…and we use the word refine very loosely. In the last 30 days, Apple has dropped the App Store ban-hammer on applications that display images of scantily clad women and Wi-Fi scanning/stumbling applications. The bare-naked ladies were removed because, as Apple VP Phil Schiller put it, “the needs of the kids and parents” had to come first. Wi-Fi scanning applications got the boot for making calls to a private API, which raises the obvious question… why were these applications approved in the first place? So, what is latest app genre to feel the sting of Apple’s proverbial backhand? So called “cookie-cutter” applications. Apple is beginning to reject apps that were created using application building services and do not add any specific functionality to the iPhone or iPod Touch. Or, as TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid succinctly put it, “Apple doesn’t want people using native applications for things that a basic web app could accomplish.” Whatever the reasoning, Apple is sending a scary message to potential application developers… we can change our mind.
Underfull is a prototype tablecloth design by Kristine Bjaadal. It has a hidden butterfly pattern that is revealed only when it is stained. Bjaadal writes:
This creates stories and can contribute in giving the tablecloth sentimental value – important in a society where we seem to have an increasingly superficial relation to the objects we surround ourselves with.
This is actually a portrait of emptiness, even though it glitters with galaxies. The bright elliptical galaxy in the top center, ESO 306-17, has absorbed every galaxy around it and grown to monstrous proportions.
Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait explains:
ESO 306-17 sits about a billion light years from Earth. In this picture it looks like it's surrounded by other galaxies, but that's an illusion: all the other galaxies you see here are either much closer to us or much farther away . . . Michael West, who led the team that took these images, tells me the little elliptical at the bottom left of ESO 306-17 may be interacting with it. It's difficult to tell; but what is certain is that there are very few galaxies near the big one, far fewer than you'd expect.
Plait adds that this lonely galaxy shares certain properties with our own cannibalistic galaxy, the Milky Way. Both our galaxy and ESO 306-17 are surrounded by globular clusters left over from galaxies they consumed.
You can contemplate the universe in higher resolution with this gigantic version of the image.
Remember the story about the school district that spied on its students at home? Well it just got boringer. Now that the lawyers are involved and some of the IT guys have been put on leave, this he said/she said/school officials saw story has just jumped the shark.
To recap: The Lower Merion School District gave their students MacBooks. The MacBooks had a theft protection system built in designed to capture images of the laptop’s surroundings in the case of a theft. The school district instead took pictures of a kid eating Mike&Ikes at home and accused him of being a pill popper. Essentially, the school spied on a student at home and is claiming it was only trying to recover a stolen laptop. As we later learned, however, some school officials enjoyed turning on the cameras just to freak the kids out, a decidedly Orwellian thing.
Well, now the story is just dull. Lawyers for both sides are at each others proverbial throats and the resulting accusations and recriminations are pretty low-key. For example, the IT guys responsible for the software are now on administrative leave with pay and everything is trying to figure out who else to sue.
What this story tells us is that there is an insidious lure to surveillance technology that, in the end, bites the surveiller. The value of the panopticon is that the surveilled cannot tell when they’re being watched but when the surveilled aren’t prisoners in some horrible, 18th-century prison invented by Jeremy Bentham and are instead high school kids, things get a little hairy.
via CNET
With art from the likes of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Julian Opie alongside public submissions, Michael Landy’s ‘Art Bin’ is a comment on creative failure… see it soon though, it’s set to be destroyed at the end of the week…..
In her ‘Pentax 110′ photograph series, Croatian artist Pekmez Med utilized low-fi film to emphasize the voyeuristic/fetishistic nature of her subject matter, creating a collection of photo’s that maintain a sense of the underground and its happenings. Featuring various action figures and playthings, ranging from the infamous Barbie to Skeletor, the images are stripped down in their simplicity, but ignite and maintain interest in the viewer. Ultimately, her ‘Pentax 110′ series demonstrates a talent for executing a creative notion to a maximum effect.
Check out this cool t-shirt by a graphic designer that goes by “ramyb.” He won 1st place in Derby #130: Nightmares at shirt.woot.com, with 942 votes
Not many workspaces sit on the edge of a babbling brook in an animal sanctuary, but if you'd like to pretend yours does the visual and audio ambience of MoodTurn can help.
Last week we shared MoodStream with you, a mashup of short and mixed together music tracks, images, and video all sorted by your mood. Thanks to a suggest by Lifehacker reader Rexem, we have another neat ambient mood site to share with you.
MoodTurn—why it says TurnMood.com in the middle of the interface, we don't know—like MoodStream, is a mashup of visual and audio elements. It's radically more simply though, with no sliders or selection wheels in sight. You can pick from Rainforest, Birds, Storm, and Beach as your soundtracks. Each category has about half a dozen backgrounds you can choose from. If you select a background it will stay on that background, otherwise it will rotate through the backgrounds for that ambient mood. The audio tracks for the moods are all, give or take a few minutes, an hour long which is great for uninterrupted listening.
One very minor complaint about the service. If you pause the audio but leave the tab open, after about 30 minutes MoodTurn will refresh itself and start playing the audio again. Something to keep in mind if you pause it and leave for lunch, lest you return to find your coworkers tearing the office apart looking for birds.
Have a favorite way to up the ambiance in your office and make it feel less like a cage and more like a beach front locale? Let's hear about it in the comments. Thanks Rexem!
Images via Terreform ONE
Mitchell Joachim and Maria Aiolova or Terreform ONE cleaned up at the Zumtobel Group Awards, with their plans to clean up New York City by converting waste into buildings and reinventing transit. The Judges wrote:
"This project is a rich source of interesting ideas of real substance. The research team is not afraid to think in whole new directions and presents a range of visionary potential approaches that are already acting as catalysts in the urban development debate." ...Read the full story on TreeHugger
From an exhibition of early human ancestor busts by “paleo-artist” John Gurche:
Australopithecus africanus This species lived about 2.5 million years ago and, like A. afarensis, is thought by some paleoanthropologists to be one of our direct ancestors. “I wanted to get an expression that captures something that both humans and great apes do, though the meaning is a little different,” Gurche says. “I wanted to build a smile, but a smile with a lot of tension in it. You might even call it a nervous smile, like the fear grin of the chimpanzee.”
More images here. Gurche's website is here.
Filed under: Utilities, Freeware, Social Software, Web
Twilk is a simple site that looks at either your Twitter follower list and/or the list of accounts that you follow, and creates a tiled background image that is then applied to your profile page. The people whose accounts you refer to most often via @ replies, re-tweets, or mentions will show up in the first two columns going down the page.
Although Twilk is primarily a free service, they also offer a paid subscription that will automatically update your background daily.
The idea of Twilk is clever, but it doesn't make for the most visually appealing profile page. It would be nice if Twilk offered to add a screen, or to slightly darken the images uniformly, so that the resulting background didn't look so chaotic. However, if you're looking for a way to pay homage to the folks that you follow (or those that follow you), Twilk isn't a bad way to go.
Twilk uses your followers' icons to make a Twitter background for you originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Utilities, Freeware, Social Software, Web
Twilk is a simple site that looks at either your Twitter follower list and/or the list of accounts that you follow, and creates a tiled background image that is then applied to your profile page. The people whose accounts you refer to most often via @ replies, re-tweets, or mentions will show up in the first two columns going down the page.
Although Twilk is primarily a free service, they also offer a paid subscription that will automatically update your background daily.
The idea of Twilk is clever, but it doesn't make for the most visually appealing profile page. It would be nice if Twilk offered to add a screen, or to slightly darken the images uniformly, so that the resulting background didn't look so chaotic. However, if you're looking for a way to pay homage to the folks that you follow (or those that follow you), Twilk isn't a bad way to go.
Twilk uses your followers' icons to make a Twitter background for you originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Nothing brings a living room together quite like a coffee table, but as the modern designs look into multi functionality of furniture, we are but perplexed at the site of so many choices. However, this concept table dubbed Sony Fusion is a stand out and makes life easier as it exemplifies taste with practicality. Derived from fusing technology and furniture, Sony Fusion is a desktop infused with a coffee table to serve both function of being a sleek, multipurpose table and a high performance desktop. Crafted in matte black aluminum with a sleek chrome lining and supported by arched chrome legs, Sony Fusion just takes a push of the button to convert the table into a work station with sleek touch sensitive keyboard and adjustable screen. The table top effortlessly splits in half and soundlessly slides apart to reveal the LED outlined keyboard, screen and DVD drive on the side of the table. Priced at $3000, Sony Fusion will be available in three different colors – Blue, White and Red, when it goes into production.
Check out the images after the jump:
Thanks, Zyane!
Paws for thought
They say that it’s a dog’s life. And if this wonderful ad for pedigree dog treats is anything to go by, the modern dog’s life is captured in glorious 1000fps, HD slo-mo.
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to smile at the looks on these mutts’ faces.
Or be a cat person.
If you've seen a video online that you want to tell us about email us? via the feed back form.
Tags: Video Websites Software Online
VIDEO OF THE DAY ? Pedigree slo-mo originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:00:00 +0000
Mamiya has announced the price and availability of its new DM40 medium format camera and a digital back of the same name. Priced at $21,990, for the body and 80mm f/2.8 lens D series lens, and $19,990 for the back, they will start shipping from this month onwards. Both incorporate 40MP, 44 x 33 mm sensors and feature true 16 bit/channel RAW capture, an ISO range of 80-800 and can capture images at 0.8 seconds per frame.
Microsoft has been offering hobbyists and professional photographers various chances to get their images as the default background for the Bing search/decision engine, and the Bing Earth Day Photo Contest needs to be added on the list. However, entries in the Bing Earth Day Photo Contest are limited to students starting with the age of five. And just in case the nam... (read more)
The Search Bar in Firefox is very useful for finding additional information or images while browsing but the UI space it takes up can be frustrating at times. Now you can reclaim that UI space and still have access to all that searching goodness with the Foobar extension.
Note: This is about the Foobar Firefox extension and not to be confused with Foobar2000 the open source music player.
Before
If you have the “Search Bar” displayed there is no doubt that it is taking up valuable space in your browser’s UI. What you need is the ability to reclaim that UI space and still have the same access to your search capability as before…no more sacrificing one for a gain with the other.
After
As soon as you have installed the extension you can see that the top part of your browser will look much sleeker without the “Search Bar” to clutter it up. The “Search Engine Icon” will now be visible inside of your “Address Bar” as seen here.
You will be able to access the same “Search Engine Menu” as before by clicking on the “Search Engine Icon”.
There are two display modes for search results (setting available in the “Options”). The first one shown here is “Simple Mode” where all results are in a condensed format. Notice that not only are there search suggestions but also “Bookmarks & History” listings as well. You can literally get the best of both when conducting a search.
Note: The number of entries for search suggestions and bookmark/history listings can be adjusted higher or lower in the “Options”.
The second one is “Rich Mode” where the results are shown with more details. Choose the “mode” that best suits your personal style.
For our first example you can see the results when we conducted a quick search on “Windows 7” (using the first of the three offerings shown from Bing).
Our second example was a search for “Flowers” using our Photobucket search engine. Once again nice results opened in a new tab for us.
Options
The options are easy to go through. It is really nice to be able to choose the number of results that you want displayed and the format that you want them shown in.
Note: Changing the “Suggestion popup style” will require a browser restart to take effect.
Conclusion
If you love using the “Search Bar” in Firefox but want to reclaim the UI space then you will definitely want to add this extension to your browser. The ability to customize the number of results and choose the formatting make this extension even better.
Links
Download the Foobar extension (Mozilla Add-ons)
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