Where are the world’s best botanical gardens, the ones that should be on the bucket list of everyone who loves plants?
We thought our favorites and then we asked some experts — horticulturalists and administrators at a botanical garden in the United States (and for the record, none of them nominated their own gardens), a nursery owner on the West Coast of the United States, the president of a U.S.-based floral group with an international membership, and a garden writer and editor in Scotland. We also talked to a few plant geeks.
BERLIN — The U.S. consulate in Berlin was evacuated as a precaution Thursday after an employee reported a strange smell from an envelope, but police said no dangerous materials were found in a sweep of the building.
The smell came from an envelope containing supporting materials for a visa application that was given to consular employees by the applicant in person, U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Ruth Bennett said.
A new open-source Bluetooth gaming controller with full QWERTY, from the team that delivered the iControlPad for iPhone and iPod touch, has hit Kickstarter in search of $150,000. iControlPad 2 will run open-source firmware and include dual-analog controls and support not only for Apple’s mobile devices, but Android phones and tablets, Google TV set-top boxes, and other hardware.
It’s fair bristling with buttons and sticks, too, keeping even the most frantic gaming fingers occupied. As well as the analog sticks there’s a D-pad and the usual cluster of four buttons, a 5-row keyboard – with the sticks sandwiched in-between rows one and two – start/select, and two shoulder buttons, though the iControlPad 2 team says the layout isn’t quite final and could still be changed base on gamer feedback.
Attaching to whatever mobile device you want to use the iControlPad 2 with uses a swivel-holder, that can flip around the back of the phone in case you need to suddenly take a call. Inside there’s a battery good for 12-14 hours of runtime.
It’ll work with your PC or Mac, too, and the firmware is open-source so that you can hack it about if you don’t have support for a specific device. Pledging is open from today, with a minimum pledge of $69 getting you a unit when it begins shipping; that’s expected to happen in time for the holidays.
WASHINGTON — Just a week after the conclusion of the Democratic convention, most polls now show a boost for President Barack Obama. But the big question is whether Obama’s bigger lead will persist or whether it will turn out to be a temporary polling “bump.”
For the moment, most polls continue to show a post-convention Obama bounce. A new Fox News survey released on Wednesday shows Obama leading Republican nominee Mitt Romney by 5 percentage points (48 to 43 percent), and the latest Gallup Daily tracking poll, based on interviews conducted over the past week, shows Obama expanding his lead to 7 points (50 to 43 percent).
Meanwhile, national surveys conducted by seven more pollsters over the past week give Obama leads varying from 1 to 6 percentage points, and a new poll in Michigan published on Wednesday and sponsored by the Detroit Free Press and local television station WXYZ-TV showed Obama expanding his lead there from 3 to 10 percentage points since late August.
Where did Katniss go? Jennifer Lawrence separated herself from her iconic “Hunger Games” character this weekend, debuting a striking, darker ‘do at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Don’t worry about Cricket hogging the spotlight during the second wave of the iPhone 5’s US launch. C Spire, Appalachian Wireless and Alaska’s GCI have also promised to carry Apple’s taller smartphone on the same September 28th date. Details of the arrival will have to wait, although they’re not likely to veer sharply from the prices and rates that carriers were setting back in the iPhone 4S days. There are a few gaps in the narrative versus the earlier releases: we have yet to see news from GCI’s Alaskan neighbors as well as Cellcom or nTelos, for example. The plan is nonetheless a sign that Apple wants to blanket the American landscape with new iPhones as quickly as possible.
[Thanks, Colby]
Update: Not surprisingly, nTelos has also confirmed (PDF) that it’s hopping aboard the September 28th iPhone 5 train.
Nintendo has announced Nintendo TVii, the company’s take on the smart TV, using the Wii U GamePad as a second-screen to navigate live, on-demand, and DVR content. Built on the fact that, for many, the Wii has been the single way their TV has been hooked up online, Nintendo TVii will offer access to live TV channels, to Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon rentals/purchases, and recorded content on a DVR like a TiVo.
The system is all socially-enabled, so that viewers can see what their friends have recommended or been viewing lately. Movies and TV shows will have links to trailers, IMDB entries, cast information, Wikipedia and more.
Tapping a show or movie will bring up a list of options on how to watch it. That will depend on what’s showing live and what is available on-demand, with the option to access a Hulu Plus premium account or Netflix streaming account if you have one, or to buy the show from Amazon if you don’t. If you’ve recorded it on your TiVo then you can find it there instead.
Sports, meanwhile, shows thumbnails of live scores, and learns from your individual sports team preferences to show those teams earlier in the list.
Each family member gets their own list of favorites and recordings, and there’s a group list that gathers together any overlaps. When you actually start playing a show or movie, on your TV, the GamePad screen shows information on the show itself, allows you to share thoughts on Facebook or Twitter, see other comments, vote in polls, and see other feedback.
The content shown on the GamePad is also synchronized to the show, so that if you join a live program partway through, you’ll see time-linked comments and other information. Similarly, sports information, plays, scores and other details are sync’d to the right point in the game.
Nintendo TVii will be offered in the US and Canada, and the functionality will be included with every Wii U, with no monthly fee.
So there is no new iPod shuffle at yesterday’s press event by Apple at the Yerba Buena center in San Francisco, California, but that does not mean that things have not gotten slimmer during the announcements. Not only were we treated to the thinnest iPhone to date as well as the slimmest iPod touch ever, we also have another superlative title introduced for the reinvented iPod nano, which is touted to be the “thinnest iPod ever”, measuring at a mere 5mm, now how about that? Despite its small size, do not think that this is an iPod nano to be trifled with, where it will now come with the largest display ever built into an iPod nano at 2.5” so that your eyes will be able to enjoy more of your music, photos and widescreen videos.
The new iPod nano, as mentioned above, will come with a 2.5-inch Multi-Touch display that makes life a whole lot easier when navigating through your music. There is also a home button that helps you return to your home screen quicker than ever before, conveniently located buttons that makes it easy to control volume and quickly play, pause or change songs without having to take a second look.
Music lovers will also appreciate the fact that the new iPod nano comes with built-in Bluetooth for wireless listening with Bluetooth-enabled headphones, speakers and cars. Not only that, boasting a whopping 30 hours of battery life, the new iPod nano delivers the longest music playback of any iPod nano to date, so that you are able to enjoy your favorite music and FM radio longer than ever before. Other integrated fitness features include a pedometer and support for Nike+, meaning you should be able to see newer iPod nano models throughout gyms in the neighborhood.
The new iPod nano will arrive this October in pink, yellow, blue, green, purple, silver and slate for $149 a pop where it has 16GB of storage space to get you started.
Nintendo showed off some of the Wii U’s new television functionality during its New York City press event — first unveiled during E3 2012 — including DVR and TiVO, and search across several content providers (Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant, and cable television, to name a few). It’s unclear whether the DVR functionality is built into the console or not, but we’ll be sure to find out as soon as possible*. Nintendo’s director of strategic partnership Zach Fountain’s calling the service a “personalized program guide” and he showed off how you’ll be able to interact with content — movies and television shows can be searched via text entry, or explored in a general category sense (movies, tv, sports, etc.). If QWERTY text isn’t your kind of thing, a rotary entry in the lower right corner offers another way to seek out content.
The service is only for US and Canadian Wii U owners for now, but Fils-Aime said the company’s exploring an expansion into other parts of the Americas. Nintendo TVii is free with the purchase of a console this November. Click on past the break for the company’s brief video demo.
Update*: DVR/TiVO functionality is not built into the hardware, we confirmed.
The iPhone 5 has been criticized for being a boring and marginal update to the iPhone 4S—at least in terms of design, since the new handset looks a lot like its predecessor. The two phones are so similar, that when Jimmy Kimmel showed the iPhone 4S to random people on the street, passing it off as the iPhone 5, no one realized the ruse. More »
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