No, this portrait isn’t made up of thousands upon thousands of magnetic sculpture beads . The metallic wonder’s lifelike contours and shimmer comes from painstakingly hand-placing 13, 000 variably sized platinum beads. Read more…
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Watch Pure Platinum Turn Into a Pricey 3D Portrait
CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The CIA gave Senate Intelligence Committee staffers access to its data offsite—in a leased facility the CIA controlled. It sounds like something out of Homeland : at a secret location somewhere off the campus of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA leases a space and hires contractors to run a top-secret network, which it fills with millions of pages of documents dumped from the agency’s internal network. But that’s apparently exactly what the CIA did for more than three years as part of an agreement to share data with the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on its controversial detention and interrogation program. And it’s also how the agency was able to gain access to the computers and shared network drive used by committee staffers in a search that Senator Diane Feinstein contended today crossed multiple legal and constitutional boundaries. In a speech on the Senate floor this morning, Feinstein detailed the strange arrangement and accused the CIA of breaking its agreement with the committee on multiple occasions. She also accused the agency of reportedly filing a criminal report against committee staffers with the Justice Department in “a potential effort to intimidate this staff.” The details shared by Feinstein show the length to which the CIA went to try to control the scope of the data that was shared with Senate staffers—and still managed to give them more than some officials in the agency wanted to. Even with multiple levels of oversight, the CIA managed to hand over the data along with an internal review of that very data, which included the agency’s own damning assessment of the interrogation program. Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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How CIA snooped on Senate Intel Committee’s files
Are you tired of waiting for Nike to design the perfect sneakers for your tastes? Thanks to a new flexible filament from Recreus that can be used in standard 3D printers without clogging the nozzle, you can finally design and print your own kicks in a wide variety of colors. The only limiting factors are your imagination and sense of taste. Read more…
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A New Flexible Filament Lets You 3D-Print Custom Sneakers
A US Court, at the behest of movie studios, has ordered the shutdown of domains related to DVDFab, one of our favorite DVD and Blu-ray ripping tools . For the time being, DVDFab reps say you can get around it by going to the company’s Japanese website . Read more and see the full injunction over at TorrentFreak . Read more…
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A US Court, at the behest of movie studios, has ordered the shutdown of domains related to DVDFab, o
Time to update! iOS 7.1 is here, and it fixes a lot of iOS 7.0’s biggest problems. Aurich Lawson There were about six months between the ouster of Scott Forstall from Apple in late October of 2012 and the unveiling of iOS 7.0 in June of 2013. Jony Ive and his team redesigned the software from the ground up in that interval, a short amount of time given that pretty much everything in the operating system was overhauled and that it was being done under new management. The design was tweaked between that first beta in June and the final release in mid-September, but the biggest elements were locked in place in short order. iOS 7.1’s version number implies a much smaller update, but it has spent a considerable amount of time in development. Apple has issued five betas to developers since November of 2013, and almost every one of them has tweaked the user interface in small but significant ways. It feels like Apple has been taking its time with this one, weighing different options and attempting to address the harshest criticism of the new design without the deadline pressure that comes with a major release. We’ve spent a few months with iOS 7.1 as it has progressed, and as usual we’re here to pick through the minutiae so you don’t have to. iOS 7.1 isn’t a drastic change, but it brings enough new design elements, performance improvements, and additional stability to the platform that it might just win over the remaining iOS 6 holdouts. Read 42 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Refinements, additions, and un-breaking stuff: iOS 7.1 reviewed
The new iPhone camera is 8-megapixels. Meanwhile, Canon is reportedly testing a new DSLR with 75-megapixels. But how many megapixels is the human eye? That is, how many megapixels would an image the size of your field of vision need to be to look normal? Read more…
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What Is the Resolution of the Human Eye?
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