Shelfie, formerly known as BitLit , already lets you take a photo of the physical books you own and get matching ebook copies. Now they’re throwing audiobooks into the mix, so you can listen to the books on your bookshelf too. Read more…
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Shelfie Lets You Download Ebooks and Audiobooks by Snapping Photos of Your Physical Copies
There isn’t much you can buy for less than one cent these days, but you can store a whole lot of files in the “cloud” for $0.005 a month with Backblaze’s new B2 storage service. It’ll even give you 10GB for free. Read more…
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Backblaze B2 Offers Dirt-Cheap Cloud Storage for Half a Penny Per GB a Month
Chinese giant salamanders are incredible amphibious beasts that look more like monsters from a movie than something that could exist in real life on this here Earth. They are comically huge, like brown boulder-sized beings who are unaware of how big they are. This one, discovered outside a cave near Chongqing, China, is over 4 and a half feet long and weighs nearly 115 pounds. Experts believe that it may be around 200 years old. Read more…
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200-year old giant salamander discovered outside a cave in China
At peak hours, Netflix makes up a mind-bending 37 percent of all internet traffic in North America. So it’s come up with a new way of divvying streaming power to all its shows, which’ll not only make streaming faster, but also decrease the suffocating Netflix footprint on the online ecosystem. Read more…
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How Netflix Plans To Cut Its Behemoth Bandwidth Use
If it’s not Mario or Shepherd and the Mass Effect crew , it’s… plants and zombies. Cedar Fair Entertainment , which runs 14 park attractions across the US, is working with EA on two attractions for Great America in California, and Carowinds in North Carolina. Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare will be adapted into what the theme park is terming a “digital attraction”. This means that it’ll be able to substitute in and reprogram the ride later for sequel content — which sounds a whole lot like its namesake. Carowinds will get the PvZ attraction, which will open next year. Source: Journal Now
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‘Plants Vs. Zombies’ is becoming a theme park attraction
Nintendo has said precious little about its plans for the NX (other than that it won’t be like a Wii U ), but it might have hinted at what’s coming through some recent paperwork. The console maker has filed for a patent on a gamepad design where a touchscreen would cover the entire front panel. You’d still have familiar elements like analog sticks (poking through the display) and shoulder buttons, but the usual front-facing buttons would be replaced by context-aware touch. The move would give you the adaptability of a smartphone interface with the primary controls you’re used to in a TV system — you could even use the controller on its side, or get visual effects when you press buttons. It wouldn’t require a gigantic body like the Wii U’s gamepad, either, and a card slot could take game data directly. This is just an application, and there’s no certainty that Nintendo will use this design any time soon, if at all. However, as The Verge notes , the would-be patent does line up with rumors that Nintendo will use Sharp’s free-form displays in a future product. Theoretically, this could be the technology behind the NX’s standard-issue gamepad. Moreover, the Wall Street Journal has heard that the NX would include a “mobile unit” that could be used separately from the main console. Given the presence of that card slot, it’s possible that you could play titles solely on the gamepad and take it with you — who needs separate TV and handheld consoles when your NX is both at the same time? The finished machine could be far less exciting, but it’s evident that Nintendo has at least been thinking about non-traditional hardware. Via: SlashGear , NeoGAF Source: USPTO
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Nintendo invents a gamepad built from a touchscreen
We drive the Arcimoto SRK from Mark Frohnmayer’s Oregon-based electric carmaker to see how the eighth-generation concept stacks up against previous prototypes.The last time we checked in with Arcimoto, the Oregon-based electric carmaker was on the fifth version of its “everyday electric” SRK prototype. The year was 2011 and Arcimoto President and Founder Mark Frohnmayer was brimming with ideas to further improve the company’s SRK concept. Now, four years and three generations later, we catch up with Frohnmayer and the team at Arcimoto to see how the company’s eighth-generation SRK improves on its predecessors in every way. “A few weeks ago we finished our generation-eight prototype, ” said Frohnmayer. “It’s certainly a huge leap beyond what we had on the road in 2011 and this is what we’re actually intending to bring to the marketplace late next year.” By dropping nearly half the weight of previous versions, the eighth-gen SRK improves on range, performance and price, at a target MSRP of $11, 900. “The notion of the SRK was to be a product that anybody could afford, ” said Frohnmayer. Have an RSS feed? Click here to add Translogic . Follow Translogic on Twitter and Facebook . Click here to learn more about our host, Jonathon Buckley.
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This electric car took almost a decade to build
The new tool out of Disney Research’s labs could turn an ingénue’s semi-decent attempt into a finely nuanced performance. This software called FaceDirector has the capability to merge together separate frames from different takes to create the perfect scene. It does that by analyzing both the actor’s face and audio cues to identify the frames that correspond with each other. As such, directors can create brand new takes during post-production with zero input from the actor. They don’t even need specialized hardware like 3D cameras for the trick — it works even with footage taken by regular 2D cams. According to Disney Research VP Markus Gross, the tool could be used to lower a movie’s production costs or to stay within the budget, say, if it’s an indie film that doesn’t have a lot of money to spare. “It’s not unheard of for a director to re-shoot a crucial scene dozens of times, even 100 or more times, until satisfied, ” he said. “That not only takes a lot of time — it also can be quite expensive. Now our research team has shown that a director can exert control over an actor’s performance after the shoot with just a few takes, saving both time and money.” Considering the lab also developed a way to make dubbed movies more believable and to take advantage of incredibly high frame rates , we wouldn’t be surprised if filmmakers arm themselves with an arsenal of Disney Research tools in the future. It’s probably hard to visualize the way FaceDirector works without seeing an example, so make sure to watch the video below to see it in action. Source: Disney Research (1) , (2)
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Disney’s FaceDirector changes facial expressions in movies
Scattered hand bones, severed arms, cracked skulls: if one thing is clear from this Neolithic burial pit, it’s that some some serious shit went down 6, 000 years ago. Read more…
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6,000 Year Old Death Pit Points to One Hell of a Brawl
It looks like an alien parasite come to invade our brains, but the truly bizarre creature pictured above is a mud dragon—a tiny worm, roughly half the size of a grain of rice, that squirmed about the seafloor 530 million years ago. It’s one of the first fossils of a mud dragon ever discovered, and it could help scientists answer some big evolutionary questions. Read more…
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This Ancient Armored Mud Dragon Could Help Solve an Evolutionary Mystery