Dan Jones

Star Wars Levitating Death Star Speaker – The Death Star is a powerful, ultra-portable speaker that spins your favorite music

The post Levitating Death Star Speaker appeared first on Shut Up And Take My Money.

Crochet Bowser Shell For Your Turtle – Dress your turtle up to be a little Bowser in training

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Hungry for a slice of pie? We hope so, because that’s what Google is serving up today.

Google today confirmed Android 9.0 Pie. The update is now rolling out over the air to Pixel phones, and it’s also available as a factory image or OTA image if you’d prefer to update that way. Pie will roll out to devices in the Android P Beta Program — like those from Sony, Xiaomi, HMD Global, Oppo, Vivo, and OnePlus — as well as qualifying Android One devices by the end of this fall.

Hot on the heels of Google’s Android Pie announcement, Essential confirmed that it’s now updating the Essential Phone to Android 9.0 Pie. Essential has been doing great with Android updates lately, and it’s awesome to see the company release its Android Pie update on the same day as Google sends it to Pixel phones.

As a refresher, there are a lot of new features included in Android 9.0 Pie. Google has introduced a new gesture-based navigation system, letting you do things like swipe up to get to the Overview. Here is where you’ll see your recent apps, and Pixel phone users will be able to select text from running apps while in Overview. There’s a redesigned Quick Settings included, too, along with a new way to take screenshots and simplified volume controls.

Google has also baked several AI features into Android Pie. Adaptive Battery will learn the apps you use most and prioritize battery for them, while Adaptive Brightness will figure out how you like your phone’s brightness set in different situations and then do it for you. And then there’s App Actions, which will try to predict what you’re going to do with your phone next. For example, you might be getting ready for your commute to work, and App Actions will suggest navigation in Google Maps or resuming an audiobook in Google Play Books.

Coming this fall is a new Android Pie feature called Slices. With it, you’ll be able to get important info from inside your apps without actually launching them. For example, you can type “Lyft” into Google Search and you’ll see fare prices for places like Home and Work as well as an ETA for the nearest car to your location.

Another major feature of Android 9.0 Pie is Digital Wellbeing. This includes a Dashboard to show you exactly how much you’ve been using your phone and an App Timer to help you control your usage. A new Do Not Disturb is included, too, along with a Wind Down feature that’ll turn on Night Light and Do Not Disturb and also fade your phone’s screen to grayscale to help you get to sleep.

Digital Wellbeing will launch to Google Pixel phones this fall, but you can sign up for the beta test right now.

Google highlighted Android 9.0 Pie’s improved security today, too. This includes an improved security model for biometrics, hardware security capabilities for protecting sensitve data using a secure chip, and privacy improvements like TLS by default and DNS over TLS.

If you update your phone to Android 9.0 Pie today, be sure to let us know what you think of the update!

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Texts From Superheroes

At the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in northern Virginia, a rare crane named Walnut imprinted at a young age on a human keeper. This made it impossible for her to mate with other cranes; she soon acquired a reputation for killing any males who tried to court her. Surprisingly, she instead was able to produce by courting with, mating, and bonding for life with another human zoo worker, who now dances and simulates copulation with her even when they’re not trying to reproduce. It’s a weird and amazing story.

When Crowe stopped by her yard, she would bow her head and raise her wings — motions that Crowe now recognizes as the first moves of a mating dance. “At first, I thought that she was just excited to see me,” Crowe says. “But then I’d see the other pairs doing the same things, and it kind of dawned on me.” Crowe accepted Walnut’s invitation to dance. Though he felt a little silly, he bobbed his head when Walnut bobbed hers, and raised and lowered his arms like wings. The two circled each other, and sometimes Walnut would make a loud, trumpeting call — the beginning of the white-naped crane love duet. If no one was around, Crowe would try to do the male part of the song — making a Homer Simpson-like “woo-hoo” — but Walnut never found his efforts satisfactory….

Captive cranes can live past 60 years old, which means Crowe’s commitment to Walnut could, in theory, last decades. “If she’s still here when I’m eligible for retirement, I won’t be able to leave,” he says. “I’d feel like a jerk.” Another male keeper — and Walnut clearly prefers men to women — might be able to woo her if Crowe were to disappear. But, as Crowe has seen with his other cranes, the loss of a mate is traumatic. Widowed cranes stop eating and fill the air with mournful calls, sometimes for weeks on end.

It’s unlikely that Walnut will be called on to produce more chicks, but Crowe continues to dance with her and even “mate” with her when she asks. It’s a strange job, but Crowe says he’s used to getting teased at this point. “I’ve heard every joke,” he says, and then shares his favorite: “What’s the difference between erotic and kinky? Erotic, you use a feather. Kinky, you use the whole bird.”

The whole thing reminds me of The Decemberists’ song “The Crane Wife,” and “Tsuru no Ongaeshi,” the Japanese folk tale it’s based on.

Once upon a time, there lived an elderly couple in a certain place. On a snowy day in winter, the old man was going to town to sell firewood, when he found a crane that was caught in a hunter’s trap. Feeling sorry, he released the bird from the trap. That night while the snow fell violently, a beautiful girl came to the couple’s house. According to her explanation, ever since her parents died, she had been traveling between relatives she had never met before, when she got lost and as a result would like to stay for one night. The couple heartily welcomed her into their home. The snow had not quite stopped the next day, and the day after that, as the girl remained in the house of the elderly couple. Meanwhile, the girl tirelessly took care of the couple, making them happy. One day, the girl asked the couple, instead of sending her off to meet relatives she had never met before, to please make her their daughter. The elderly couple was delighted to accept.

As she continued to help the old couple, one day she requested: “I would like to weave a cloth, so please buy me yarn”. When she was handed the purchased yarn, she stated: “Please don’t ever look in the room.” to the couple; then hid in the room, and wove for three days straight without a break. “Sell this, and buy me more yarn”, she told the couple. The cloth was very beautiful, and became the talk of the town immediately, and sold for a good price. With the new thread that was bought with the new money, their daughter wove another fabric with stunning workmanship, selling at a higher price and making the elderly couple wealthy.

However, when she confined herself to the room to weave a third piece, while the couple persevered in keeping the promise at first, they began to wonder how she wove such beautiful cloth. Unable to fight curiosity, the old lady took a peek inside. Where there should have been a girl was a crane. The crane plucked its own feathers to weave between the threads to produce a glittering cloth. Large portions of the wing had already been plucked out, leaving the crane in a pitiful state. In front of the shocked elderly couple, the daughter who finished weaving approached them, confessing that she was the crane that was saved. While she had intended to remain their daughter, she had to leave, as her true identity has been discovered. She turned back into a crane and flew into the sky, leaving behind the remorseful elderly couple.

For years, Jerry Jacobson was in charge of the security of the game pieces for McDonald’s Monopoly, one of the most successful marketing promotions in the fast food giant’s history. And for almost as long, Jacobson had been passing off winning pieces to family, friends, and “a sprawling network of mobsters, psychics, strip club owners, convicts, drug traffickers”, to the tune of more than million in cash & prizes.

Dent’s investigation had started in 2000, when a mysterious informant called the FBI and claimed that McDonald’s games had been rigged by an insider known as “Uncle Jerry.” The person revealed that “winners” paid Uncle Jerry for stolen game pieces in various ways. The $1 million winners, for example, passed the first $50,000 installment to Uncle Jerry in cash. Sometimes Uncle Jerry would demand cash up front, requiring winners to mortgage their homes to come up with the money. According to the informant, members of one close-knit family in Jacksonville had claimed three $1 million dollar prizes and a Dodge Viper.

When Dent alerted the McDonald’s headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, executives were deeply concerned. The company’s top lawyers pledged to help the FBI, and faxed Dent a list of past winners. They explained that their game pieces were produced by a Los Angeles company, Simon Marketing, and printed by Dittler Brothers in Oakwood, Georgia, a firm trusted with printing U.S. mail stamps and lotto scratch-offs. The person in charge of the game pieces was Simon’s director of security, Jerry Jacobson.

One of the winners, Jerry Columbo, a partner of Jacobson’s who was allegedly a member of the Mafia, even appeared in this TV commercial holding an oversized novelty key to a car he had “won”:

At the height of the scam, no normal person won any of the best Monopoly prizes…they were all arranged by Jacobson. This has to become a movie, right?

I remember when the Monopoly game started. We didn’t eat out that much when I was a kid, but we still played a few times here and there. But I distinctly remember studying the game board, looking at the odds of winning, and figuring out how they must restrict some single game pieces to make it all work. You could get Park Places all day long, but you’d never ever see a Boardwalk. After that realization, I lost interest in playing. It was an early lesson about not spending too much time and energy striving for unattainable goals. Besides, those delicious McDonald’s fries were reward enough.

Update: Ah, a movie version of the story is in the works with Matt Damon playing Jacobson and Ben Affleck directing.

There are certain languages which are still in use, are still changing and maturing, and yet are also frozen in time. Fortran is a perfect example- over the past 40–60 years, huge piles of code, mostly for scientific and engineering applications, was written. It may be hard to believe, but modern Fortran supports object-oriented programming and has a focus on concurrency.

Most of the people using Fortran, it seems, learned it in the 70s. And no matter what happens to the language, they still write code like it’s the 70s. Fortran’s own seeming immortality has imbued its users with necromantic energy, turning them into undying, and unchanging Liches.

Which brings us to Greg. Greg works with an engineer. This engineer, the Dark Lich Thraubagh, has a personal “spellbook” containing snippets of Fortran they’ve picked up over the past 40 years. For example, there’s this block, which creates an array of every number from 1–999, padded out to three characters.

I don’t know Fortran, so I give credit to this engineer/lich for writing code which even I can understand why it’s wrong and bad.

      character*3 c(999)
      character*1 b(9)
      b(0)='0'
      b(1)='1'
      b(2)='2'
      b(3)='3'
      b(4)='4'
      b(5)='5'
      b(6)='6'
      b(7)='7'
      b(8)='8'
      b(9)='9'
      
      do 1 i=1,999
      
      c(i)(3:3)=b( int( 10*((i/10.0)-int(i/10.0) ) ) )
      c(i)(2:2)=b( int( 10*((i/100.0)-int(i/100.0) ) ) )
      c(i)(1:1)=b( int( 10*((i/1000.0)-int(i/1000.0) ) ) )
      
1     continue

Start by creating a 1000-element array of 3-character long strings. Then create a 10-element array of 1-character long strings, containing the numbers 0–9.

Then we loop, and populate the strings in that larger array by doing some modular arithmetic and selecting from the 10-element array.

Fun fact: even in Fortran 77, there were a number of formatting options. If, for example, you wanted to put a number into a padded string, you could do write(string_var,"I3.3") 99. string_var now contains "099". Maybe not the clearest thing, but much simpler, certainly.

Funner fact: the c array was basically not used anywhere, in the particular program which caused Greg to send this along. The Dark Lich Thraubagh simply copies their “spellbook” into every program they write, gradually adding new methods to the spellbook, but never updating or modifying the old. They’ve been doing this for 40 years, and plan to do it for at least a century more.

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A reader wrote in to tell me we should update our articles about SVG <use> elements. The attribute we always use for them, xlink:href, is deprecated. Indeed, MDN says:

That's pretty strong language, hence the reader's warning. This is a bit surprising to me, as the SVG 2 thing got a little weird. It looks like it did become a Candidate Recommendation though.

So...

<!-- This is old -->
<svg>
  <use xlink:href="#whatever" />
</svg>

<!-- This is new -->
<svg>
  <use href="#whatever" />
</svg>

I like it. But does it actually work? Lemme fork my little old demo and change all the references. In a quick run through of what I have easy access to:

Better than I thought! But enough 🙅‍♂️ no-go's there that up and switching everything seems far too dangerous, especially when xlink:href has support across the board.

Will browsers actually pull support? I'll bet ya fifty bucks none of them ever do. There are tons of websites that use the attribute in the old format that will never update, and we know that browsers take breaking old sites very seriously (yay).

It feels like the same thing with, for example, :before and ::before. Yeah, ::before is the new and more correct syntax. But no browser will ever pull support for :before (I'll bet ya another 50 bucks) because it just needlessly breaks sites. And because of that, it almost makes the most sense to keep using :before as you get the widest swath of support that way.

I probably won't be updating older articles using <use xlink:href="" /> unless something bizarre happens and some browser actually does pull support.

The post On xlink:href being deprecated in SVG appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Texts From Superheroes

Om Malik:

From Business Insider (which called it iPhone of e-cigarettes) to CrunchBase, everyone seems to marvel over their growth rates, their post-Unicorn valuations, and jaw-dropping success at raising capital. And very rarely have I seen anyone stand up and point out that it is no different than traditional tobacco peddlers like Marlboro and Camel. They are peddling nicotine-based addiction. By focusing on charming founders, their backgrounds, large amount of funds raised and crazy valuations, no one is asking the right question: why are we supporting this company that is essentially Camel 2.0?

Addiction is a profitable and high-growth business. Ask the cartels selling other addictive products. “And is it an ethical business?,” asks Crunchbase. “We can’t answer the latter question here as we’re not equipped for it.” Yes, you are! Any halfway decent person can see that tobacco and nicotine industries are driven by greed and have preyed on human frailty.

Agree with every word of this.