Two cute T-shirts that mashes up a game for mature audiences and literature for kids. Mass Effect and the children’s books Little Miss and Mr. Men. Somehow it works. Look at Little Miss Shepard’s cute nose.
There’s also a Mister Shepard, equally adorable with his Paragon smile.
You can order both T-shirts from How to Carve Roast Unicorn for $30 (NZD) (~$24 USD). Sadly, they don’t actually share how to carve – or roast, or find – unicorn.
The zombie apocalypse would almost certainly be the saddest way for the human race to go. But is it actually possible for us to rise from the dead as a self-cannibalizing horde of mindless killers? Well, yes and no. As ASAPScience explains, we might not ever actually come back from the dead and eat each other’s brains, but a 28 Days Later-like zombie virus could potentially bring the whole human race down. [ASAPScience] More »
Zynga has been in the news a lot lately, but the recent layoffs at the beleaguered social games company have caught the attention of more than just the media. Anonymous isn’t all too happy with Zynga at the moment, and it’s planning to do something about the company’s perceived mistreatment of employees come Guy Fawkes Day. It’s then, on November 5, that Anonymous plans to complete “operation maZYNGA,” an offensive it has apparently already started.
In a forum post on AnonNews.org, Anonymous has shared some links to data files it has allegedy stolen from Zynga. On November 5, Anonymous says it will “release the key to the data files,” which the group claims outline a Zynga plan to layoff even more employees and outsource those jobs. Not only that, but Anonymous claims it will release games it has stolen from Zynga’s servers for free unless the company halts its plan to layoff more employees.
Anonymous put a video up on YouTube explaining the plan, but it has been taken down since it violates YouTube’s policy against the “depiction of harmful activities.” In the video transcript posted to the AnonNews forum, Anonymous explains, “With a billion dollars cash sitting in a bank we do believe that such actions are an insult to the population and the behaviour of corporations like Zynga must change.” The group has posted a transcript of one of these stolen internal documents, which supposedly outlines the company’s plan to layoff more workers in the US while outsourcing these jobs to India.
This is where the story gets a little difficult to believe, as the transcript from this alleged internal document is very poorly written. In other words, take these claims from Anonymous with a grain of salt, because it’s possible the infamous hacker collective is just making the whole thing up. In any case, November 5 is right around the corner, so we should be finding out if Anonymous is telling the truth soon enough. Stay tuned.
Contrary to previous rumors that the Verizon-headed Nokia Lumia 822 might be getting its official debut next month, Verizon and Nokia has just announced the said Windows Phone 8 device today. Expected to run on Verizon’s 4G LTE network, the Lumia 822 features a unique design, maps with turn-by-turn navigation, free unlimited music streaming, and an enhanced camera for its users.
The Lumia 822 sports a 4.3-inch 480 x 800 display alongside an 8-megapixel camera from Carl Zeiss and a 1.2-megapixel HD front-facing camera. Under the hood is a 1.5 GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8960 chipset, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of onboard storage, and microSD card support. Verizon consumers will also love the fact that the Lumia 822 also comes with Nokia Drive+, Nokia City Lens, Nokia Music, and a separately sold shell design that is capable of wireless charging.
“With the Nokia Lumia 822, first-time smartphone buyers – and those ready to switch – will get high-quality performance on both their device and Verizon Wireless’ incredibly fast 4G LTE network,” said Olivier Puech, President of Nokia Americas. “Bringing the Nokia Lumia 822 to Verizon Wireless allows us to expand our award winning Lumia brand to even more customers here in the United States,” he added.
Microsoft‘s latest piece of hardware, the Surface tablet running Windows RT, has been placed on the surgery bed and was given a full dissection by the fellows over at iFixit. While they were able to tear it apart completely, it wasn’t an easy feat, and they came across some obstacles along the way.
The whole process begins with removing the rugged kickstand from the tablet, which is actually held in place by torx screws. Of course, there are a whopping 17 torx screws that hold the entire device together, but once those are out, you’ll be able to carefully take off the rear panel, which is only attached to the rest of device by a small ribbon cable.
The battery is glued onto the rear panel, but it’s easier to remove then the iPad. Plus, all of the small components like the speakers, connectors, and ports come out fairly easily. However, some components, like the camera, couldn’t be removed until the motherboard was taken out. The top of motherboard obviously is home to the main circuitry like the CPU, graphics, and flash memory, but the bottom consists of the smaller features, like the WiFi antenna, the ambient light sensor, and a couple of microphones. Everything that deals with the touchscreen display is on a completely separate “daughterboard.”
Removing the display takes some work. It requires a heat gun, some guitar picks, and “plenty of patience.” Just like the iPad, the LCD and the glass are fused together and strongly adhered to the casing, making it a rough repair if the display breaks down. Overall, iFixit gave it a 4 out of 10 for repairability, which isn’t great, but it’s certainly not as bad as the third-gen iPad’s 2 out of 10 score.
iFixit has dissected Microsoft Surface to get a look at its innards and found it only slightly easier to dissemble than many of the latest Apple gadgets, which haven’t exactly been a picnic to take apart. More »
DEPOK, Indonesia (AP) — When a 14-year-old girl received a Facebook friend request from an older man she didn’t know, she accepted it out of curiosity. It’s a click she will forever regret, leading to a brutal story that has repeated itself as sexual predators find new ways to exploit Indonesia’s growing obsession with social media.
The junior high student was quickly smitten by the man’s smooth online flattery. They exchanged phone numbers, and his attention increased with rapid-fire texts. He convinced her to meet in a mall, and she found him just as charming in person.
They agreed to meet again. After telling her mom she was going to visit a sick girlfriend on her way to church choir practice, she climbed into the man’s minivan near her home in Depok, on the outskirts of Jakarta.
Colored LED lighting that could be remotely controlled used to take professional installation and thousands of dollars; now, Philips’ new hue system makes it as easy as screwing in a bulb. On sale on Tuesday – initially exclusively through Apple Stores – the hue bulbs screw into a regular ES fitting and are remotely controlled from iOS or Android apps over a ZigBee connection, either locally around the home or (handy if you’ve left the lights on while you’re on holiday) anywhere with an internet connection. They’re hardly a cheap replacement to a standard incandescent bulb, though, so we spent some time with Philips to find out why hue is special, and how the system could actually make us happier or more productive.
The starter box – containing three bulbs and the base station – is priced at $199/£179, while individual bulbs are priced at $59/£49. That might seem expensive on the face of it (though Philips has high-end white LED bulbs in its range that are $50-60 alone) but, in comparison with the LivingColors lamps which come in with an RRP of £159 apiece, it starts to look more reasonable. If you’ve already bought any LivingColors models, incidentally, you’ll be able to use them with the hue system too (with one or two limitations).
Installation is simple: screw in the bulbs, plug the ZigBee base station into a spare ethernet port on your router, and hook it up to the mains. A pairing button on the base station allows you to link up any other hue bulbs, while three LED lights show system status including whether there’s an internet connection for remote access. Since ZigBee is a mesh system, each hue bulb can talk to each other: bulbs can be a great distance from the base station itself, just as long as there are other bulbs spanning the intermediate distance (though lag increases the more mesh-points the signal needs to hop through).
Philips hue official demo:
The bulbs themselves use 8.5W at most, and – at 600 lumens – are equivalent to 50W traditional bulbs. They also use a special internal coating that, coupled with the shape of the glass, projects light more evenly around the bulb, meaning there isn’t a dead-zone to your lamp. Officially, up to 50 can be paired with a single base station, though Philips told us that in fact that’s more of a quality-assurance guarantee; in fact, the company has had 250+ bulbs paired with test systems, and had no real issues with them. Bayonet fitting versions are in the pipeline.
Control is via smartphone and tablet app, with iPhone, iPad, and Android versions available at launch; up to ten devices can be linked to control any one base station. The software itself is surprisingly comprehensive. At its most basic, you can adjust the color of any one bulb across the spectrum, including adjusting brightness and color temperature, from a rich red, deep blue, bright white, or anything in-between. You can link up two or more bulbs into a group, and control them all simultaneously, and create preset scenes which each have their own icon on the app’s homescreen.
However, there’s also color sampling to be played with. Philips includes a number of photos in the app – scenes like beaches or mountains – and by dragging pointers linked to each lamp, you can recreate the color of that point in the image. Again, custom setups of multiple lamps tied to different points can be saved, or you create a random arrangement by physically shaking the tablet or iPhone.
You can alternatively pick out a photo from your own photo gallery – or take a new photo, within the Philips hue app – and select colors from that instead. Each of the scenes, whether basic colors or based on photos, can be set to timers, either turning them on or off; you can also have them gently fade in or out over a period of several minutes, helping you to gently wake up or drift off to sleep. Of course, you can also shut off all the bulbs with the tap of a single button.
Finally, though, comes Philips’ splash of science. The company preloads four “LightRecipes” – relax, read, concentrate, and energize – which adjust lighting to specific shades and brightness levels based on research into how those scenarios affect the human body. Philips says testing in schools showed students did better in tests, were calmer, or read faster and more accurately, depending on the different setting active at any one time. It’s worth noting that older LivingColors lamps won’t work with these new LightRecipes, as they don’t have the settings baked in like the new hue bulbs do.
There are some sensible tweaks and decisions Philips has made along the way to the hue system overall. An override feature automatically lights the bulbs up to a regular white “lamp light” default if the physical power switch is used, just in case of emergency, and you can easily deactivate a phone or tablet from the control group in case it’s lost or stolen (or if your kids insist on triggering a mini disco in your room at 2am every day). At launch, the Android app will lack the out-of-house remote control feature, though Philips says it’s coming; if you have any existing remotes from the LivingColors line-up, the company confirmed to us that they, too, would still work, useful for the less tablet-savvy in the household.
Perhaps best of all, it’s all designed to be open. Philips’ base station works as a regular ZigBee hub, and so will function with any other ZigBee devices that conform to the standard, while the individual bulbs are compliant with the ZigBee Light Link standard and so can be integrated with wireless home automation setups you might have already. The company is also opening up its app to third-party developers, in the hope that they’ll step in and augment the functionality. Suggestions included flashing the lights when you get a VIP email, synchronizing color changes with musical playlists, or geo-location so that the lights automatically turn on when you get home, and off when you leave. Individual users will be able to use the site to swap color scheme presets.
At sixty bucks apiece, hue bulbs aren’t cheap. However, the popularity of recent Kickstarter campaigns for WiFi-enabled bulbs such as Lifx – which raised more than 13x of its goal – has shown that there’s a consumer interest for more flexible, smarter lighting. Unlike fund-raising projects, though, Philips’ hue system ships from tomorrow, not sometime next year, and comes from a company with a long history in lighting. We’ll be putting hue through its paces soon, to see if the promise lives up to the price.
President Barack Obama said in an interview Monday that the Republican party would have to overcome an internal war if he were reelected, but expressed hope that the partisan gridlock in Washington could come to an end.
“There are a whole range of issues I think where we can actually bring the country together with a non-ideological agenda,” Obama said in a pre-taped interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“The question’s going to be, how do Republicans react post-election?” he continued. “Because there’s going to be a war going on inside that party. It just hasn’t broken up. It’s been unified in opposition to me.”
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Contrary to previous rumors that the Verizon-headed 
