Myfitnesspal was a startup that offered Internet of Shit-based fitness and diet tracking; they were purchased by Under Armor for $475,000,000 in 2015; three years later, Under Armor has admitted that hackers stole the personal data of 150,000,000 Myfitnesspal users. (more…)
There are plenty of us out there who enjoy the look of vintage speakers, but using them today isn't necessarily practical. However, that's not to say you can't add some 1950's flair to your listening setup. The Lofree Poison aims to combine a vintage aesthetic with 21st-century technology, and it's on sale for $79.99 in the Boing Boing Store.
Boasting a design reminiscent of 1950's appliances, the Lofree Poison lets you tap into this feeling of nostalgia while blasting your living space with its powerful 20-watt amplifiers and enhanced bass driver. It features a 2000mAh rechargeable battery that allows for up to six hours of playtime and includes a physical rotating dial and built-in FM radio so that you can search for music the old-fashioned way.
You can pick up the Lofree Poison on sale for $79.99 today.
Josh from Fight for the Future writes: "The death of net neutrality will hurt small businesses the most. But mobilizing businesses and startups en masse could be the secret ingredient that saves the open Internet. Over the past few months, we’ve seen that direct pressure from business owners is one of the most effective methods of convincing Republican lawmakers to support net neutrality, and we need to get at least one more GOP senator on our side in order to win a vote in Congress to block the FCC’s December repeal." (more…)
Avatar is a self-actualization "technique" created by an ex-Scientologist named Harry Palmer, who defected from the "church" in 1986 to found a lookalike multi-level-marketing version where he serves as a commission-earning "upline" from practitioners who teach his high-priced "courses" -- his Scientology-alike borrows heavily from the original cult and even used some of its symbols until he lost a trademark suit to Scientology. (more…)
I got my first Kíla album in the mid-1990s while I was going to university in Halifax, Canada. It was a big deal.
Lemme give you some background: my folks declared bankruptcy the week that I shipped off to school. The financial help I assumed would be there for me, wasn't. I watched, near penniless, as my fellows drank themselves into oblivion and got to know one another. I couldn't afford to participate. I couldn't afford the books from the extensive reading list I'd been given. The only thing that I had going for me was that I'd used my student loan to pay for a meal plan as part of my first semester's tuition. I quickly found the work I needed to get by, teaching music, doing audio/visual duty for the classes I was attending, rattling locks as a security guard and playing in a bar band to make ends meet. I was exhausted much of the time.
There wasn't a lot of room in my life for joy back then.
Around the middle of the school year, I received a letter from my mother. It explained that the she'd come by a coupon, good for $25 at HMV--a Canadian and British music store franchise. The thought of buying new music--new anything, really--at the time, didn't have a place in my head, given how hard it was to come by books or cover my day-to-day expenses. I've never listened to a lot of popular music. My tastes lean towards OG punk and Irish/Scots traditional music. HMV's offerings, in these areas, was limited. Thumbing through CDs in the store's tiny world music section, I came across Kíla for the first time. I'd never heard of them, but the name of the album I had in my hands, Tóg É Go Bog É, spoke to me. It translates, roughly, as 'take it easy.' I handed over my coupon and took the CD home with me.
It was like having happiness poured into my ears.
I'd stumbled on a group of musicians hellbent on breathing new meaning and life into the traditional music I'd grown up with. Their compositions were original. They sang in Irish--a language I so rarely, at the time, had a reason to use. Having their music fill my head made me feel like I was a part of something larger than myself. The problems that came from money and the stress of not having having any felt small in comparison to the enormity of culture, tradition and love that their music suggested.
Kíla's music has been a constant in my life, ever since.
I've not been fortunate enough to catch them in concert, yet. But this video of one of their shows from a few years back gives me an idea of what standing in the same room as them might be like.
For the first time in over 60 years, Easter and April Fools' Day are on the same day, creating the rare EasterFools' Day holiday.
To celebrate, former NASA-JPL engineer/current science YouTube star Mark Rober (previously) went on Jimmy Kimmel Live to demonstrate some easy pranks for this rare double holiday. For example, he fills hollow chocolate bunnies with broccolini and calls them "Brocco-Bunny" and puts Brussels sprouts on sticks and then dips them in melted chocolate, creating "Brussels Pops." 
What he does with mayonnaise is unforgivable. And the kids they give these EasterFools' "treats" to are surely scarred for life.
FYI: the next EasterFools' Day happens in 2029.
Georgia is a hub for cybersecurity research, with leading university computer science and security programs and a new $35m state cybersecurity research center underway; but the Georgia state legislature just passed SB315, the most onerous prohibition on computer security research ever passed in the USA. (more…)
Matt Burns at TechCrunch:
"The additional horsepower isn’t needed for general use, but the added graphics cards supercharge Macs for VR rendering and gaming. Only a handful of eGPUs are compatible with macOS so choose carefully before adding one to your rig."
The AMD Radeon RX 580 is the best card for games on the compatibility list, but most of the eGPU boxes are pretty bulky. Your best best is probably the Sonnet Box, which is the smallest and comes with an RX 570 built in (with a cheaper RX 560 option). The caveat is that it doesn't have USB-C output, so you can't put it between a Mac and the LG UltraFine monitors that Apple actually sells. Other eGPU boxes have this feature.
This will probably go unheralded but I think it's a huge milestone in Mac history: serious game support! Finally!
Reader recommended, and absolutely delightful, The Unbitten Elbow depicts the fervor and zelotry of the Soviet state as it rots from the brain to the heart.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is another fantastic Soviet era writer of dystopic fiction. Folks in Russia were already living in the worst dystopia most Westerners could imagine. In The Unbitten Elbow, we see an old Russian proverb, that the elbow is always near but impossible to bite, tested by the strength of an entire nation.
Absurdity abounds in this 10-15 minute read.
The National Coffee Association failed to demonstrate that a known-carcinogen produced during the coffee brewing process is not harmful. A judge in the Bear Republic ruled coffee cups need to carry a warning.
Via the NYT:
The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed in 2010 by the Council for Education and Research on Toxics, a nonprofit group based in Long Beach. The group charged that Starbucks and other companies — a group that eventually included 91 defendants — did not warn consumers that ingesting coffee would expose them to acrylamide, a chemical formed when coffee beans are roasted.
California keeps a list of chemicals it considers to cause cancer or reproductive harm, and acrylamide has been included since 1990. The state’s Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, known as Proposition 65 after it was passed in 1986, requires businesses to provide warning labels when exposing consumers to any of the hundreds of chemicals listed.
Judge Elihu M. Berle, in Los Angeles County Superior Court, wrote in a proposed decision on Wednesday that the companies failed to show that acrylamide does not pose a significant risk when produced during the coffee roasting process.
“Since defendants failed to prove that coffee confers any human health benefits, defendants have failed to satisfy their burden of proving that sound considerations of public health support an alternate risk level for acrylamide in coffee,” the judge wrote.
Barry's Gold Blend tea merely invokes an existential crisis. Drink Barry's.
Today, the US State Department published a notice in the Federal Register seeking comment on a plan to require 15,000,000+ foreigners who get a US visitor visa to disclose all their social media identities as a condition of entry. (more…)
What do you call someone who derives pleasure from the bread of affliction?
A matzochist.
###
Why do we have a Haggadah at Passover?
So we can Seder right words.
Share your own in the comments! Happy Passover!
John "The Paper Airplane Guy" Collins shows us how to fold "Suzanne," the aircraft that set a 2012 world record for flying 69.14 meters.
"I bring paper airplanes into classrooms and start talking about complicated ideas involved with fluid dynamics and using paper airplanes to explain it," Collins told Wired. "If you can have a group of middle schoolers and high schoolers that don't look at their phones for 45 minutes while you're doing a demonstration, you've hit success," he says.
In 2007, the Guardian's Victor Keegan published "Will MySpace ever lose its monopoly?" in which he enumerated the unbridgeable moats and unscalable walls that "Rupert Murdoch's Myspace" had erected around itself, evaluating all the contenders to replace Myspace and finding them wanting. (more…)
The idea of representative democracy is that we pay lawmakers to give serious attention to the nuances of policy questions and cast votes on our behalf in accord with their understanding of our preferences, applied to those nuanced understandings. (more…)
Developed by Jussi Leinonen of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, this is a visualization of the first ever 3D model of a snowflake melting in the atmosphere. Eventually, a deep understanding of how snow actually melts could "help scientists recognize the signature in radar signals of heavier, wetter snow -- the kind that breaks power lines and tree limbs -- and could be a step toward improving predictions of this hazard." From JPL:
Leinonen's model reproduces key features of melting snowflakes that have been observed in nature. First, meltwater gathers in any concave regions of the snowflake's surface. These liquid-water regions then merge to form a shell of liquid around an ice core, and finally develop into a water drop. The modeled snowflake shown in the video is less than half an inch (one centimeter) long and composed of many individual ice crystals whose arms became entangled when they collided in midair.
"NASA Visualizes the Dance of a Melting Snowflake" (JPL)
Oklahoma teachers will walk out en masse this coming Monday, despite a historic agreement from the ailing state legislature to give them a long-overdue pay raise which will be paid for by increasing taxes on the state's previously untouchable oil and gas industry. (more…)
RSS was a revelation for blogging and online media; we got our first RSS feed in 2001 and I have relied heavily on RSS feeds to write this site (and stay informed) for nearly two decades now; in 2005, Google bet heavily on RSS with its Google Reader product, which quickly eclipsed every other reader, so that by the time they killed it in 2013, there wasn't anything sophisticated, robust and well-maintained to switch to. (more…)
Douglas Palmer got wind of a classified CIA program to create board games to train spies, so he used a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to get copies of two of these games: the first is called "Kingpin: The Hunt for El Chapo" and the second (which the CIA revealed to a SXSW audience in 2017) is called "Collection Deck." (more…)
Hailed for its versatility and user-friendly design, Python is one of the best first languages for aspiring programmers to learn. However, not all of us have a natural affinity for programming, but you can get the training you need without breaking the bank thanks to the Pay What You Want: Absolute Python Bundle.
Here's how the deal works: Simply pay what you want, and you'll unlock one of the collection's five courses. Beat the average price paid, and you'll get the remaining four at no extra charge. Plus, if you beat the top price, you'll be entered into a major giveaway and earn a spot on the leaderboard.
Featuring nearly 60 hours of training, this collection will take you from beginner to expert in Python programming. You'll follow along with the collection's example-based curriculum, taking on core concepts, like input, functions, lists, and loops. Then, you'll dive into more advanced ideas, like automation framework design and creating deep learning models.
You can catalyze your Python education for a price you choose with the Pay What You Want: Absolute Python Bundle.
The late-great comedienne Joan Rivers was a frequent guest on Martha Stewart's daytime show. One year for Passover, they built gingerbread-like houses with sheets of matzo and decorated them with other kosher foods including macaroons, chocolate, dried fruits, and nuts. Such a cute idea!
Watch: https://youtu.be/V9rTS8yNziI
Happy Pesach to those of you out there who celebrate!
There's still plenty of life left in my 2015 MacBook Pro. But sooner or later, I'll ditch my computer in favor something new.
The nerd in me is wicked excited with the notion of using an ultra light laptop with an external graphics processor, for several reasons. I've always wanted to own a gaming laptop, but I could never justify the price, or the weight of one in my bag. Going with a computer that can connect to an external GPU means that I could invest in the laptop first, and then the GPU when I could afford it. And since the GPU for the rig is external, I wouldn't be forced to carry around a heavy bastard of a computer with me every time I needed to take off on assignment. That said, I was hesitant to buy one without seeing how it'd perform, first and foremost, as a work machine. I really like the look of the Razer Blade Stealth: the laptop's industrial design is what Apple might have come up with if their design department had a shred of edge or attitude. So, relying on the privilege of my position as a tech journalist, I asked Razer if I could borrow one.
They said yes.
I spent the past month working on Razer's insanely well-built ultrabook. It was pimped out with 16GB of dual channel RAM, and an Intel Core i7 2.70Ghz processor. It's zippy! But then, that's in comparison to my daily driver: a three year old Core i5 with 8GB of RAM. The Razer Blade Stealth is an easy machine to fall in love with. It feels as solid built as any Apple laptop I've ever used. I'd argue that, subjectively, it feels better to pick up and carry than any other portable computer that I've handled. There's something really satisfying about its weight. There's a decent number of ports for connecting to legacy hardware, HDMI for using it with an external display and a USB C/thunderbolt port for charging it and, yes, connecting to an external GPU rig.
I found myself quickly getting attached to this thing, and hating myself for it. As I used it, I attempted to rationalize why I should buy it.
The usual suspects filled my head: I deserve nice things. It'd be good for my work. Gaming helps to manage some of my PTSD symptoms. Yadda yadda yadda. It's a series of excuses that I feed myself, often. Buying new shit gives me a quick rush of endorphins. Consumerism and booze (especially where it concerns buying booze!) have long been my drugs of choice.
Last week, I made the decision to box the Razer Blade Stealth back up. This week, I ask Razer to send me a return shipping label. I need to get it out of the house as we'll be traveling north to spend our summer in Canada soon. Shipping it back means one less thing that I don't own will be in our RV home for customs to scrutinize when we cross the border. But more than this, I needed it out of my life. Using it made me feel too good, too quickly. When you're an addict, of any kind, it's easy to be roped into accepting the monkeys that long to cling to your back. A new computer. Too much drink. Both result in too little money on hand, for me at least. That I have a job that allows me access to all the shiny things in the world makes it that much worse. It's a path that's led me to some dark places in my past. I've no interest of going there again.
As for the rest of you, if you're looking for a solid ultrabook that can handle work and some hella heavy gaming with the use of an external GPU, the Razer Blade Stealth is amazing. But until the computer I currently own dies or becomes too old to use, I'll have to go without it.
Today on "WTH is Walmart trying to sell my friend Terry through a Facebook ad"**: Earthworm Jerky. (Last time it was funeral potatoes.)
At first, I thought he was pulling my leg. But he's not one to joke about stuff like this: 
Reviews are poor for these "100% edible dehydrated large earthworms" in a "spicy marinade," so I don't recommend buying them: 
**I have to think that the-store-that-no-longer-shall-be-named is advertising weird items to draw some attention (after all, negative attention is still attention). Good job, it worked. I feel right into their trap. I'm sending all their "earthworm jerky" traffic to Amazon though.
Not everyone around the world agrees that cats say "meow" and that dogs "woof." Watch in this Conde Nast Traveler video as 70 people from 70 countries share their interpretation of how pets sound. I feel like all these sounds should be incorporated into a song or something.
In 2015, Patti Smith went on tour with her band to celebrate the 40th anniversary of her debut album, Horses. Now it's been announced that a new documentary titled Horses: Patti Smith and her Band has been made using footage of the tour's final gig at Los Angeles' Wiltern Theater.
In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2014, the then 67-year-old said,
"I think we continue to deliver all of these songs sometimes stronger than when I was young... So I'm going to be happy to celebrate it, to perform the album with happiness, not with any kind of cynicism or a cashing-in thing. It will be a true, proud celebration, so the answer is yes."
I attended one of the three sold-out shows at The Fillmore in San Francisco in early 2015 and can attest that it was a strong performance. The 1975 album was performed in its entirety, in sequence, and Patti rocked the whole show hard.
The new film was directed by Steven Sebring and executive produced by record producer Jimmy Iovine. It premieres April 23 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. After the screening, Smith and her band will perform some songs, including the album's title track.
(PAPER)
Sophia is an advanced social robot in her second year of development by Hanson Robotics. In this video, she's on a date in the Cayman Islands with actor Will Smith. He turns on the charm, goes in for a kiss but is immediately, awkwardly friendzoned by her.
Last year Sophia was on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon with her creator, former Imagineer Dr. David Hanson. On it, she tells Jimmy a joke and then plays Rock, Paper, Scissors with him: https://youtu.be/Bg_tJvCA8zw?t=2m20s
P.S. You can follow Sophia on Instagram! I just did. https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg661Ikn2vF/?taken-by=realsophiarobot
A lot of Star Wars fans were butt hurt over the Last Jedi's treatment of iconic Star Wars characters. Others, not so much--I'm one of those. I think it was a fun film that pushed the franchise forward in a new and interesting direction. No matter which camp you fall into, there's one thing that we can all agree on: Watching Carrie Fisher slap the silly shit out of Oscar Isaac over and over will always be entertaining.
While I'm not crazy about sharing anything from Entertainment Tonight, damn this is fun.
For more than a century, the Canadian government was responsible for perpetuating horrendous abuses against native peoples who were unfortunate enough to be living in an area where a imperial colonialist power decided to set up shop. It was government policy for Indigenous children to be separated from their families, the without the permission of their parents or tribal elders, and them into what were known as residential schools: institutions predominantly run by the Catholic Church, along with a small handful of schools that were handled by Anglican, Presbyterian and United Church interests.
Once the kids were secured into these boarding schools, they were taught the 'right' way to live--right being in accordance to western culture. Were the incarcerated children to dare to speak their own language or act according to cultural norms outside of what their white caretakers felt was 'civilized,' they were met with severe corporal punishment. Mortality rates at the schools were high. So were instances of physical and emotional abuse. Children were often buried in unmarked graves or simply disappeared. Even after the last residential school closed in 1998, its legacy of hate and abuse remains.
In 2015, Canada finally confessed to its part in this long-running crime. The nation's Truth and Reconciliation Commission looked to the crimes of the residential school system, saying that they amounted to cultural genocide. The commission made 94 recommendations that it felt would go along ways towards righting the wrongs of the past. One those recommendations was that the Pope step forward and apologize for his church's role in the residential school system. It makes sense: the bulk of the schools were operated by the Catholic Church. There's precedent for it, too: in the past, Popes have apologized for other shitty things that the church has done.
Last May, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a personal appeal to Pope Francis, asking him for an apology, on behalf of all Canadians. The pope's response?
Nope.
From the New York Times:
“The Holy Father is aware of the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which he takes seriously,” Bishop Lionel Gendron, who is president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote in an open letter to Canada’s Indigenous people released on Tuesday. “After carefully considering the request and extensive dialogue with the Bishops of Canada, he felt that he could not personally respond.”
It wouldn't have been the first time that a pope's apologized for the church's bullshit. As the New York Times points out, Pope Benedict XVI apologized for the decades of sexual abuse that many Catholic priests heaped on members of their flock in Ireland, back in 2010. More recently, Pope Francis asked for forgiveness for the church's role in the Rwandan genocide. Thousands were killed during that one. Maybe the problem with apologizing for what went on in the residential schools is that around 80,000 people who were forced to attend them are still alive. Admitting culpability through apology could open the doors to one hell of a class action lawsuit against the Church.
The Pope's got a trip to Canada planned in the near future. Apparently, meeting with native politicians and tribal elders will be a priority. I guess we'll see what happens.
Image via Wikipedia Commons
As listeners of the Serial podcast know, Adnan Syed was a Baltimore, Maryland high school student sentenced to life in prison for the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. Now, he's getting a new trial. From Rolling Stone:
Syed's conviction was overturned in June 2016 by retired Circuit Court judge Martin Welch, but the Attorney General's Office quickly appealed the ruling. Today's decision affirms Syed's right to a new trial, but based on an issue that the Circuit Court had considered and ultimately rejected – that Syed's trial attorney had demonstrated "deficient performance" and "prejudiced Syed's defense" by failing to pursue alibi witness Asia McClain...
(The Maryland Court of Special Appeals') decision comes down to this: "Syed's murder conviction must be vacated, and because Syed's convictions for kidnapping, robbery, and false imprisonment are predicated on his commission of Hae's murder, these convictions must be vacated as well. The instant case will be remanded for a new trial on all charges against Syed."
"A cheetah decided to explore our vehicle on a safari I was leading for Grand Ruaha Safaris (in the Serengeti National Park," wrote wildlife photographer Peter Heistein on Instagram. "Another one jumped up on the hood and was staring at us through the windshield. They were just curious, we kept calm and let them go about their business. Quite a thrill to be this close!
"Our guide Alex Mnyangabe... helped us through the encounter with instructions on how to treat the animal 'with respect.'"
https://vimeo.com/124474617
Calyx is an amazing nonprofit, privacy-oriented activist ISP (they were the first ISP to successfully resist a secret Patriot Act warrant); they are notable for offering an unlimited, unfiltered, unthrottled 4G/wifi hotspot for a tax-deductible $400 year (mine has repeatedly saved my bacon). (more…)
An absurd and wonderful example of semantic satiation, starring the "Komputer Tutor" Kim Komando, best known for her bestselling 1990s instructional videos sold via infomericial. And in case you were wondering, Kim Komando is still at it!
As advanced atom smashers like the Large Hadron Collider come online, older ones are sometimes abandoned or, better, used for unexpected science experiments. Examples range from recording high-speed X-rays of the biological "motor" that flaps a fly's wings to finding an easter egg in a Degas painting. In the video above, Science Hack Day "global instigator" Ariel Waldman reveals how researchers hack particle accelerators for new uses.
There are bubbles in your joint fluid that POP! when a joint is "cracked."
Via Phys.org
Using a mathematical model alongside a geometrical representation of the joint, experts from Paris' Ecole Polytechnique and Stanford University in the United States simulated the events leading up to the crack.
"The sound that is generated when one cracks his or her knuckles is due to the partial collapse of a cavitation bubble that's in the fluid in the joint," explained Abdul Barakat, a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique.
"It could be multiple bubbles, but we showed that the collapse of a single bubble is sufficient to give you the signature sound you get," he told AFP by phone.
Every joint in my body makes noise.
Image via Vecteezy
If you've tried to delete your Facebook account and found yourself mysteriously lost and frustrated, welcome to the world of Dark Patterns, "tricks used in websites and apps that make you" buy, sign up, or otherwise fool you into doing something other than you intend.
The video uses closing an Amazon account as an example. It's essentially impossible: even if you find the one deceptively-titled link three layers down through the most irrelevant-seeming menu options on the site, all it gives you is a generic "live chat" window. You cannot close your account without a fundamentally adversarial interaction with a person whose job depends on stopping you.
Pictured here, though, is something this week from Facebook, promising "text anyone in your phone" but really a ruse to let the company track your phone calls and texts--a fact you might be able to figure out from the tiny, unreadable silver-on-white text it doesn't want you to read. 
The sharp, thin metal bristles of grill brushes end up in your food and then in your throat, from where there is "no surefire way of removing them," say surgeons. Throw them out.
That was the case for Lisa Wadden two years ago. The Dartmouth, N.S., woman ate a burger her husband had barbecued and noticed something pierce her throat.
"Every swallow, it just was this crazy pain, burning," she said.
"It was like I was being poked again with it every single time that I swallowed."
X-rays showed Wadden had swallowed a thin wire about 1.5 centimetres long, which had become embedded in her throat.
Over four months, she had multiple CT scans, X-rays, scopes and two unsuccessful attempts to remove it through surgery. Dempsey, who was Wadden's otolaryngologist, told her it was best to wait for scar tissue to build up around the wire and lessen the pain.
Get yourself a grill stone at Amazon, folks. Or if that's too rustic for you, one of these fancy copper scrapers.
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The Struggle Against Imperialism and for Workers' Power in Iran is a $3.50 pamphlet by Keith Jones of the Socialist Equality Party of Canada; published by Mehring Books and distributed by the World Socialist Web Site. (more…)
The traditional explanation for the retail apocalypse is that Walmart and Amazon killed malls and big-box stores, but that account is incomplete -- the real story includes massive asset-stripping by debt-financed private equity vultures who paid themselves lavishly to run beloved businesses into the ground. (more…)
Jakiw Palij is a convicted Nazi war-criminal who helped train the force charged with murdering every Jew in Poland, guarded the Trawniki forced labor camp, -- where 6,000 prisoners were murdered in a single day -- and was present at the "liquidation" of the Warsaw Ghetto. He's lived in the USA since 1949, when he entered the country and lied about his Nazi past. (more…)
Palantir is the surveillance company founded by authoritarian "libertarian" Peter Thiel; their business-development employee Alfredas Chmieliauskas was part of a cohort of Palantir employees who worked closely -- if informally -- with Cambridge Analytica as they hatched their plan to harvest 50,000,000 Facebook profiles with a deceptive "personality quiz" app. (more…)
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