Rob LeFebvre - page 34

Email has become somewhat of a necessary evil lately, with a attempts like Google’s recent Inbox to use software to corral the over-abundance of the technology into something that makes better sense for us humans.

Designer Brendan Dawes worked with email marketing provider Mailchimp to come up with these fascinating single-use gadgets that bring email into the real world. Nim, the gadget named for a famous chimp in linguistics, is a light switch that lets you turn your email off. And on again, assumedly.

“Email is an interface we’ve been using for years,” Dawes told Wired, “so why not leverage its power some more?”

Dawes has several other gadgets he’s designed in concept. Each one tries to make the digital real and interactive. Some are more successful than others, of course, but they’re all fascinating.

Update: The leaked Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer has been pulled from several sources, but once the toothpaste is out of the tube, even superheroes can’t put it back. Marvel Entertainment has responded with an appropriately cheeky tweet (see below) and released the official trailer in HD.

It’s hard not to contain our excitement for the upcoming Joss Whedon joint, Avengers: Age of Ultron, especially with this new leaked trailer. It’s not the high-quality one you’ll likely see when Marvel Studios puts the official trailer up on YouTube, but it definitely looks legit.

The trailer gives us our first glimpse of baddie Ultron, voiced by James Spader, and features some creepy use of the Pinnochio song, “I Got No Strings” — a reference to the fact that Ultron is no longer a puppet, perhaps?

Check it out below:

Google’s got a new way to manage email: Inbox. It’s a refinement of Google’s already pretty rad Gmail service, and it’s headed up by the folks, like Jim Denis, who used to work for Sparrow, a fantastic Mac email app that was acquired by Google in 2012.

“Built on everything we learned from Gmail,” says the Inbox announcement, “Inbox is a fresh start that goes beyond email to help you get back to what matters.”

I typically try out a new product for review without reading any of the documentation or media relations stuff that the folks who send us such things want us to look at. I want to have as pristine an experience as possible. Sometimes that leads to little surprises.

I put these new Astro Gaming A38 Bluetooth headphones on my head last week, and paired them with my iPhone to play a little music. After a few songs of various genres, I stopped the tunes and took these off my noggin. I suddenly realized that my girlfriend had been blending up a protein shake in the nearby kitchen. It was surprising because I honestly could not hear it with the headphones on my head and playing music at a relatively low volume – and our blender is really loud.

While they’re great for music, these are also fantastic sounding headphones that help you immerse yourself into any game on your iPad or iPhone, cutting down on the auditory distractions from the outside world when they’re powered up.

Wondering how many solar eclipses there have been since the day you were born? How about when your next birthday on Mercury is? Perhaps you want to know how much Earth’s population has changed since your very special day.

You can answer these questions and more at BBC Earth with this interactive tool — you just plug in your birthdate, height, and gender, and you’ll get all sorts of interesting facts about our planet, as it relates to your lifespan.

“Find out how,” says the BBC site, “since the date of your birth, your life has progressed; including how many times your heart has beaten, and how far you have travelled through space.”

Heady stuff, indeed.

The Pokémon Company International just took another step towards iOS domination with its free-to-play game, Camp Pokémon, now available on the App Store for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. This new game will let children of all ages explore Camp Pokémon, learning to become a Pokémon trainer.

This is a big step in the right direction for Pokémon video game players, since Nintendo has as yet refused to put it’s incredibly lucrative Pokémon RPG games on any platform besides its own. However, The Pokemon Company owns the rights to the card game; they can put it on any platform they choose.

“Kids will have a blast exploring Camp Pokémon as they immerse themselves in the Pokémon universe in a fun, interactive setting,” said The Pokémon Company’s J.C. Smith. “Parents will love watching their little campers participate in fun activities and create memories at the virtual Pokémon island.”

OS X Yosemite has changed the way your Mac deals with your privacy. On the one hand, Apple has decided to enable hard drive encryption by default, despite the FBI requests not to.

On the other hand, every time you type in Spotlight, your location and local search terms are sent to Apple, and, according to developer Landon Fuller, other third parties like Microsoft.

Fuller’s created a website, Fix Mac OS X Yosemite, where he’s posted up a way to stop Yosemite from sending such private data out. He’s also been contributing to a developer project on GitHub to find out and fix other ways that OS X phones home.

Filmed on location at the Alyeska resort in Alaska, the Alaskan wilderness, and the Golden Alpine lodges in Canada, this incredible film of extreme skiing will light up your screens on October 19.

The 12-minute video was created to show off the color and light technology of Phillips Ambilight TV. To do so, the filmmakers created LED ski suits and let loose their pro skiers in the Alaskan and Canadian mountains.

Check out the gorgeous preview in the short teaser below.

iCloud passwords and security passwords can be guessed using social networking and various phishing techniques, and complex passwords and two-step verification are not as intuitive as they should be.

In a delightfully complete article over at TidBITS, author Rich Mogul lays out the facts behind the current spate of Apple security problems – most of which boil down to this: People are the weakest link in the chain.

As anyone who’s worked with technology in the past decade can tell you, the thorniest technical challenges aren’t typically those that deal directly with hardware and software. No, in most cases, the toughest things to troubleshoot and fix lie along the human spectrum. System administrators have long known this, coming up with acronyms like PEBCAK and ID-10T errors.

The same goes for security, which in Apple’s case affects an ever-increasing number of people who not be savvy to the ways of information security.

Another week, another issue — all of Cult of Mac’s best news stories and features, compiled in one place to read through easily on your iPad or iPhone. This week we’ve got some fantastic coverage of Apple’s iPad event, which revealed iPad Air 2, iPad mini 3, iMac with 5K Retinal Display, and a boosted Mac mini. Plus, read about how one cop saved a life using Find My iPhone, and the new official Reddit app. That and more in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine.

Dig into Cult of Mac Magazine October 17 Edition, Free on iTunes

It’s been way too long, joked Apple, since any groundbreaking announcements like the Apple Watch and iPhone 6 Plus. While the product refreshes announced at today’s iPad-centric event aren’t as high on “wow” as the revelations during last month’s big show, these are solid updates to product lines that continue to make Apple great.

Here are the top 12 things you need to know from today’s Apple event.

It may be hard to tell from the image above, but that’s a hot-rodding quadcopter speeding through the forest at about 100 miles an hour. The drone is taking part in the first large-scale first-person video drone race ever in the United States, held last week in Los Angeles.

For the operators, staring at video screens or wearing virtual reality goggles while their drones record the high-speed chase via tiny mounted cameras, the experience is not unlike the best part of the prequel Star Wars movies — the podracing scene.

Check out the video below for a better sense of what these guys are doing.

Back when I was in college, I didn’t have a computer and I didn’t have a typewriter. I did, however, need a way to write papers for my classes. While this may date me, my solution was to purchase an electric typewriter that had word-processing capabilities (I think it was a Brother). I could see one line at a time on it, and the only way to see a whole page was to print it out using the typewriter itself.

These days, of course, we all use full-on super computers to write our blog posts, school papers, and reports for work. You can’t get away from them. If you just want to write, you have to discipline yourself to turn off the Wi-Fi and ignore the constant stream of beeps and notifications that make up a typical work or school day.

The Hemingwrite wants to be the answer to the always-on computer writing conundrum. Instead of eschewing all network connectivity, however, the Hemingwrite tries something different.

“It combines the simplicity of a ’90s era word processor with the modern tech we all require,” writes the team on their web page, “like cloud backups and integration into our favorite document editors like Google docs and Evernote.”

Now that’s something I can get behind.

There’s always that moment when your drummer can’t show up for rehearsal. She’s got some other commitment. He’s got another gig. Her boyfriend needs her to take him to the hospital.

It happens. When it does, you can do what I’ve always done – pound your foot against the floor and try to muddle on through – or you can use a drum machine. The problem with standard drum machines is that they’re made to be used by hands or, in some cases, drum sticks. I’m not a drummer (no sticks) and I need my hands to play my guitar. What I really need is a drum machine I can play from the floor, guitar-pedal style.

That’s what caught my eye about the BeatBuddy – this is a guitar-pedal-style device that lets you use your foot to play back drum beats in a variety of styles, fills and different parts included. This is my new best friend when the drummer can’t make it to practice, and it may become my new stage pal if I take my act solo.

Entertainment insiders are saying that Oscar-winner Christian Bale will start filming Jobs this Spring as Apple’s late CEO and wonder-boy, Steve Jobs.

According to Variety, Bale is in talks to star as the mercurial tech leader in the movie based on the biography by Walter Issacson and a script written by Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network).

At a Time Warner investor meeting on Wednesday, Warner Bros. Chairman and CEO Kevin Tsujihara laid out his company’s plans to plaster movie houses with big DC-themed movies over the next six years, starting with Zach Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, set to release in 2016.

Disney-owned Marvel already dominates the box office with its comic-book team-ups like The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy as well as movies based on top characters like Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America.

It’s going to be a tough job for Warner Bros. to catch up to Marvel, which has already laid a ton of groundwork in it’s previously released films for the ongoing cinematic dynasty, but this new list promises to please fans new and old.

Handsome Jack, the erstwhile villain of Borderlands 2, had to start somewhere. It’s not easy taking over an entire corporation, let alone a whole planet.

His story begins much more humbly, however, with Jack working as a programmer at Hyperion Corporation. Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, in some part at least, aims to tell the story of this psychopath’s rise to power.

What’s even better is that this newly released game, available on all the consoles and PC on Steam, is also available for Mac thanks to the tireless efforts of the best Mac game publisher around, Aspyr.

That means that if you rock a Macintosh computer as your main gaming device (and why not, it’s a fantastic machine!), you’ll be able to shoot your way across the moon of Hyperion, floating through the air with every low gravity jump and using new awesome weapons like the ice and laser weapons.

Check out the trailer below, starring Mr. Torgue High-Five Flexington and Sir Hammerlock, for more hilariously over the top details.

Is there anything cooler than images of our solar system? Especially ones of the actual Sol, or, our sun. No, there is not.

This fantastically seasonal Halloween image was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which does nothing but stare at the sun all day and night in complete disregard of what its mother told it not to do.

Regardless, this image is amazing.

“The active regions in this image appear brighter,” writes NASA on its website, “because those are areas that emit more light and energy. They are markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona.”

This image blends the images taken with two different ultraviolet wavelengths highlighted, one at 171 and the other at 193 Ångströms, to create this one-of-a-kind jack-o’-lantern sun.

Whatever — this thing is just creepy cool and I want a giant poster of it.

Source: NASA

Imagine this: Tim Cook walks out on stage to introduce a special musical act at the end of the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch event last month.

Instead of trotting out “aging Irish rockers,” though, imagine if the Foo Fighters came out. Then Zach Brown. And then they launched into the killer rendition of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” you can see below.

Imagine that.

A few years ago, Portland resident Sam Beck built a bike-powered speaker that wouldn’t cut off when he stopped pedaling at stoplights. He accomplished such a feat with an amazing new technology: supercapacitors.

Instead of stopping there, however, Beck decided to bring his vision to the portable bluetooth speaker market, and his company — Blueshift — was born. Crowd-funded and open sourced, these gorgeous bamboo speakers charge in minutes and sound amazing for hours. The original unit, called Helium, is a big, bold bamboo speaker that packs a ton of sound.

Beck is releasing a second generation speaker called Hydrogen on crowd-funding site Crowd Supply. This new boombox is smaller and a little less loud, but it’s the same quality and design as its larger sibling, and a little less pricey.

Part of the appeal, for Beck, of figuring out this entirely new way of powering a speaker was the inherent challenge of doing something that no one else had.

“It seemed like such a good idea,” he told Cult of Mac over the phone, “I wondered why no one else was doing it. I saw that there was another way to do things that no one else was doing.”

Check out the video below for more details on this gorgeous high-tech portable speaker cabinet.

Picture this. You’re a disembodied skull with stretchy brain parts. You use this elasticity to fling yourself around the afterworld, Angry Birds-style, in order to collect taxes from the deadbeats who reside there.

Sound like fun? It is, oddly enough. While Skullduggery may be one of the odder platforming games you’ve played, it’s as challenging and action-packed as anything out there. Once you’ve wrapped your, ahem, head around the control scheme, you’ll find yourself flying through level after level with glee.

Check out the launch trailer below to get a sense of what we mean.

You know you hate showing up to the Halloween party with that lame generic pirate costume. We all do, but we all end up doing it.

Then there’s those of us who want to make the coolest, most unique costume ever. But we never do, because, let’s face it, we just don’t have the time.

Your solution, then, just may be these amazing just-add-iPhone costumes from Digital Dudz. You buy the mask or shirt, download a free app, and you’re suddenly the best costume at the party. Check out the video below to see how it all works.

My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle. Ponyo, Kiki’s Delivery Service. Chances are you’re thinking of these lovely, peaceful, wonderful animated films right now.

And these are just a few of the fantastic and bewitching animated films that Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli have made together over the past couple of decades. Now, however, Miyazaki has retired after making one final, autobiographical film, The Wind Rises. Studio Ghibli has put its film-making on hold, as well, citing restructuring.

Independent filmmaker Pablo Fernandez Eyre was a little sad when he heard the news.

“I decided to make a tribute to show my love for movies like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away,” he told Cult of Mac in an email. Check out his moving 8-bit piece below.

It’s that time of the week again — all of Cult of Mac’s best news stories and features, compiled in one place to peruse easily on your iPad or iPhone. This week we’ve got heartfelt remembrances of Steve Jobs, some products we’d like to see updated along with the coming new iPads, a look at upcoming Twin Peaks in our modern era, and some hard lessons learned in running the top iPad magazine. Plus, some great new apps to look at and a reminder that the iPhone 6 continues to sell like, well, iPhones.

Dig into Cult of Mac Magazine October 10 Edition, Free on iTunes

A young girl gets out of jail and is given back her paltry few belongings. A baseball cap, some gum, and a pin. The pin? Isn’t hers.

“What if there was a place, a secret place,” says the voiceover in this new teaser trailer for Disney’s Tomorrowland, “where nothing was impossible. A miraculous place, where you could actually change the world.”

As she touches the pin, the world around her changes. She freaks out.

Says the man in the voiceover, “You wanna go?”

If this would have happened to me when I was a young kid, enthralled with the idea of sci-fi-themed Tomorrowland as the best place to go when visiting Walt Disney’s happiest place on earth, I would have grabbed the pin in a heartbeat. Check out the trailer below.