Every so often, a project slides across your screen that seems too cool to be truly feasible. But Tyler Short, the architecture student behind this incredible louvre system, says his system’s been worked out to the last mechanical detail. Someone, manufacture this thing! Read more…
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This Amazing Mechanical Shading System Makes Blinds Beautiful
First-gen Kindle Paperwhite owners are woefully missing a bunch of features, including Goodreads integration , available on the device’s successor. Thankfully, this latest software refresh brings their e-readers up to par — and, yes, that means early Paperwhite adopters can now place The Winds of Winter on their to-read roster from within the device. Just like on the second-gen Paperwhite, Goodreads’ familiar “g” icon should appear on the menu bar after installing the software. Clicking it will launch the app where users can segregate books into lists, share digital bookshelves, look for weekend reads or post excerpts. Those who don’t particular care for the Amazon-owned service might enjoy the other new features more, though. For parents, there’s the FreeTime function, which allows them to make profiles for their kids and monitor their reading habits. The update also gives users the power to customize e-book list categories (Cloud Collections), skim books without losing the page they’re on (Page Flip) and easily organize bookmarks, highlights and notes. When people look up words, they’ll now see dictionary, Wikipedia and X-Ray information, and those words get automatically added to Vocabulary Builder. Finally, they can now read footnotes in-line without having to go to another page. An over-the-air update with all the new features is rolling out to first-gen Paperwhites over the next few weeks. People who’ve had enough of waiting, however, can manually download the software refresh right now from Amazon’s website. Comments Source: Goodreads , Amazon
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First-gen Kindle Paperwhite gets second-gen features, at last
It’s over a year since we last covered Plextor ‘s wares, but the company’s been busy with the next generation of its M-branded SSD s. For the first time, the range includes a premium PCIe option explicitly aimed at gamers, which promises much better speeds by side-stepping the SATA “bottleneck.” This card, the M6e, starts at €199 ($275) for 128GB and tops out at €540 ($750) for 512GB, with claimed sequential read / writes of up to 770 / 625MB/s, and random read / writes of up to 105k / 100k IOPS. Plextor says that’s a gain of around 50 percent compared to the sequential speeds you’d get from the regular SATA option, the M6S, but of course you’re paying for that extra performance: the biggest 512GB M6S will set you back just €332 ($460), for example. We’ve been told to expect availability “very soon, ” but in the meantime you can check out some early reviews of the PCIe drive at the links below. TweakTown The SSD Review Hardware Heaven Filed under: Storage Comments
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Plextor targets gamers with ’50 percent faster’ SSD starting at €199 ($275)
Apple has just shipped iOS 7.1, which brings a number of small enhancements and some considerable performance improvements to older devices, but now the way is clear for iOS 8, and already the rumor mill has started cranking. 9to5Mac, which generally has reliable information for first-hand reported rumors, revealed today a couple of details about Apple’s next big mobile OS, which should… Read More
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iOS 8 Said To Take Maps To The Next Level With Added Data And Transit Directions
We are used to illegal activities looking and feeling far more illegal than this. A new BitTorrent-powered video app has been released that beautifies the torrenting process to the point that TorrentFreak describes it as “Netflix for pirates.” The app, which is available for OS X, Windows, and Linux, shows a catalog of movies and loads them up on a computer in an interface as seamless as that of most legit streaming services, but using means that are generally less than legal. Typically, torrenting a movie (illegally, if it’s copyrighted property) involves seeking out a sketchy torrent website littered with porn ads to download a .torrent file that users hope will actually result in a movie and not, say, a virus. The process’s pitfalls and risks are many, not to mention the potential for getting called out by one’s ISP and, in rare instances, being fined or sued. Popcorn Time eliminates the seedier aspects of torrent location in a slick app that doesn’t involve dealing with files, download speeds, or seeding—at least on the front end. The app began as a Github project that now has over 50 contributors. It is free, open-source, and has no ads or other money-making schemes. The app works by using an API provided by torrent service YTS to stream the file, which is then shared from the user’s computer after the download is completed. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Popcorn Time reinvents the seedy process of torrenting
We don’t need to tell you that data can be beautiful—but the process of putting it in order can look pretty darn good, too. A new site called SORTING aims to make people aware of just how elegant some of computer science’s most fundamental algorithms can be. Read more…
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Visualizing How Sorting Algorithms Work Is as Good as Any Art
itwbennett writes “As Slashdot readers will remember, last month the U.S government ‘petitioned the court system’ to let the NSA retain phone call metadata for more than 5 years, ironically ‘because it needs to preserve it as evidence for the various privacy lawsuits filed against the government.’ Well, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has ruled against that request. The FISC’s Presiding Judge Reggie B. Walton ruled Friday (PDF) that the proposed amended procedures would further infringe on the privacy interests of U.S. persons whose ‘telephone records were acquired in vast numbers and retained by the government for five years to aid in national security investigation.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Court Denies NSA Request To Hold Phone Records Beyond 5 Years
Have you been wanting to dive into the world of Star Trek novels, but aren’t sure where to start? Check out the Almighty Star Trek Lit-verse Reading Order Flowchart , which lays out which books should come earliest on your reading list. Read more…
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The Proper Reading Order for the Star Trek Novels in a Handy Flowchart
Sometimes when you go a stadium to watch a game or an arena to watch a concert, you’ll have the option of buying an overpriced large beer or a slightly less overpriced small beer. Go small to save a few dollars because the small cup holds just as much beer as the large cup. More beer for your buck! Read more…
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There’s no difference in buying a large beer vs a small beer at a game
Languages are evolving, living things, a fact that this graphic that charts just which languages English has been taking its loanwords from over time makes clear. Read more…
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A graph showing all the languages whose words invaded English