kingpin” of bike theft who admitted stealing expensive bikes on a KGW-TV segment, served just 90 days. (And by the way, Sanders told me at Sunday Parkways that Parsons is back on the streets already.)
These cases illustrate that enforcement isn’t the only tool we need to address bike theft. Bike theft is just the tip of a very large iceberg of failed social policies and a lack of funding for people in need. Both Parsons and Dubouis (and many other people arrested for bike theft) are methamphetamine addicts who need help to treat their abuse and get their lives turned around.'
Removed quite a few posts/responses to them. In a discussion regarding in-game content, it's really not appropriate to turn the thread into a platform for debating aspects of real-world religion or mythos. There were also a myriad of personal attacks, baiting posts, and other similarly inappropriate comments in this thread. Keep this one about the original topic, or we'll be closing it.
“When I first saw [Cohen make the comments] I said, ‘Wow.’ You know it is something I disagree with. But that’s the way it is. He’s speaking for himself. He’s not speaking for me obviously,” Trump said in an interview with CNN on Tuesday.
Spousal rape has been against the law in all 50 states since the early 1990s.
Cohen apologized earlier Tuesday for his remarks, which were a response to a reporter’s question about a 1989 allegation against Trump that was later retracted.
“In my moment of shock and anger, I made an inarticulate comment — which I do not believe — and which I apologize for entirely,” he said.
“You have to understand Michael was extremely angry,” Trump said, echoing his special counsel’s apology. “Who knows what he said. … But assuming he said it, yeah, I disagree with that.”
Almost all Android mobile devices available today are susceptible to hacks that can execute malicious code when they are sent a malformed text message or the user is lured to a malicious website, a security researcher reported Monday.
The vulnerability affects about 950 million Android phones and tablets, according to Joshua Drake, vice president of platform research and exploitation at security firm Zimperium. It resides in "Stagefright," an Android code library that processes several widely used media formats. The most serious exploit scenario is the use of a specially modified text message using the multimedia message (MMS) format. All an attacker needs is the phone number of the vulnerable Android phone. From there, the malicious message will surreptitiously execute malicious code on the vulnerable device with no action required by the end user and no indication that anything is amiss.
Keila Banks was a keynote speaker at OSCON 2015 in Portland. Her speech was called “Undefinable Me: The story of a 13-year-old girl from the inner city who codes.”
At the beginning of her speech, Banks presents a couple ways that society labels her. She’s black, 13-years-old, a girl, and she’s from inner city Los Angeles. “There are a lot of negative labels that come with that” she says.
Then, Banks starts talking about herself and the impressive resume she’s built. She started a blog at six and taught herself to code when she was 9. She’s an international speaker, also having spoken as a kid coder at the Southern California Linux Expo SCALE in 2013. She’s a gamer, a former cheerleader, a self-taught chef, and lots more.
So, how would you define someone like me? And someone like you too, because I’m pretty sure lots of people here have a lot of qualities or labels that don’t really go together. You don’t. And that’s why I like to call myself undefinable
What you see on the outside looking at me and what I see on the outside looking at you is not what you really are. Join me in being an undefinable you.
She concludes with a nod to Shia LaBeouf’s inspirational video, exclaiming “Just do it!”
'Mixamo got bought out by Adobe... as part of the merge, they've turned off all their billing systems... which means almost everything they have is now free.'
Mixamo got bought out by Adobe... as part of the merge, they've turned off all their billing systems... which means almost everything they have is now free.
"Fuse" is their (free) character modeling / texturing / creation tool that is miles ahead of the old Autodesk Character Generator -- from there, you send the character mesh out to their Auto-Rigger cloud service (also free) with 60+ bone skeletons and facial blend shape support -- and with every (free) account you register, you get 20 (free) animations, and you can potentially make unlimited free accounts. This is a complete character art solution from mesh to skin weights to rigging to animation, for free. It's pretty impressive, and you can easily make a game that looks like a prestige AAA FPS from late 2013. (These assets don't have the accuracy of photoscanned models or DX11 procedural hair, but they're very well crafted.)
Tentatively, they're going to shutdown this infrastructure on December 31, 2015 (I think, according to a cryptic e-mail I got a few months ago) when they've finalized more of the merge with Adobe, so make sure you grab as much stuff as possible while you can.
To celebrate, look at the brunch hunk I made in Fuse (above) and exported out to Unity. Again, it's pretty high resolution stuff with no restrictions. Make use of it for your games while you can.
I'm documenting this resource as a "PSA" because making the tools of photorealism accessible and widespread helps (a) sabotage game industry machinery that privileges fidelity as something valuable, (b) re-contextualizes realism as a stylistic choice rather than a "default" marketing tactic.
Tour Triangle, a gorgeous high-rise pyramid designed by architects Herzog & DeMueron will be the first skyscraper to join the Paris skyline after 40 years of height restrictions in the area. The building, located in the 15th arrondissement, offers a hotel, start-up office space, beautiful views and extensive parks and green spaces in the surrounding areas.
“I counted everything. I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed … anything that could be counted, I did.”
On her NASA calculations:
“Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start. I said, ‘Let me do it. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I’ll do it backwards and tell you when to take off.’ That was my forte.”
Katherine really stood out in her field because she was the only woman who asked questions.
“The women did what they were told to do,” she explained. “They didn’t ask questions or take the task any further. I asked questions; I wanted to know why.“
In 2011, when asked if she still counts things:
“Oh, yes. And things have to be parallel. I see a picture right now that’s not parallel, so I’m going to go straighten it. Things must be in order.”
A woman contacted me, explaining that the latest version of the Playstation controller was almost unusable for her. The triggers were not working as she played in the top-down style, where you put your hands on top of the controller and use a surface to grip the triggers.
Initially I was going to design some kind of grip that glued onto the triggers. Then, I came up with this idea.
It isn’t perfect. It may not even solve her problem (ps4 triggers are at a different angle. not much I can do about that). however, it exists now and maybe it will help others.
This mat was printed with Ninjaflex on a Lulzbot Taz4 3D printer. This means it is a flexible rubber that grips the surface below pretty well. You could really use any soft rubber for this, I suspect that a rubber/gel insole might be perfect actually!
Kind of neat how similar Chicago is to 7+, actually
One of the first Windows 10 features we learned about was the return of the Start menu, which is sort of funny, since the concept of the Start menu is over two decades old. Microsoft tried to replace it with the Start screen in Windows 8, and you only have to look at the adoption numbers to see how most consumers and businesses felt about it.
The Start menu has changed a lot over the years, but there are a handful of common elements that have made it all the way from Windows 95 to Windows 10. We fired up some virtual machines and traveled back in time to before there was a Start menu to track its evolution from the mid '90s to now.
Chicago
Andrew Cunningham
Windows Chicago is the bridge between Windows 3.x and 9x.
5 more images in gallery
What you’re looking at here is build 58s of “Chicago,” one of the earliest extant betas of what would go on to become Windows 95. Things still look awfully Windows 3.1-ish in many parts of this build, but you can see the seeds that would later grow into the familiar Start Menu, Taskbar, and My Computer features, among a few other things.
'The other three farmers blatantly disregarded my warnings. Two of them upped their thruster power to 10,000, and the third set their power to precisely 6,969. That is profoundly juvenile, and does not offer proper respect toward the noble profession of farming.
I cannot help but feel disappointment. I wanted to make a fun farming simulator that everyone could enjoy.'
Farming has always been make-believe ... until now! Let's all get together and play a game of Jon's Farming Simulator, a simulator about farming.
Oh no, there's trouble on the farm ... and we need your help! The farm is out of feed for its chickens, and it's up to you to deliver a barrel of feed from the nearest town. One of you has a chance to save the day. Be the first farmer to make it back to the farm, and you'll be the hero!
Monday, I surveyed y'all on how you wanted to calibrate your vehicle, and how much you knew about farming. I then selected four of you to play in this game, and customized each vehicle according to that person's specifications.
You were allowed to set your thruster power as high as 10,000, but I cautioned you never to set it above 500. 500 is more than enough power to quickly and safely propel you back to the farm. You do not need any more power than that. Set the power any higher than that, and you are likely to lose control of your vehicle and/or cause bodily harm to your person. I was very clear about this.
It should come as little surprise that the person who is actually a farmer in real life would be excellent at a farming simulation. Joe Garbe slowly, but steadily, propelled his way to the farm with nine thrusters: five in the rear, two on the left side, and two on the right side. They were set to a power rating of 450 -- which, as it turns out, is a perfectly safe and acceptable setting.
The other three farmers blatantly disregarded my warnings. Two of them upped their thruster power to 10,000, and the third set their power to precisely 6,969. That is profoundly juvenile, and does not offer proper respect toward the noble profession of farming.
I cannot help but feel disappointment. I wanted to make a fun farming simulator that everyone could enjoy.
I will run another of these simulations as soon as I can find it in my heart to trust all of you again.
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3910604/4.0.png)
