Whether or not you’re interested in videogames, this device is kind of fascinating from an industrial design/interface design point of view. The PhoneJoy Play is essentially a portable input device with a slick mechanical design: The two holdable halves can spread sideways, connected by a telescoping mechanism. Your smartphone or mini-tablet can then be “docked” in the middle, and the variety of buttons and motion pads interact with your device wirelessly. (more…)
Mac: You know what’s boring? The little “Verizon” or “AT&T” logo in the left-hand corner of your iPhone. You know what would be way more awesome? The Batman logo, or an image of Pac-Man chomping down on pellets. CarrierEditor lets you change your carrier logo to whatever you want, with no jailbreaking required. More »
Hackulous, the iOS piracy community behind the jailbreak app Installous, has suddenly shut down . Along with the community site, the Hackulous repository for the jailbreak store Cydia has also disappeared, rendering all of the community’s piracy tools dead. More »
An anonymous reader writes “YouTube has dropped 2 billion fake music industry views and their offending videos. From the article: ‘Google made good on its promise to weed out views inflated by artificial means last week, according to Daily Dot. Record company sites impacted included titans like Universal Music Group, which reportedly lost 1 billion of its 7 billion views, and Sony, who lost 850 million views. The cuts affected marquee names like Rhianna, Beyonce and Justin Bieber. YouTube said in a statement that the figures had been deliberately, artificially inflated. “This was not a bug or a security breach. This was an enforcement of our view count policy,” the company, which is owned by Google, wrote.’” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
These magnificently preserved socks date back to Roman Egypt, c. 250-420 A.D. Are they designed for two-toed people? Not quite: The big toe divided from the others suggest that the socks were probably meant to be worn with sandals. It is unclear whether the socks formed offerings to the dead or were used as foot coverings. Note that the holes have not laddered (though they have spread somewhat). Link -via Curious History | Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum
In 2002, over 2000 people between the ages of 51 and 80 were asked to sit on the floor using as little hand- or knee-support as possible. They were then asked to stand up without resorting to using their hands or knees if they were able. The results were recorded. By the end of October 2011, 159 subjects had died. It turns out that most of the people who died were the ones who needed the most support while performing the task. Only 2 of the 159 people who died had been able to sit down and stand up unsupported: “These differences persisted when results were controlled for age, gender and body mass index, suggesting that the sitting-rising test score is a significant predictor of all-cause mortality.” Test of musculo-skeletal fitness is ‘strong predictor’ of mortality in the middle-aged and older (Via Seth Robert’s Blog )
If you prefer to use Internet Explorer or must use it in your enterprise environment you should be aware of a new exploit that takes advantage of the way IE accesses an object in memory that has been deleted or not properly allocated. More »
It was inevitable. Drones are in ever-wider use by the military, and some day they might deliver you food, but it looks like they’ll also be the private, flying-camera spies for private companies too. That’s what Japanese security company Secom is banking on with its new private security quadrotor. More »
If you want to take your movies with you on the road, or just want to clean up those physical discs but keep your films and TV shows on your HTPC, you’ll need to rip them first. Thankfully, there are plenty of great utilities designed to make the process easy and give you files that are playable on any device you choose, whenever you choose to watch them. Here are five of the best, based on your nominations. More »
If you’re a science hobbyist you probably don’t have access to actual liquid nitrogen (-320 degrees Fahrenheit) but you can make your own cryo-fluid from dry ice and rubbing alcohol that goes down to -110 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to instantly freeze flowers, cherries, and other popular liquid nitrogen demonstrations. More »
