John Brownlee - page 33

We’ve seen a few great Flappy Bird machines before, but nothing as incredible as this robot that flawlessly plays Flappy Bird using a web cam, a robotic arm made from an old hard drive, and the tip of a stylus.

It was created by two Chinese developers, Liu Yang and Shi Xuekun, who live in China’s Shaanxi province. According to the duo, it took four days to create the robot, which is probably 3.99 days more than Dong Nguyen originally spent programming the game himself.

Now can it beat Flapthulhu?

Apple was responsible for 15% of the world’s smartphone shipments in 2013, and as much as 56% of all the profit. Sony, on the other hand, accounted for only 3.8% of the world’s smartphone shipments in 2013, and is barely ekeing out a profit company-wide.

Despite all of this, Sony mobile chief and European president Pierre Perron told The Inquirer that Apple is “missing out” by only releasing yearly iPhone freshes, instead of flooding the market with incremental updates every few months.

Despite the fact that this year, as every year, Apple failed to show up at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the iPad Air still managed to win the award of 2014’s Best Mobile Tablet in the 19th Annual Global Mobile Awards.

I know we’ve talked about Flappy Bird a lot over the past month… but forget that stupid bird. You have a new god now. Meet Flapthulhu.

Following the unexpected uncovering of Tim Cook’s high school photos, Apple has updated the official iPhone 5s page and iSight section to pay tribute to the company CEO’s gawky yearbook origins. Looking good, Tim!

Via: The wonderfully talented Michael Steeber

Apple may be great at making trackpads, but they are pretty terrible at making computer mice. On the positive side, though? Those mice make pretty great fashion statements.

Source: Flickr
Via: TUAW

When you buy a 16GB iPhone 5c, you get 12.60GB of storage space left over after taking into account iOS 7’s default install size. Comparatively, the Samsung Galaxy S4 was the worst bang for the buck, storage-wise, in smartphones: a paltry 8.56GB of internal space was available to the user to store apps and media upon.

Even the S4, though, was roomy compared to the newly announced Galaxy S5. A 16GB Galaxy S5 comes with less than eight gigabytes of usable memory.

When you sell your old iPhone to a third-party, what happens to it? It enters a thriving third-party marketplace in China, where it is restored to almost new and sold in gray and emerging markets. Weird!

Do you remember that gorgeous iOS 8 concept from last week that merged multitasking with control center? It’s coming soon to a jailbroken iPhone near you.

Like some totem out of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser series, a bizarre and grotesque statuary tribute to the late Steve Jobs was unveiled in Belgrade, Serbia today. Even more bizarrely, Apple may have liked it enough to put it on display in one of its Cupertino offices.

Blackberry has been dealt another blow as yet another major customer jumps ship to iPhone. The U.S. Air Force is planning on replacing 5,000 Blackberries with iPhones.

Did you miss the Flappy Bird phenomenon?

Well, if you’re a Twitterific user, no need to download one of the seemingly infinite number of clones: an Easter egg within the popular Twitter app lets you play a great 8-bit Flappy Bird clone with just a gesture.

If you own a Fitbit Force — a fitness tracker with a built-in OLED display that we like quite a lot at Cultofmedia — you might want to check under the band.

Do you see any redness? If so, you should avail yourself of a voluntary recall of the Fitbit Force.

After releasing iOS 7.0.6 yesterday with an important SSL bug fix, jailbreakers were put in a quandry. The bug that iOS 7.0.6 fixes a seriour security flaw that makes SSL/TLS sessions insecure, which puts your personal details in web transactions at risk of being stolen. On the other hand, is it really worth sacrificing your jailbreak for?

Luckily, it turns out that iOS 7.0.6 is still capable of being jailbroken using the existing Evasi0n jailbreak. Although Apple has patched out the Evasi0n jailbreaking exploit in iOS 7.1, iOS jailbreak dev winocm has said on Twitter that iOS 7.0.6 is still jailbreakable.

Of course, the existing Evasi0n jailbreak installer hasn’t yet been updated to support iOS 7.0.6, but if previous iOS 7.0.x updates are anything to go by, it won’t take long. In the meantime, if you want to jailbreak iOS 7.0.6 and don’t mind doing some hex editting, you can do so by following the instrucions here.

Personally, I love the look of the new stealth engine Mac Pro, but some people find it to look, well, a little too much like a trash can (which may not be a coincidence).

Jarred Land, one of the key figures of the Red Digital Camera Company, obviously agreed. He built himself a machined aluminum chassis to keep his Mac Pro in, plus an integrated Redmag Mini card reader with 8TB internal Thunderbolt RAID, and a monster fan to keep things cool.

It looks pretty awesome, but sadly, it’s a one-off: Land says he did it just for fun.

Source: Facebook
Thanks: Chuck W.

BiteSMS, the best jailbreak tweak for SMS addicts, has just been updated to version 8.0, coming out of beta officially and gaining iOS 7 and iPhone 5s support.

A lot of the artistic assets of Flappy Bird were ripped pretty much wholesale from Super Mario Bros.. So what happens when you beat Flappy Bird? Do you face Bowser? As this parody video show, it’s not the King of the Koopas you have to fear: it’s gaming’s favorite stereotypical Italian plumber, who certainly won’t let you flap your way past pipe 999.

Do you love playing Minecraft on your iPhone or iPad? So do we, but you’ve got to admit, there’s some compromises in playing Minecraft: Pocket Edition compared to the Mac, not least of which the size of the worlds. On the Mac, Minecraft worlds are infinite, but on iOS, they are extremely limited. But according to a new blog post, that’s about to change soon.

Apple won’t come right out and say so, but the iPhone 5c is a (comparative) dud. But why? Legendarly Apple ad man Ken Segall has his theories, and it all comes down to the fact that with the iPhone 5c, Apple violated Steve Jobs’ prime directive: Apple doesn’t do cheap.

Do you think Blackberry is dead? So does T-Mobile, which is why they tried to get Blackberry customers on the network to switch over to Apple’s smartphone. But apparently, Blackberry has some life in it yet… or enough, at least, to get pissed off about T-Mobile counting the Canadian smartphone maker out.

Love Clear, the slick iPhone to-do app? So do we. But if you’ve never tried Clear before — or if you bought Clear+ and want the minus version without paying for it — you’ll soon be able to download it, free of charge.

Remember GBA4iOS? It was a Gameboy Advance emulator for iOS that took advantage of an App Store enterprise deployment loophole to let you play GBA games on your iPhone or iPad, no jailbreak required. Unfortunately, Apple closed the loophole… until now.

Apple fans may argue that from a bang-for-your-buck perspective, an iPhone is one of the best smartphone deals around. If you’re judging simply by how much screen proportionally makes up the front of your device, though, this chart makes a strong case that the iPhone is a pretty bad deal compared to various Android phones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s7v0F_oaZQ

How bad does the other half — those who have never owned a MacBook — have it?

Pretty bad, as this hysterical video showing what Macgasm (tongue-in-cheek?) says are a trio of Norwegian Microsoft employees hurling around a MacBook Pro between themselves like the early hominid apes in the Dawn of Man section of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

So oblivious are they to the fact that this shiny wedge of unibody aluminum is a laptop, that they blindly destroy it, hooting and hollering as if they could never even envision a laptop that wasn’t made of cheap black plastic. Which, surely, many PC owners can’t.

Via: Macgasm

Electronic Art’s recently released update of Peter Molyneux’s Dungeon Keeper has garnered a lot of criticism for its shameless destruction of the gameplay of a strategy classic. But hey, why play that cynical piece of freemium crap when you can play the original for free?

For the next 24 hours, GOG.com is having a great promotion capitalizing upon the nigh-universal hatred for the Dungeon Keeper iOS remake. Just go to their site and sign up for an account to download the original classic Dungeon Keeper game for your Mac for free. Although seventeen years old, the original game still holds up, and runs just great on modern Macs. If you want to know why people are so honked off about the new version, look no further.

Source: GOG.com