It might seem like LED bulbs are only for early-adopters hoping to cut down their monthly Con Ed power bill, but come Sunday, the energy-efficient lighting alternative will take center stage at one of the greatest spectacles on Earth. This will actually be the first Super Bowl to be entirely lit by LED bulbs . Read more…
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The First Super Bowl Played Under LEDs Will Use 75 Percent Less Power
Producing quality 360-degree video for Oculus Rift-like headsets is still really difficult to do, which is why high-tech porn company Huccio had the $250, 000, seven camera rig above custom-designed for its venture into the world of immersive video. Read more…
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The Insane Camera Rig Being Used to Shoot 360-Degree Oculus Porn
Artist Daniel Reeve created and re-created calligraphy and maps for Peter Jackson’s films of the Tolkein adventures in Middle-earth. His gallery of images includes maps and illustrations as well as calligraphy and lettering . Read the rest
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Meet Daniel Reeve, calligrapher for The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings
This morning, a number of developers signed in to Apple’s iTunes Connect service only to be greeted by a list of apps that didn’t belong to them. TechCrunch has a good roundup of tweets from affected developers —it seems that whenever developers signed in with their credentials, they were being granted access to other developers’ accounts at random. As of about noon Eastern today, Apple took the service down to resolve the problem. It also looks like developers won’t be able to submit new apps or invite new testers to TestFlight while iTunes Connect is down. Affected developers can check Apple’s System Status page for developers for updates while they wait for the problems to be resolved (no other developer services appear to be affected by the outage). We don’t yet know whether the outage was caused by some error on Apple’s end or by a security breach like the one that brought all developer systems down in the summer of 2013 . We’ve asked Apple when the service will be back and what caused the login problem in the first place, and we’ll update this article as we have new details. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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iTunes Connect bug logs developers in to other developers’ accounts at random
If you’ve ever gotten the craving for a late night snack and had the misfortune of an empty pantry, you might understand the very real struggle to find food. StillOpen is a webapp that checks store hours so you can quickly find out which restaurants are—well—still open. Read more…
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StillOpen Checks If Your Favorite Store or Restaurant Is Still Open
Thorfinn.au writes with this paper from four researchers (Jehan-François Pâris, Ahmed Amer, Darrell D. E. Long, and Thomas Schwarz, S. J.), with an interesting approach to long-term, fault-tolerant storage: As the prices of magnetic storage continue to decrease, the cost of replacing failed disks becomes increasingly dominated by the cost of the service call itself. We propose to eliminate these calls by building disk arrays that contain enough spare disks to operate without any human intervention during their whole lifetime. To evaluate the feasibility of this approach, we have simulated the behaviour of two-dimensional disk arrays with N parity disks and N(N – 1)/2 data disks under realistic failure and repair assumptions. Our conclusion is that having N(N + 1)/2 spare disks is more than enough to achieve a 99.999 percent probability of not losing data over four years. We observe that the same objectives cannot be reached with RAID level 6 organizations and would require RAID stripes that could tolerate triple disk failures. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Proposed Disk Array With 99.999% Availablity For 4 Years, Sans Maintenance
Chrome/Web: Learning another language can be difficult if you don’t immerse yourself in it every day. Mainichi is a Chrome new tab replacement and webapp that teaches you (and reminds you of) everyday Japanese words. Read more…
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Mainichi Teaches You Japanese with Every New Chrome Tab
Microsoft has released new Outlook apps for iOS and Android, and they might just be light-years better than those web apps the company has unleashed in the past. See, these are the result of Redmond’s Accompli acquisition in December, and seeing as we liked that startup’s email app when we test drove it last year, we have high hopes for these new ones. The company says the new Outlook for the mobile platforms comes with a built-in calendar and makes attachments easier to add for higher productivity. They’re apparently more tightly integrated with Office apps and Outlook for desktop, as well. We can’t say whether they’ll truly blow your current email apps out of the water as we haven’t tested them yet, but you can find out for yourself by downloading either (or both) from iTunes or Google Play . Take note that the Android app’s just a preview at the moment, so Microsoft could still tweak its features for the final version. Filed under: Cellphones , Mobile , Microsoft Comments
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Microsoft’s new Outlook apps for iOS and Android promise higher productivity
Microsoft has long wanted you to use OneDrive to store your photos, but actually viewing those photos isn’t ideal — you’re ultimately using a file browser that just happens to have some photo-related features. That’s going to change in the next couple of weeks, though. The folks in Redmond are rolling out a photography-focused update to OneDrive that gives your image library some TLC. You can organize photos into albums with edge-to-edge photo collages and larger single-picture views. It should be much easier to find and share your snapshots, as well. OneDrive now draws on Bing image recognition to give your pics basic tags (like “beach” or “dog”), and PCs running Windows 7 or 8 can automatically sync photos from devices as soon as you plug them in. Only web and iOS users will see the new photo tricks right away, but they’ll reach Android and Windows Phone in the days ahead. Filed under: Storage , Internet , Mobile , Microsoft Comments Source: OneDrive Blog
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Microsoft’s OneDrive gets better at showing and sharing your photos
TracFone has agreed to pay $40 million “to settle charges that it deceived millions of consumers with hollow promises of ‘unlimited’ data service,” the Federal Trade Commission announced today . Despite advertising unlimited data, the company’s various prepaid wireless brands “drastically slowed or cut off consumers’ mobile data after they used more than certain fixed limits in a 30-day period,” the FTC said. “Beginning today, consumers who had a Straight Talk, Net10, Simple Mobile, or Telcel America unlimited plan before January 2015 can visit http://ftc.gov/prepaidphones to file a claim for a refund,” the commission said. “Refunds will be paid to consumers whose data service was slowed or cut off. Consumers who had an unlimited plan but are unsure if their data service was slowed or cut off should still file a claim to find out if they are eligible for a refund.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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TracFone must pay $40M for throttling and capping “unlimited” data