As a nation, the United States consumes a whopping 8 billion chickens every year, and this results in a few mountains’ worth of chicken feathers in pure waste. But no more, some entrepreneurs say: chicken feathers could be the future of plastic.
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If you ever find yourself scratching your head over the complicated articles in science and math journals, don’t feel too bad about yourself. Because there’s a chance that whatever you’re attempting to read is actually 100 percent, Grade A, peer-reviewed bullshit.
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Welcome to Feedback Loop, a weekly roundup of the most interesting discussions happening within the Engadget community. There’s so much technology to talk about and so little time to enjoy it, but you have a lot of great ideas and opinions that need…
There are quite a few top-level apps ready for Nokia X as it heads to launch just one week after it was introduced to the world at Mobile World Congress … Continue reading
Interested in a tour of Westeros? Of course you are. This Game of Thrones: A Pop-Up Guide to Westeros is available for pre-order now and it looks amazing.
This book is pretty awesome by itself, but you could also add some Game of Thrones action figures for a really fun time. It’s a book and an amazing playset in one. Check out the video to truly appreciate how cool this guide is.
This is the best pop-up book I’ve seen since I was a kid. You will totally want to get one for yourself. It looks like it has everything you could want between the covers. It will be released on March 25th, and is available for pre-order on Amazon for about $41(USD).
Now if it only played the theme song every time you opened it up.
[via Tor via Nerd Approved]
If your front door looks like mine, you will appreciate the Pebble Smart
Doggie Doorbell. I think it’s one of the most ingenious pet products
created in some time, and I recommend that you at least consider
investing in this clever device for a few reasons: one, to keep your dogs
from scratching up your doors when they want to come inside (or go
outside); and two, to have some great fun training and rewarding your dogs
for using it.
There’s a theory that if you make Android look enough like Windows Phone, that users will grow accustomed to the interface, and when it comes time to upgrade, seek to scratch that tile-shaped itch. That’s the view Steven Elop gave us in our recent…
If you—like me—have already obsessed over every single word written about True Detective, then you will want to obsess over this ridiculous graphic tribute. It’s absurd, it’s overblown, and it’s exactly what the obsessive fan inside me wants to pore over.
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No, Americans are not fatter than ever. It’s not like we need our homes to smell like food. It’s not like we need Cinnabon Air Fresheners or anything… Wait. What? Yes, they actually exist, presumably to make us so hungry that we get in the car on a mission to find some.
Air Wick’s Cinnabon-scented air fresheners will fill your home with the scent of “one-of-a-kind cinnamon and cream cheese frosting that make Cinnabon cinnamon rolls so unforgettable.” There goes your diet right? I don’t know about you, but I don’t need spray can to make me crave delicious junk food. I want that all on my own.
However, if you have to make your home smell like a bakery – without baking these – now you know that this is a thing.
This article was written on February 09, 2008 by CyberNet.
Weekend Website
This past week, Ryan and I found ourselves looking for a new background image for our computers . We were both using a winter scene and got sick of looking at it when we have our own winter scene right outside our window (we got over 15 inches of snow this past week!). I set out to find something different and ended up using two different sites before I came across a background I was satisfied with. I liked both sites for different reasons and thought I’d share them with you. We’re also asking you to fill us and everybody else in on your favorite places to get desktop wallpapers.
Before we get into two of the best sites I’ve come across, I thought we’d talk a little bit about how computer wallpaper originated. Obviously we know that the term wallpaper refers to an image that’s used as a background on a computer screen, but how did it all come about? I went to none other than Wikipedia to find out, and here’s what I found:
The first use of a distinguishable background in conjunction with overlapping windows was in an experimental office system, Officetalk, developed in 1975 at Xerox PARC on the Alto. Prior to that, the white backgrounds to overlapping windows (for example, in Smalltalk) could be difficult to distinguish from window interiors. The pattern used in Officetalk produced a 25% gray, using dots two pixels high to avoid flicker on the Alto’s interlaced screen. The same pattern was adopted for the Xerox Star.
Apple used a similar gray background for their Lisa and Macintosh. However, since these machines had non-interlaced screens it was possible to use a less noticeable background pattern, formed from a simple 2×2 repeating pattern that gave a 50 percent gray. The introduction of color monitors for personal computers led to non-patterned, single-color backgrounds and then to arbitrary ‘wallpapers’.
Social Wallpapering is described as “a community effort to classify, rank, and distribute high resolution images for use as computer wallpaper. As you might expect, Social Wallpapering has a social side to it. Visitors to the site can vote up or down a wallpaper that they may or may not like. The nice thing is that unlike social sites, you don’t have to register to be able to vote.
Now, on to the important part, the wallpapers. At Social Wallpapering you can browse by category. They have all kinds of categories ranging from abstract to TV and movies. If you’re not quite sure which category you’d want a wallpaper from, you can also filter by the highest/lowest rated, the most popular ones, and more. Additionally, you can browse by monitor size whether it be standard, widescreen, or a dual monitor set-up.
Another thing I like about this site is that if you hover over a wallpaper, a box pops-up with information like the size as shown below:
Visit http://socwall.com to find a pretty decent selection of wallpapers for your computer.
InterfaceLIFT is another site that offers free high-resolution wallpapers. One of the things I like best about this site is that they divide all of their wallpapers into categories based upon size. Here are the sizes that they offer:
On their homepage you’ll find that the wallpapers are listed and sorted by the date that they were added to the site. It’s not that they offer many new ones each day because they don’t, but the ones they do offer are usually quality. At least one new wallpaper is posted every few days.
You can also sort wallpapers by which ones were downloaded the most, which ones are rated the highest, those they were commented on the most, or you can even view random selections. Over the last year or so, I’ve found some of my favorite desktop backgrounds at InterfaceLIFT which you can visit here.
We know there are all kinds of sites out there with great backgrounds, so fill us in. Where do you go for wallpaper?
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