Amazon has started rolling out a new version of Lovefilm Instant on the Playstation 3 in the UK and Germany, with new countries and platforms to follow. The update brings a better search engine and recommendations, along with a new Watchlist feature and revised UI that lets you track content currently being watched via the homepage. Viewers in the launch countries will also notice another welcome change: they can finally watch TV and movies in HD on the PS3. There's no word on exactly when other Instant platforms will see the upgrade, but we're assured it will get to everyone "in the future."

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD, Amazon

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Computer and smartphone maker Apple reports its first quarterly drop in profits in a decade, despite strong sales in the three months to March.

Longest Sunset

What is the longest possible sunset you can experience while driving, assuming we are obeying the speed limit and driving on paved roads?

—Michael Berg

To answer this, we have to be sure what we mean by “sunset".

This is a sunset:

This is not a sunset:

For the purposes of our question, this is not a sunset:

This is also not a sunset:

This is definitely not a sunset:

And no matter what happens here, this will not be a sunset:

Sunset starts the instant the Sun touches the horizon, and ends when it disappears completely. If the Sun touches the horizon and then lifts back up, the sunset is disqualified.

For a sunset to count, the Sun has to set behind the idealized horizon, not just behind a nearby hill. This is not a sunset, even though it seems like one:

The reason that can’t count as a sunset is that if you could use arbitrary obstacles, you could cause a sunset whenever you wanted by hiding behind a rock.

Note: We also have to consider refraction. The Earth’s atmosphere bends light, so when the Sun is at the horizon it appears about one Sun-width higher than it would otherwise. The standard practice seems to be to include the average effect of this in all calculations, which I’ve done here.

At the Equator in March and September, sunset is a hair over two minutes long. Closer to the poles, in places like the London, it can take between 200 and 300 seconds. It’s shortest in spring and fall (when the Sun is over the equator) and longest in the summer and winter.

If you stand still at the South Pole in early March, the Sun stays in the sky all day, making a full circle just above the horizon. Sometime around March 21st, it touches the horizon for the only sunset of the year. This sunset takes 38-40 hours, which means it makes more than a full circuit around the horizon while setting.

But Michael’s question was very clever. He asked about the longest sunset you can experience on a paved road. There’s a road to the research station at the South Pole, but it’s not paved—it’s made of packed snow. There are no paved roads anywhere near either pole.

The closest road that really qualifies is probably the main road in Longyearbyen, on the island of Svalbard, Norway. (The end of the airport runway in Longyearbyen gets you slightly further, although driving there might get you in trouble.)

Longyearbyen is actually closer to the North Pole than McMurdo Station in Antarctica is to the South Pole. There are a handful of military, research, and fishing stations further north, but none of them have much in the way of roads; just airstrips, which are usually gravel and snow.

If you putter around downtown Longyearbyen (get a picture with the “polar bear crossing” sign), the longest sunset you could experience would be a few minutes short of an hour. It doesn’t actually matter if you drive or not; the town is too small for your movement to make a difference.

But if you head a little ways south, you can do even better.

If you start driving from the tropics and stay on paved roads, the furthest north you can get is the tip of European Route 69 in Norway. There are a number of roads crisscrossing northern Scandinavia, so that seems like a good place to start. But which road should we use?

Intuitively, it seems like we want to be as far north as possible. The closer we are to the pole, the easier it is to keep up with the Sun.

Unfortunately, it turns out keeping up with the Sun isn’t a good strategy. Even in those high Norwegian latitudes, the Sun is just too fast. At the tip of European Route 69—the farthest you can get from the Equator while driving on paved roads—you’d still have to drive at about half the speed of sound to keep up with the Sun. (And E69 runs north-south, not east-west, so you’d drive into the Barents Sea anyway.)

Luckily, there’s a better approach.

If you're in northern Norway on a day when the Sun just barely sets and then rises again, the terminator (day-night line) moves across the land in this pattern:

(Not to be confused with the Terminator, which moves across the land in this pattern:)

To get a long sunset, the strategy is simple: Wait for the date when the terminator will just barely reach your position. Sit in your car until the terminator reaches you, drive north to stay a little ahead of it for as long as you can (depending on the local road layout), then u-turn and drive back south fast enough that you can get past it to the safety of darkness. (These instructions also work for the other kind of Terminator.)

Surprisingly, this strategy works about equally well anywhere inside the Arctic Circle, so you can get this lengthy sunset on many roads across Finland and Norway. I ran a search for long-sunset driving paths using PyEphem and some GPS traces of Norwegian highways. I found that over a wide range of routes and driving speeds, the longest sunset was consistently about 95 minutes—an improvement of about 40 minutes over the Svalbard sit-in-one-place strategy.

But if you are stuck in Svalbard and want to make the sunset—or sunrise—last a little longer, you can always try spinning counterclockwise. It’s true that it will only add an immeasurably small fraction of a nanosecond. But depending on who you’re with ...

... it might be worth it.

Bad news, everyone. Five years into Futurama's revived presence on Comedy Central, the animated sci-fi series is getting the boot for the second time in its long and tumultuous history. Long-time fans will remember the first series finale ("The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings") on Fox in 2003, the show's brief rerun stint on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, the foray into four direct-to-DVD movies (which were separated into sixteen episodes for its inaugural season on Comedy Central) and its eventual deal with the cable network that brought us South Park and The Daily Show. But it seems even after stunts like playing on our gadget obsessions and coming up with a brand new mathematical theorem, the fine folks over at Planet Express just couldn't slake Viacom's thirst for viewers. So, with a heavy heart, we await the series finale (dubbed "Meanwhile") to air on September 4th. But hey, maybe someone can convince Netflix to give life to yet another brilliant-but-canceled series?

Update: To check out a preview of the show's final season -- to debut on June 19th -- take a peek at the second video after the break.

Filed under: HD

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Source: Entertainment Weekly

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We have offshored both our consumption and our perceptions

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website, 12th April 2013

 

Every society has topics it does not discuss. These are the issues which challenge its comfortable assumptions. They are the ones that remind us of mortality, which threaten the continuity we anticipate, which expose our various beliefs as irreconcilable.

Among them are the facts which sink the cosy assertion, that (in David Cameron’s words) “there need not be a tension between green and growth.”

At a reception in London recently I met an extremely rich woman, who lives, as most people with similar levels of wealth do, in an almost comically unsustainable fashion: jetting between various homes and resorts in one long turbo-charged holiday. When I told her what I did, she responded, “oh I agree, the environment is so important. I’m crazy about recycling.” But the real problem, she explained, was “people breeding too much”.

I agreed that population is an element of the problem, but argued that consumption is rising much faster and – unlike the growth in the number of people – is showing no signs of levelling off. She found this notion deeply offensive: I mean the notion that human population growth is slowing. When I told her that birth rates are dropping almost everywhere, and that the world is undergoing a slow demographic transition, she disagreed violently: she has seen, on her endless travels, how many children “all those people have”.

As so many in her position do, she was using population as a means of disavowing her own impacts. The issue allowed her to transfer responsibility to other people: people at the opposite end of the economic spectrum. It allowed her to pretend that her shopping and flying and endless refurbishments of multiple homes are not a problem. Recycling and population: these are the amulets people clasp in order not to see the clash between protecting the environment and rising consumption.

In a similar way, we have managed, with the help of a misleading global accounting system, to overlook one of the gravest impacts of our consumption. This too has allowed us to blame foreigners – particularly poorer foreigners – for the problem.

When nations negotiate global cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, they are held  responsible only for the gases produced within their own borders. Partly as a result of this convention, these tend to be the only ones that countries count. When these “territorial emissions” fall, they congratulate themselves on reducing their carbon footprints. But as markets of all kinds have been globalised, and as manufacturing migrates from rich nations to poorer ones, territorial accounting bears ever less relationship to our real impacts.

While this is an issue which affects all post-industrial countries, it is especially pertinent in the United Kingdom, where the difference between our domestic and international impacts is greater than that of any other major emitter. The last government boasted that this country cut greenhouse gas emissions by 19% between 1990 and 2008. It positioned itself (as the current government does) as a global leader, on course to meet its own targets, and as an example for other nations to follow.

But the cut the UK has celebrated is an artefact of accountancy. When the impact of the goods we buy from other nations is counted, our total greenhouse gases did not fall by 19% between 1990 and 2008. They rose by 20%. This is despite the replacement during that period of many of our coal-fired power stations with natural gas, which produces roughly half as much carbon dioxide for every unit of electricity. When our “consumption emissions”, rather than territorial emissions, are taken into account, our proud record turns into a story of dismal failure.

There are two further impacts of this false accounting. The first is that because many of the goods whose manufacture we commission are now produced in other countries, those places take the blame for our rising consumption. We use China just as we use the population issue: as a means of deflecting responsibility. What’s the point of cutting our own consumption, a thousand voices ask, when China is building a new power station every 10 seconds (or whatever the current rate happens to be)?

But, just as our position is flattered by the way greenhouse gases are counted, China’s is unfairly maligned. A graph published by the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee shows that consumption accounting would reduce China’s emissions by roughly 45%. Many of those power stations and polluting factories have been built to supply our markets, feeding an apparently insatiable demand in the UK, the US and other rich nations for escalating quantities of stuff.

The second thing the accounting convention has hidden from us is consumerism’s contribution to global warming. Because we consider only our territorial emissions, we tend to emphasise the impact of services – heating, lighting and transport for example – while overlooking the impact of goods. Look at the whole picture, however, and you discover (using the Guardian’s carbon calculator) that manufacturing and consumption is responsible for a remarkable 57% of the greenhouse gas production caused by the UK.

Unsurprisingly, hardly anyone wants to talk about this, as the only meaningful response is a reduction in the volume of stuff we consume. And this is where even the most progressive governments’ climate policies collide with everything else they represent. As Mustapha Mond points out in Brave New World, “industrial civilization is only possible when there’s no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning”.

The wheels of the current economic system – which depends on perpetual growth for its survival – certainly. The impossibility of sustaining this system of endless, pointless consumption without the continued erosion of the living planet and the future prospects of humankind, is the conversation we will not have.

By considering only our territorial emissions, we make the impacts of our escalating consumption disappear in a puff of black smoke: we have offshored the problem, and our perceptions of it.

But at least in a couple of places the conjuring trick is beginning to attract some attention.

On April 16th, the Carbon Omissions site will launch a brilliant animation by Leo Murray, neatly sketching out the problem*. The hope is that by explaining the issue simply and engagingly, his animation will reach a much bigger audience than articles like the one you are reading can achieve.

(*Declaration of interest (unpaid): I did the voiceover).

On April 24th, the Committee on Climate Change (a body that advises the UK government) will publish a report on how consumption emissions are likely to rise, and how government policy should respond to the issue.

I hope this is the beginning of a conversation we have been avoiding for much too long. How many of us are prepared fully to consider the implications?

www.monbiot.com

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It appears that the X3: Terran Conflict space training and combat simulator game has finally reached Linux, nearly five years after it premiered for Windows and OS X...

So there I was last week at my parents’ house, and my dad said: I am thinking of getting Netflix.

“Oh?”, says I. “What brought this on?”

Questions like that end up turning into long discussions, and this was no exception. Those of you with the attention span of a four-year-old will find a summary at the bottom of the post.

He explained (in response to my question) that he likes the idea of watching films and it’s probably easier and probably cheaper and probably less hassle to do that in your own living room rather than the cinema, especially since the nearest cinema to him is probably 15 miles away. I pointed out that the available films will lag behind the cinema releases (so if you see an ad for, say, Star Trek Into Darkness ¹ on the side of a bus, you can’t watch it in your living room now) but that they lag behind a consistent amount (so all the films that hit the cinema 12 months ago ² arrive online at now, roughly, so all the films which were contemporarily released with one another are still contemporary with one another), and that there are multiple different providers of this sort of thing (Netflix, Lovefilm, Now TV). And I pointed out ³ that this would be a bit of a problem technically, because the computer plugged into the big TV in the living room runs Ubuntu, and you can’t watch commercial streaming video on Ubuntu ⁴ because it all requires MS PlayReady DRM ⁵ and there’s no Ubuntu implementation of that, and so this meant that we’d need to install Windows on that TV computer instead. ⁶

so, like, wassitallabout?

“How does it work?”, says my dad. “Well,” said I, settling into the chair and adopting a wise look, “you pay a monthly subscription, and then pick any film you want and watch it whenever you want for free, beyond the subscription. I think if you watch the very latest films then they might charge an extra cost because it’s a really recent film, but you’re already waiting 12 months before it hits Netflix at all; you might as well just set your clock to 18 months behind and watch a film once it hits non-pay-per-view.” A nod from Dad. “Oh, and I think occasionally there might be a film that Netflix doesn’t have: sometimes there are little wars between them and, say, Amazon or Lovefilm ⁷ or Hulu or whatever, and a film is a ‘Netflix exclusive’ or something.” ⁸

“We should check that,” says my dad, a man for whom “films I want to watch” has hitherto been Zulu and The Great Escape, but he’s right ⁹. Now we pause here for twenty minutes while, with increasing disbelief and shrillness, I discover that Netflix don’t provide a browseable list of their films. They don’t. That’s insane. Also: you know how shops that don’t display their prices are doing so because it’s all stupidly expensive? Anyone who doesn’t display a list of their products is doing so because that list is a lot shorter and less comprehensive than you think it will be. So we poke around some more (I was honestly, properly shocked by the absence of a list) and find a website that searches Netflix and gives you a link. Commence another twenty minute block of disbelief during which my dad names film after film after film he wants to watch, or wouldn’t mind watching, or has always meant to watch… and we find, I think, three. These weren’t all new films, weren’t all obscure films, weren’t all old films: there was a good mix. And hardly any of them were there.

and the rat was nowhere at all

Further research establishes that the rivals — Lovefilm, Now TV, Blinkbox — are the same. I was under the impression that every one of these online movie places had basically every film you’ve ever heard of, and they compete on pricing, or access to the very latest films. It is not like that. ¹⁰ Instead, Netflix and Lovefilm and Now TV have basically no films for streaming and then every now and again they might have one. That is: I thought that the model was “think on the bus of a film you fancy watching, then go home and find it on Netflix and watch it”, and the model is totally not that. Instead, the model is “decide you want to watch a film, and set aside two hours for film-watchy time, and then go to Netflix and choose a film from their list of films”. Or, in practice, from the subset of their list of films that you actually want to watch. That’s not necessarily a bad model — I’m sure new films come into Netflix’s list faster than you can watch them, and you could probably get quite a long way by just looking at their list and finding all the stuff on it that you like the look of — but I totally misunderstood (and so did Dad). I thought that Netflix were like Spotify but for films, and they really ain’t. ¹¹

father, I shall bring you only the finest blank tv screens

At this point he said, well, that’s crap then. I suppose I ought to go to the cinema.

I said: well, if you have to do the just-choose-off-the-list thing anyway, then why not just use a service who don’t charge a monthly subscription? What I mean is: do it all pay-per-view. So then you’re not paying when you’re not using it, and on any given day you can just do a search and see if there’s anything you fancy watching (and paying for), and if there isn’t, get in the car and go to the cinema instead. Best of both worlds. I’m sure that if you watched ten films a week that Netflix would be cheaper, but I don’t think that you’re gonna do that, daddy dearest.

OK, says daddy dearest. So, we do that, and put Windows on the computer, right?

Yep, I said. None of this stuff works on Ubuntu. Amazon Instant Video works fine, and does exactly what you want, but (check briefly on internet to confirm; briefly bitch on reddit about this; go back to dad) it’s US only. Soz.

the sacred art of stealing

We then have a little discussion about BitTorrent and theft of movies, during which I basically say: it is not the solution for you. First, it is really awkward and annoying. Popup ads, hundreds of different websites, being able to tell the difference between a “download the torrent” link which is real and one which is put there by an advert. Torrent sites are blocked by ISPs in the UK. Yes, gentle reader, stop sniggering at how this blocking approach is useless. Tt’s not meant to stop you, you filthy techie pirate: it’s meant to be a speed bump which makes it difficult for the unwashed masses to do this, to keep people like my dad out of the torrent gutter and in paid-for shiny Netflix territory… and it works.

I specifically recommended to dad that he not think about dealing with this stuff through theft, because theft is hard. Try it, next time you steal a movie: look at what you’re doing with the eyes of an inexperienced person. A person who doesn’t have Adblock Plus, who isn’t able to read through a list of search results and identify which ones “look legit” and which look like spam, who isn’t able to tell which links on a site are real and which download an exe. Theft is hard, and frankly it’s fairly close to not being worth the pain. It’s fairly close to it being easier to just pay the money. And that’s all the movie people want. They don’t want to make it impossible, they don’t want to studiously ignore that DRM doesn’t work, that blocking doesn’t work, that they can’t shut down every Pirate Bay proxy… all they have to do is make most people think “blimey, it’d be easier to pay the money than do this”. To me it feels like that’s now fairly close to being the case unless you’re a super techie (like most of the people reading this).

Also, y’know, stealing.

Also also: mkv. avi. srt. Do you really want to care about this stuff? Learn what a “BRRIP” is? Learn whether the thing you’ve got has Italian audio rather than English? Is "Incepcja - Inception DVDRip.XviD AC3 - ENG / Lektor PL" OK to download? ¹² Srsly, hassle. Avoid.

say that my glory was I had such friends

While explaining BitTorrent and why it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, a couple of very helpful people saw and commented on my Reddit post complaining about this stuff. Google Play, they said… that’s in the UK. Single-purchase pay-per-view videos, no subscription required. Dad’s got an Android phone so he’s already got a Play account… and Play Video works in Ubuntu?

Really?

It does, it turns out.

I was quite surprised by this.

he saved every one of us

You have to install hal to make Google Play work in Ubuntu ¹³: to do this, search for hal in Ubuntu Software Centre and then install it (“Hardware Abstraction Layer”) ¹⁴. This is the same thing that Amazon Instant Video in the US needs. It’s using Adobe’s Flash DRM stuff. This is good for us, we happy few, we Ubuntu users, because we have Flash. We do not have the PlayReady DRM which is in Silverlight ¹⁵, and which the movie studios are pressuring online video people to switch to — that’s why Netflix doesn’t work in Ubuntu, that’s why Lovefilm no longer works, why Now TV doesn’t work. Google Play, on the other hand, works fine. Dad likes the pay-just-when-you-watch-a-film model, and it works on his existing computer with his existing accounts; he didn’t even have to sign up for anything. Just click and he’s bought a film and can watch it. Right there in the web browser. No app required at all.

It was literally that simple.

People on other platforms, who are not only used to the idea that it’s that simple, but have hardly any concept that it might not be simple, are laughing themselves sick right now at me being so childishly, pathetically pleased by this. I personally am thinking: good work, Google Play. You made that easy.

The film that Dad chose to watch… was Twilight. Twilight. You’re not my real dad, dad.

dispatch war rocket Ajax to bring back his body

This is worrying. (Not the Twilight thing.) Flash still exists on Ubuntu, but Adobe have stopped making it. The DRM parts of it are already dependent on hal, which is basically deprecated: Adobe built the Flash DRM stuff into Flash and on Linux when hal was the thing, and since then hal has stopped being the thing, but Adobe didn’t update Flash to work with the replacement… and right at the moment it doesn’t look like they will at all, because they’ve stopped doing Flash for Linux. This means that at some point it will stop working. At the moment it is possible to legitimately, legally, happily, easily watch a Hollywood film on a stock, standard Ubuntu machine. Google Play can do it in at least the US and the UK; Amazon Instant Video can do it in the US. If Flash stops working, that goes away.

And HTML5 will not save us. It will not. They’re talking about putting DRM into HTML5 video right now, but either they won’t do it (and then there won’t be any commercial videos in HTML5, just like there aren’t now) or they will do it and they’ll likely pick a DRM scheme which is not implemented on Ubuntu and won’t be (highly likely to be something like PlayReady, because the whole industry is already familiar with it). A move away from Flash and towards anything else makes life measurably worse for Ubuntu users, because we have Flash, and don’t have anything else.

fight the work per unit time

But you’re missing the point, man! We must fight DRM! It doesn’t work and it’s evil and useless!

I agree with all that. But that’s a long-term fight. And no-one has yet convinced me that there is a way to do it without selling the whole world on the idea that they should just Stop Watching Movies until the DRM goes away. And we, the DRM-haters, have had little to no success convincing people to make that sacrifice.

The music industry is not a good guide here. What happened in music was that all the players fought one another with different DRM schemes, no cooperation, to try and beat out their rivals. And while they were doing that, Apple came along and built something which was slick and easy to use and had Apple-specific DRM in it and dominated the market. Then the music industry said: it is our music, you have to play by our rules… and Apple said: no we don’t. We really don’t. What are you going to do, music people? Go and sell WMAs? Not likely. Everyone’s got an iPod now. And Apple were right… and because everyone wanted to sell music to iPod owners and didn’t want to do it through Apple’s sales channel, they had to go DRM-free. Because that’s all that iPods would play. You could see this as a great victory for consumer power, if you squint a bit.

The movie people, though (and this is an important point) are not stupid. They have seen what happened to the music industry, have seen that it ended up with all viable saleable music being DRM-free, and have said: that’s not gonna happen to us. They are not going to fight and bicker amongst themselves while Apple builds a royal road to all the money. They are not going to knife one another. They’re going to get together, swallow their pride a bit, and cooperate because they recognise that one DRM system that everyone compromises a bit on is better than a million and the eventual arrival of DRM-free videos. And so they did cooperate: that’s what Ultraviolet is. And it does not matter that Ultraviolet hasn’t taken off yet: it does not matter that it is not a viable competitor to Netflix. The point is that it exists. The movie people will not be forced into offering DRM-free movies because they didn’t cooperate until it was too late. They have seen the mistakes the music industry made, and won’t get caught the same way.

Let’s talk about how, in the long term, the studios can be convinced to not use DRM: that’s a good conversation to have. But it’s hard to see how to do that now without telling my dad that he can’t watch Twilight on Ubuntu even if he wants to.

whataboutery

One of the things about this whole topic of movies and DRM and Ubuntu and stuff is that every sentence comes larded with a million caveats, oh-but-what-abouts, roads-not-taken, sidebars, and other ancilliary things. If you manage to find something where I said “and therefore X” and didn’t mention that Y and Z also exist as possibilities, do not assume that it is because I do not know about Y and Z. But tell me about them!

tl; dr

Summary: Google Play video works on stock Ubuntu, in your browser, and exists here in England. It is, as far as I am aware, the only legitimate, unhacky ¹⁶ way to watch a streamed Hollywood film on a standard Ubuntu laptop in England. I like it. So does my dad.

Notes:

1. not Star Trek: Into Darkness ↩
2. or 18 months ago, or whatever the time lag actually is ↩
3. a touch shamefacedly ↩
4. he wants instant gratification: being able to go from “I want to watch a film” to “I am watching a film” in seconds. This means that a DVD rental service is no good for his use case ↩
5. yes, Silverlight, but Silverlight itself is not the problem ↩
6. yes, I know about the Netflix-under-Wine stuff in Ubuntu. Read on ↩
7. yes I know Amazon own Lovefilm ↩
8. pause for brief explanation of how Netflix are remaking House of Cards in America ↩
9. and this is a massively unfair characterisation ↩
10. Maybe it is like that in America. It isn’t, here. ↩
11. this is not necessarily a complaint. I understand that Netflix are not Spotify for films, and it is not Netflix’s fault that they are not Spotify for films. You think the music industry is full of back-alley cheating and under-the-table secret deals? Ha! You should see the movie people. ↩
12. I’ll be honest: I’m not sure myself. Looks like it’s got English audio and Polish subtitles? Don’t know. ↩
13. if you don’t install hal, Flash obviously still works, but the movie just won’t play ↩
14. or sudo apt-get install hal from a terminal ↩
15. we could have. Microsoft have not “refused” to put PlayReady on Ubuntu. They just haven’t done it, and why should they? what’s their motivation? I wouldn’t do it if I were them, right now ↩
16. installing a custom Wine and a PPA is hacky; using a US-based proxy is hacky. If you think it isn’t, that’s fine; continue to think so, and we’ll agree to differ. ↩

A comic about a glorious undersea creature.

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Some of the web's most-visited porn sites are increasingly putting their visitors at risk of being infected by harmful software, a researcher finds.

Are you sick and tired of those boring bike stands that don’t deserve to have your beautiful bike tied to it? I’ve scoured the internet looking for the sleekest, the coolest and most outrageous bike stand designs I could find.

Here they are for your viewing pleasure!

1. Giant Squid Bike Rack

Nothing says I’m a totally awesome hardcore cyclist like…a giant squid? Well maybe not but this bike rack will definitely help you remember where you parked your bike. I’m not quite sure how you’d lock the bike to anything other than the front tentacles, but it’s kooky and it’s secure so why not!

2. PlantLock

The PlantLock cycle stand plays double-duty as a planter and a secure method to lock up your bike. Rather than turning cluttered hallways and stairwells into walking hazards, the PlantLock adds a bit of greenery and a lot of security since this hefty (75 kilograms…empty) stand cannot be moved.

3. Yarn-Bombed M Stand

Take a simple M cycle stand and cover it in colorful patterns of yarn, or ‘yarn bomb’ it to make it stand out on your standard dreary grey street. I don’t know who has time to yarn bomb a cycle stand, but it sure looks pretty darn cool, doesn’t it?

4. Rainbow Slinky Cycle Stand

This colorful cycle stand in Denmark reminds me a lot of the infamous slinky, not just because of the rainbow hues but also because, well it looks like a fallen slinky. You’ll never forget where you’ve parked your cycle with this colorful stand.

5. Comb Cycle Stand

This bicycle stand/art weighs in at 181 kilograms and as you can see, is shaped like a gigantic comb. Just slide your wheel between the teeth of the comb and secure it as you normally would. It’s rather fun to look at!

6. Rolling Bike Stand

These letter shaped bike racks were designed by David Byrne and can be swapped around to form different words.

7. Pit In

This super cool “bike stand” by Store Muu may not be the most practical method of storing your bike, but it certainly secure. Simply park your bike right into the table and use your bike seat as your desk seat, and get to work. Imagine how easy it’ll be sliding into your desk after rushing to the office or getting a table without locking away your bike!

Best of all, your cycle never leaves your side.

8. Car Bike Port

For cyclists wishing for motorist-cyclist equality, this bike stand design by Cyclehoop will definitely soothe your sense of righteousness. Shaped like a car, this bike stand takes 1 car space and turns it into parking for 10 bicycles. Now you too get prime parking when you’re out and about.

9. Bike Hanger

If you’re like most cyclists you’re tired of never having any place to secure your cycle when you’re shopping or dining out. But this cool new bike hanger offers vertical storage on the side of buildings, kind of like a bicycle carousel storage facility. We don’t know all the details, but the concept is appealing.

10. Sexy Silhouette

How many times have you wished to use your bike to get close to a sexy lady? It may not be quite what you have in mind, but this sexy silhouette bike stand puts you one step closer. Find an appealing body part, grab your locks and let this beauty keep your cycle save and secure.

If you’ve come across any more crazy designs, please share them below!

The post 10 bike stands I’d love to leave my bike in appeared first on London Cyclist Blog.

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This is a Lego-compatible, two headed, three-legged mini-figure. Legs are fully moveable. Only the torso and the hips/legs are included, you must provide your own heads and arms.

It’s available on Shapeways, and there are full-size photos on Flickr.

The torso was printed slightly warped, and it cracked when I put the arms in. If your print is warped or distorted, ask Shapeways for a reprint. All the edges should be straight and the flat surfaces should be completely flat.

The post Three-legged Mini-figure appeared first on glyphobet • глыфобет • γλυφοβετ.

Continuing its quest to sate subscribers' appetites with a flow of original content, Netflix has announced a new original series, Sense8. Due in late 2014, it's being developed by the Wachowskis of The Matrix, V for Vendetta, Cloud Atlas and Speed Racer fame, as well as J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5. Details are thin, but the press release promises a gripping global tale of minds linked and souls hunted with a ten episode run for its first season.

As it did with House of Cards, Arrested Development and other productions, Netflix is relying heavily on data from viewers to decide which programs to support. According to chief content officer Ted Sarandos, "Andy and Lana Wachowski and Joe Straczynski are among the most imaginative writers and gifted visual storytellers of our time," whose creations are very frequently viewed on the service. According to the creators themselves, they've sought to work together for a decade, and this idea started from a late night conversation about "the ways technology simultaneously unites and divides us." If that's not enough for now, then there are a few more details and quotes in the press release, which is included after the break.

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Code review can be a bit of a recipe for drama. There was a large-ish amount of drama in a close project quite recently that stemmed from patch review, and it got me thinking about how we handle this in free software.

In free software code review, along with other practices that we call “agile practices” (such as continuous integration, unit testing, behavior driven design, test driven development) is a relatively new thing in some projects, especially those on the desktop stack.

Code review tends to fall into an intersection which might otherwise be called an “HR-nightmare”. There are lots of competing factors which can make things very dramatic.

1. The person submitting the patch has invested some time and effort into it.
2. The reviewer’s responsibility is mediating the change proposed by the patch and the quality of the code as a whole.
3. People disagree on the best way to do things, and sometimes these differences are fundamental and irreconcilable.
4. People have differing views on what the purpose of review is, and what priorities should be given to reviews.
5. Reviews are often seen as a “chore” and a necessary part of project management.

Beck and Mezaros have used the terms “Code Smells” and “Test Smells” to describe whats wrong with the non-agile way of doing both of those things, perhaps its time we coined the term “Review Smells” for looking at how we can do review better? Though maybe not. Maybe it would be good to look at what makes for a good review, and how we as a community can do review better.

Reviews aren’t for rejecting what’s bad, but growing what’s good

In most (legacy) projects, code review generally starts up because a manager heard about this new-fangled thing called “agile development” and how code review along with other  agile practices would do amazing things like reduce technical debt and improve quality, allowing engineers to be even more efficient, which in turn means that your organization can cut ballooning costs and not increase resources so much. Managers say “we’ve had enough of this, we’re not allowing any more crap in the codebase, so we’re introducing code review”.

While parts of this are certainly true, its not really the right way to start reviews. If you want to stop crappy code from going into the codebase, then you don’t hire engineers who don’t know what they’re doing. Of course, in free software this isn’t really an option.

Generally I live my life by the mantra “people don’t think they’re evil”. If someone proposes a change to a project, they generally think they’re trying to make it better. And generally speaking – they are, whether or not that be adding a new spec’d out feature, or fixing a bug or cleaning up some of the code.

This of course, doesn’t mean that you just accept the change because all changes are amazing. The point is that no change is perfect, but the job of the reviewers is to mentor the one proposing the change to make it the best they possibly can. Good reviewers ask questions and provide suggestions on:

1. How can we make this change, and prevent regressions in other areas?
2. How can we ensure this change is well tested, so that it can’t accidentally be stomped on in future?
3. How can we make the code even clearer to everyone who uses the project than it is now?
4. How can we make this code even faster than it is now?

Those kinds of questions are the kinds of questions that promote healthy discussion and help to both the reviewee and the reviewer to learn new things in the process. Its often the case that in reviews like this, both parties will come up with a solution that was even better than either one of them could have done alone. Its an environment that promotes collaboration and rewards both the reviewer and the reviewee.

It also means that the quality of your codebase will improve moreso than if the policy is to just reject things that don’t meet the standards. Having a policy of saying “no” to anything you don’t like without providing mentorship might mean that bugs never get fixed, or that specs never get completed, because nobody wants to go through that process only to run the very high risk of just being turned down again.

Keep code reviews about code, and RFCs for specs

I’ve seen it many times before – someone proposes a patch to change the behavior of a system and the patch gets rejected because the system wasn’t meant to behave that way in the first place. That’s a fair call for the maintainers – the scope of the software needs to remain determinate, as does it’s specified behavior.

The best thing to do in this case is document exactly how your system is supposed to work, even for the bits that haven’t been completed yet.

Then review becomes a two-step process – first, contributors propose an RFC to change the proposed behavior, get that added to the specification, and then they propose the code to make that specification a reality.

No wasted time writing patches that get turned down because of the unwanted change in behavior  Clearer expectations for everyone involved.

Use a centralized review system

Many free software projects use the model of “patches on a mailing list”. This works for small-scale projects and small-scale patches with a small number of maintainers, because the patches just flow in with the rest of their email. It gets really out of hand for large projects. Here are some of the problems with using email to manage patches:

1. The email filibuster can kill pretty much anything: The huge problem with mailing lists is that they invite endless discussion, and email is not very good at keeping context. Stuff can be discussed endlessly, and its often not about the code
2. Keeping track of multiple patches is a pain: Email doesn’t provide you a centralized list of unmerged patches. Its just all over the place in your inbox. Better hope that someone tagged it with [PATCH]
3. Making changes to patches is a pain and also slow: If you want to make a change to a patch on a mailing list, you have to rebase all of your patches in your vcs checkout, and then you have to undo a bunch of commits and re-do all the commits. Then you have to mail the new patches to the list and go through the review process all over again, with all of the original context lost in history. Granted, tools like quilt make the first part of this a little easier, but not the second part.

There are so many tools out there for keeping track of patches and reviews nowadays. There are the project hosts like GitHub and Launchpad which provide integrated code review based on the merge-model, or there are tools you can host yourself like patchwork, reviewboard, gerrit and if you don’t mind paying, proprietary tools like Crucible from Atlassian.

All these tools take the pain out of patch-management. The developer just hacks away on their own clone of the repo in their own branch, pushes stuff to that branch and then when ready, proposes a “merge” of that branch into mainline. Most tools allow you to make comments directly on specific parts of the code, and automatically update diffs as soon as new changes are made.

Automate!

There is so much about patch review that is totally boring. Nobody likes hand-inspecting a piece of code to make sure it fits all the formatting and style conventions, making sure that it has adequate test coverage, making sure that it doesn’t have any bugs that could be found by static analysis.

The good news is that most of this stuff can be automated. At Canonical we ran the same continuous-integration job on every active merge proposal, which, at least in the form that I worked with it, checked that the branch in it’s current state could be:

1. Merged
2. Builds
3. Passes all tests
4. Installs correctly
5. Passes any runtime tests

You can do so much more with continuous integration too. You can also check that the code matches the style conventions (StyleCop, astyle). Furthermore, you can do some rudimentary static analysis with clang’s scan-build tool. You can check if all the various #ifdef combinations build correctly. You can check for performance regressions by having some standardized performance tests. In code, more stats about how your change affects the codebase are king, and serve to inform reviews rather than make them do guesswork about how changes in code might affect your product. That being said, metrics shouldn’t drive review, but rather inform it. A goal of review should be to understand why the metrics say what they say, whether or not that’s important, and then use that to determine where to go next with the patch.

Apply the “better-in-than-out” principle

The thing about perfect is that its impossible. The question to any good review is “would the proposed change in its current state be something which we’d rather ship tomorrow as opposed to what trunk is today?”. If so, then know where to put the boundaries of what the scope of the review is and call it a day. All software is a work-in-progress. If you know where to go after the patch is merged, then there’s no sense delaying it any longer when it could be serving a good purpose now.

Set a review deadline

One of the things that can absolutely kill a patch review and leave lots of patches lying around everywhere is a review that goes for a seemingly endless period of time. Especially in free software, people get frustrated, people get distracted, and then they move on, leaving the maintainer wondering what to do with the patch that still had some follow up left.

Review deadlines really help here. Evaluate the complexity of the change, think about what it affects and what work needs to be done at first instance, and then set a deadline based on that. Have both parties engage with the review process until that date, and then apply the better-in-than-out principle at that date, or if new circumstances arise, renegotiate the deadline. Having clear expectations about where a patch is going and how long a review is going to take will take away a real source of demotivation amongst contributors.

Make it mandatory for everyone

There’s nothing worse than a project where some people are treated as better than others. Make code review mandatory for everyone, including for that person who has been working on it for ten years. Not only will they learn new things they might not have thought of from fresh blood in the project, but it also instills a sense of both responsibility and equality in new contributors too, because they feel as though everyone is on an equal footing and not at some kind of prejudicial disadvantage by virtue of the fact that they are new.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of all the things that will make code review a rewarding process as opposed to a dramatic one, but it certainly makes up some of the major factors that I’ve found in code review processes that are functional as opposed to dysfunctional.

A Spanish open source group has filed a complaint against Microsoft over access to alternative operating systems.