O Netflix se tornou um serviço tão adorado, que hoje em dia praticamente qualquer aparelho tem suporte a ele (menos a porcaria da minha Bravia!), porém, ainda faltava um local a ser explorado, o bom e velho Nintendinho.
Isso mesmo, por mais surreal que possa parecer, este foi o desafio encarado por um trio de engenheiros que participou do Netflix Hack Day, evento em que os funcionários da empresa tentam se relaxar criando coisas novas e o resultado do projeto deles pode ser visto no vídeo abaixo.
Para demonstrar a criação, o grupo escolheu a série House of Cards uma produção original do serviço de streaming e que como de vez em quando cita os jogos eletrônicos, certamente é digna da homenagem, mesmo nos fazendo ficar com a sensação de que foi bom tal tecnologia não ter surgido há 30 anos.
Digo isso porque devido a limitação de cores do lendário console, as imagens da abertura da série estrelada por Kevin Spacey não são muito bonitas, mas chama a atenção o fato do menu do Netflix estar plenamente funcional, mostrando a sinopse das produções, fotos indicativas e nos dando a opção de escolher os episódios.
Contudo, o mais impressionante é que o darNES funciona em um aparelho original, já que tudo é executado em um cartucho e de acordo com um dos envolvidos no projeto, Guy Cirino, foi muito difícil fazer o programa caber em apenas 256 kB.
Um detalhe curioso é que se você prestar atenção, notará que o vídeo mostra algumas produções do Netflix que ainda não foram lançadas, como O Tigre e o Dragão 2 e o filme Ridiculous Six, de Adam Sandler, sugerindo que o programa não está pegando suas informações do servidor online.
Evidentemente tal criação não será disponibilizada para o público, assim como quase todas as outras 70 que apareceram no Hack Day, mas mesmo assim é muito legal ver a criatividade deste pessoal.
The cast of Firefly knows a thing or two about the importance of creative control (ahem, Fox), and they're taking advantage of the internet to make sure they hold the reins for their next effort together. Both Nathan Fillion (aka Mal Reynolds) and Al...
To date there is no verified service guaranteeing that after you die, you'll be reborn as a majestic, high-flying eagle or a fearsome tiger roaming the jungles of Sumatra. But to believe Italian designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel, there is a chance that in death you could become a real, if slightly less-spectacular bit of nature—say, a leafy shrub beautifying a street corner in Rome.
That's the idea behind "Capsula Mundi," a proposed method of using corpses to enhance the urban canopy that's up for nomination in 2015's INDEX: Award. Traditional burial practices come with a slew of problems, argue Bretzel and Citelli. Funeral plots take up space, and many cities like London and Washington, D.C., are running out of room for bodies. There's also the fear that embalming fluids could contaminate the environment, not to mention that wooden coffins require the destruction of trees.
Rather than continue with tombstones and chemicals, the designers suggest we turn toward no-frills "green cemeteries." The funeral planning would begin while people are still alive, as they gather their loved ones and tell them their favorite kind of tree or bush. Then, once their souls pass from this worldly realm, they'd be stuffed in the fetal position into egg-shaped sacks and buried around town. Trees planted above them would suck their nutrients and grow into towering firs, stately silver birches, gnarled olives, or horse chestnuts.
For many this idea must sound gruesome. (And indeed, a similar concept has repeatedly popped up on NBC's serial-killer drama, "Hannibal.") But Citelli and Bretzel lay out a few reasons why it's worth considering:
The growth of a tree needs from 10 to 40 years and a coffin is used for three days. Capsula Mundi is produced with 100% biodegradable material, starch plastic. The starch is taken from seasonal plants such as potatoes and corn. Capsula Mundi saves the life of a tree and proposes to plant one more. By planting different kinds of trees next to each other it creates a forest. A place where children will be able to learn all about trees. It's also a place for a beautiful walk and a reminder of our loved ones.
As this type of feral burial is forbidden by Italian law, the human-fertilizer system is stuck in limbo for now. The design duo hope to change that through a lobbying effort—so, hey, get in touch if you want your flesh to one day become olives on the table or juniper berries flavoring your children's gin.
Americans don't need a time machine to get a taste of the last Ice Age, when hulking icebergs routinely floated down the East Coast. They simply need to go to Cape Cod, where the beaches are littered with what look like chunks of exploded glacier.
The junior-bergs began washing ashore over the weekend and have since somewhat softened and shrunk, reports the Capital Weather Gang. Their gargantuan appearance is yet another reminder the Northeast just suffered an intensely raw February, with frigid temperatures body-slamming records and a historic five-plus feet of snow burying Boston. The region's conversion into The Lands of Always Winter is clear in this photo recently snapped by astronaut Sam Cristoforetti:
A local artist who goes by the pseudonym Dapixara was lucky enough to capture these frosty formations at the height of their immensity. In some cases, the blocks left grooves in the sand as they drifted onto the beaches, leading the photographer to comment, "Death Valley have sliding Rocks, We in Cape Cod (sailing) moving ice." Take a peek:
Symmetry is a dance and opera film that was directed by Ruben van Leer and was shot inside the CERN Large Hadron Collider. It looks pretty epic and totally intriguing with some scenes feeling a little bit like Interstellar. The film will premiere on March 15 in Amsterdam.
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; 2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; 3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
It’s easy to get caught up in big ideas and brand new worlds… and forget to laugh.
Douglas Adams—born today, March 11, in 1952—was not convinced of his own worth as a writer, a comedian, and thinker of remarkably thinky thoughts. Whenever there was a dry patch in his working life, he tended to question his abilities, to fall into spates of depression and low self-worth. It’s odd to think that the man responsible for Zaphod “if there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now” Beeblebrox would fail to realize his own relevance in a world that so desperately required his special brand of madness.
After all, without him, who would have told us the answer to life, the universe, and everything?
[Life. Don’t talk to me about life.]
Douglas Adams was a practical giant at six foot five (that’s 1.96 meters). Not exactly the first thing you would expect to learn about him at random, but it apparently made an impression on his behalf at as a young man, while he wrote and wrote all the time. He was the only student to receive a ten out of ten in creative writing from his form master at Brentwood School. After completing university—where he insisted he had done very little work—he was determined to break into television and radio writing.
Though it wasn’t always steady work, Adams’ singular voice landed him gigs with Monty Python’s Graham Chapman and various radio sketches. He became a script editor for Doctor Who during the Tom Baker era, writing a few stories himself, and his influence on Who is arguably still felt in the show’s current incarnation. Between his writing jobs in the 70s, Adams filled in with odd paychecks gained from barn building to bodyguard-ing for a wealthy family of oil moguls. When he was writing, he reportedly took forever to complete his projects; so long that his editor once locked them together in a hotel suite for three weeks to assure that So Long and Thanks For All the Fish was finished.
Adams was best known for his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, which was first brought to life via radio, and later via book, television, and film. With a joyful blend of wit and absurdity, he proved beyond a doubt that genre fiction had a great capacity for humor and satire. There are others who have followed in his footsteps, still others who have made their own contributions in this manner (Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld novel would be released four years after the first Hitchhiker’s book), but no one has ever quite duplicated the timing of Adams’ prose, his particular insights. There is funny, and then there is Adams funny.
Those deeper insights likely came from the many other loves and causes Douglas Adams pursued in his life. He was an avid traveler, an environmentalist, a musician who played the guitar left-handed, and he was a great advocate of technological innovation. He never shied away from what computers, the internet, and new inventions could bring to humanity. He never demonized progress, but rather, he offered himself up to try new things, to see where we were headed. In fact, his ability to take on these changes with ease and good-natured amusement was nothing short of inspirational. As he so succinctly put it to anyone concerned over the (at the time) very new world wide web:
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; 2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; 3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.
Or to put it simply, in other words that he would use elsewhere in large, friendly letters: DON’T PANIC.
It is perhaps the cruelest irony of all that Adams did not live to see what the world of technology has become in recent years. Having access to his wisdom in this digital age would have likely been a comfort and intriguing to boot. But more than that, we are missing out on the stories he never had the opportunity to regale us with. Myself and many others, we owe our sense of humor to Adams, at least in part. He was a very real, shaping factor in our persons.
It’s easy to forget that comedy is just as difficult as drama. It’s easy to ignore the fact that humor is complex as mathematics and learning to laugh is not a mindless task. And it’s also easy to get comfortable with our favorite tropes and tales—with serious stories—and neglect the fact that any and all situations can (and often should) be hilarious. Thank goodness we had Douglas Adams to show us how.
We've seen some neat visuals from the earlier Tomorrowland trailers, but this one...this one is just adorable. Between the crazy inventions and the action in our retrofuturistic city, it feels like Brad Bird is channeling 1980s-era Steven Spielberg. And just like that, we're excited.
The latest Tomorrowland trailer has bathtub rockets, fighting robots, assassins in creepy masks, and all manner of shifting gears and brass countdown clocks. And it actually tells us a lot more about the movie.
[Watch the trailer]
To be fair, Disney’s new action/adventure is still rather vague. We know that the near-future is messed up, nigh apocalyptic, and that the bright and wonderful future is thisclose to being lost forever. So, some sort of retired/exiled inventor (George Clooney) teams up with a troubled kid (Britt Robertson) via teleporting pins and the aforementioned technology to go back to Tomorrowland.
“What you saw,“ Clooney tells Robertson, ”was a place where the best and the brightest people in the world came together to actually change it.” But now it’s in danger—possibly from Hugh Laurie’s shady character—and with every second that ticks away, this future land and tomorrow time becomes less and less of a possbility. Does this movie feature time travel or alternate universes, or just some awesome simulations? Hard to say, but this is the most engaging trailer yet:
Maybe you remember your childhood Atari or that rec room NES, but today's kids are growing up with mobile games, and sixth-grader Madeline Messer has noticed something weird. Read the rest
schwit1 writes with this news from the Associated Press: Mysterious, middle-of-the-night drone flights by the U.S. Secret Service during the next several weeks over parts of Washington — usually off-limits as a strict no-fly zone — are part of secret government testing intended to find ways to interfere with rogue drones or knock them out of the sky, The Associated Press has learned. A U.S. official briefed on the plans said the Secret Service was testing drones for law enforcement or protection efforts and to look for ways, such as signal jamming, to thwart threats from civilian drones. The drones were being flown between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because this person was not authorized to publicly discuss the plans. The Secret Service has said details were classified. ... The challenge for the Secret Service is quickly detecting a rogue drone flying near the White House or the president's location, then within moments either hacking it to seize control over its flight or jamming its signal to send it off course or make it crash.
An incredibly shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status, says Computerworld, and reports their user market share at 10% and dropping. It doesn’t look good for the Mozilla Foundation – especially not with so much of their funding coming from Google which of course has its own browser to push.
I wish I could feel sadder about this. I was there at the beginning, of course – the day Netscape open-sourced the code that would become Mozilla and later Firefox was the shot heard ’round the world of the open source revolution, and the event that threw The Cathedral and the Bazaar into the limelight. It should be a tragedy – personally, for me – that the project is circling the drain.
Instead, all I can think is “They brought the fate they deserved on themselves.” Because principles matter – and in 2014 the Mozilla Foundation abandoned and betrayed one of the core covenants of open source.
I refer, of course, to the Foundation’s disgraceful failure to defend its newly promoted Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich against a political mob.
One of the central values of the hacker culture from which Mozilla sprang is that you are to be judged by the quality of your work alone. We aspire to be a pure meritocracy, casting aside irrelevancies of race, sex, nationality, and of political and sexual preferences.
Brendan Eich lived those values. Though he was excoriated for donating to California Proposition 8, it was never even claimed – let alone established – that he judged gay hackers on the Firefox project by anything but their code.
Another central value of the hacker culture, intertwined with judgment only by the work, is free expression – the defense of people holding and expressing unpopular opinions. It must be this way, because suppression of dissent prevents us from discovering and acknowledging that our beliefs do not align with reality. That hinders the work.
When Brendan Eich was attacked, the correct response of the Mozilla Foundation from within hacker and open-source values would have been, at minimum “His off-the-job politics are none of our business.” Ideally, it would have continued with an active defense of Eich’s right to hold and express unpopular opinions, including by donating to the causes of his choice.
That’s not what happened. Instead, the Foundation truckled to that political mob, putting Eich under enough pressure that he felt he had no alternative but to resign. By failing to defend and support Eich, the Mozilla Foundation wronged a man who had every right to expect that he, too, would be judged by his work alone.
There, are of course, also technological factors in the decline of Mozilla – an aging codebase and failure to rapidly deploy to mobile devices are two of the more obvious. But in any market-share battle, hearts and minds matter too. It’s a significant advantage to be universally thought of as the good guys.
The Mozilla Foundation threw that away. They abandoned the hacker way and trashed their own legitimacy. It was a completely unforced error.
That is why I can only think, today, that they brought their end on themselves. And hope that it serves as a hard lesson: to thrive you must, indeed judge by the work alone.
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UBUD, Bali—A monkey scrabbles around a lawn overlooking a lemongreen rice paddy. Fifteen people wearing flipflops, baggy trousers and tanktops are plopping down on some beanbags in the grass.
“Summarize the highlight of your weekend in one sentence. Then tell us what your goals are for today and what you need help with,” says Ben Keene, who’s moderating the “meeting.” A roundtable—or actually, round-beanbag-discussion—follows.
It is Monday morning, 11am at Hubud, a co-working space completely built of bamboo in Ubud, Bali, which has a raw food café and people walking around with t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “Work is Changing.”
Digital nomads at work at Hubud, the co-working space in Ubud, Bali, which is completely made out of bamboo.(Liza Jansen)
I am on a so-called coworkation: a vacation with co-workers, or combining work with a holiday. We do not unplug or send out-of-office emails. With the availability of wireless and high-speed internet, you can work from basically anywhere these days. Then why not from Bali? Where you can start the day doing yoga in a rice paddy, go surfing in the afternoon and climb a volcano—or three in one day if you wish—during the weekend.
The coworkation is organized by Tribewanted, an alternative travel organization building communities, in (often) exotic locations, including a deserted island in Fiji or a beach in post-civil war Sierra Leone. Or in this case Bali, where a startup tribe is being formed. The idea is simple: avoid getting worn down by a European or American winter and build your venture from “Silicon Bali,” as Ubud—mostly known as a pilgrimage place for wellness seekers since Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a part of Eat Pray Love there—has been dubbed. Many digital nomads—mostly bloggers, entrepreneurs, freelance designers—often simply cannot afford to send out-of-office emails for a number of weeks. For a $446 fee, those seeking a work vacation have three months of unlimited access to Hubud and become a member of Tribewanted. (This does not include food or accommodations.) The average monthly living and working costs for digital nomads in Ubud amount to $1,066, a stark contrast to San Francisco where this currently stands at $4,854, or New York City, with average costs of $5,332 per month.
Morning check-in sessions, setting the goals for the day, are often done on beanbags outside on the lawn.(Liza Jansen)
During our startup coworkation we spend time working on our own projects—in my case: Newspresso.org, a Dutch-language weekly newsletter for women on the go. But we’re building them together by exchanging skills. So rather than spending a few hundred dollars to have someone design a logo for me, I write website copy for a designer in exchange. Fifty percent of our time is spent working on our own startups, 25% on each others, and brainstorming while sauntering through a rice field or descending a volcano. The remaining 25% of our time we help local community projects, or, quite frankly, just chill out and explore Bali’s natural beauty. Apart from being inspired by the surroundings, we’re also especially motivated here because we’re being held accountable, asking each other frequently: “have you accomplished your goals? If not, WHY not? And where do you need help?”
Our startup tribe consists of some 30 people from all over the world. There is a bucket-list consultant setting up a global travel society, a travel blogger going by the name “The Hopeful Vagabond” and a writer of—yes—erotic novels. There’s an online business coach building a platform called Coffee Break and Chocolate Cake—providing inspiration for a coffee break (preferably with chocolate cake)—a model/lifestyle coach, and a NASA-funded astrophysicist developing innovative science education programs. Some stay for three weeks, others for the maximum three-month span. Despite everyone being considerably different, one thing connects us: an intrinsic curiosity—a boundless belief in each other’s capacities to start a—we hope—groundbreaking new venture that we’re passionate about. We share our skills through workshops and ask each other (tough) questions. All while “keeping our heads in the cloud but our feet on the ground,” as Ben Keene, our tribe leader and founder of Tribewanted, reminds us frequently.
Going on a coworkation—co-creating your venture with other digital nomads—or just working from a holiday-like destination—is becoming increasingly popular. A 2013 survey by PGI, a global provider of conferencing and collaboration solutions, showed that 82% of the 500 US employees surveyed connect to the office while on vacation.
Tribewanted isn’t the only coworkations operator. A number of organizations have recently begun to offer certain types of holidays. Including Hacker Paradise, which is being organized for the second time this year. The idea is similar to Tribewanted Bali: a three-month long coworking holiday in three different locations with other entrepreneurs and digital nomads: start in Da Nang (Vietnam), continue in Ubud (Bali) and end in Chiang Mai (Thailand). It costs between $600 and $1,500, which includes workspace, accommodation, some meals and activities. They’ll report what they’re working on at the beginning of the day while engaging in social activities in the evenings and on weekends.
When Casey Rosengren, a Philadelphia-based engineer, organized the first Hacker Paradise last year in Costa Rica—which included working from a hotel on the beach—he said this 12-week period reminded him of his student years. “You spent day and night together and bond very, very quickly,” he recalls in a Skype-interview from a co-working space in Tokyo, where he—as a diehard digital nomad—is currently residing for a number of weeks.
Other organizations that offer coworkations or set up temporarily coworking spaces in exotic locations for entrepreneurs and other location-independent workers include Coworking Camp, Workawaycamp or Flaks.
Two digital entrepreneurs holding a brainstorming sessions at Hubud.(Liza Jansen)
I’ve been coworkationing for about a month now. As opposed to what I (and my friends and family) would’ve expected, working from a tropical island has proven productive. More productive than I generally am when working from my hometown Amsterdam. How is that possible?
As the startup tribe is keen to make the most of their stay here, and wants to explore as much of the island as possible, we try to limit the amount of time spent behind a computer screen. This means that the time we are staring at our MacBooks is spent as efficiently and effectively as possible. We’d rather discuss each others’ projects while catching a sunset and drinking a Bintang beer than hold a brainstorm session in a plain meeting room.
What’s more is that Hubud is filled with such diversely skilled people, resulting in, quoting Tribe-member Andy McLean, “getting any work related issues—(read: stuff on the internet)—done in the fastest way possible.” The majority of the 30-plus tribe members have extended their stay while here and are alreadyplotting return next year. So am I. But not for a month this time—a minimum of three months.
The cast of Firefly knows a thing or two about the importance of creative control (ahem, Fox), and they're taking advantage of the internet to make sure they hold the reins for their next effort together. Both Nathan Fillion (aka Mal Reynolds) and Al...
It’s easy to get caught up in big ideas and brand new worlds… and forget to laugh.
R.I.P Sam Simon
