News - page 1361

HBO’s new comedy Silicon Valley has been the toast of TV the past two weeks with its irreverent satirization of life inside the exorbitant tech startup scene.

Not everyone in the valley is a fan of the show with its Square-toting strippers, amped-up nerd stereotypes and creepy angel investors, but we’ve been mesmerized each week with the main title sequence, which showcases the rise and fall of some Silicon Valley’s most heralded companies.

Apple’s headquarters actually pops up twice — but don’t blink or you’ll miss it.

Watch the full sequence below and see if you can spot it:

If you’ve played any of the new Telltale Games series The Wolf Among Us, you’ll know who that hairy dude with the bandages is. It’s Bigby Wolf (née Big Bad), the star of the fantastic adventure game series based on the Eisner award-winning comic book series, Fables, by Bill Willingham.

The doctor here is telling Bigby Wolf, the sheriff of Fable town, to take it easy, get some rest. Eat more chicken.

See the full video below.

When Apple finally revealed it’s iOS car integration system CarPlay earlier this year the only hope of getting iOS on your dash in 2014 was to buy a new Ferrari or Benz, but thanks Pioneer’s announcement that it’s adding CarPlay to its 2014 aftermarket in-dash car multimedia systems, you hoopty could be rolling with CarPlay later this summer.

Story-driven puzzle-adventure games are finding a new resurgence lately, with titles like Telltale’s The Walking Dead and Fables finding critical success in the typically first-person shooter dominated games market.

Jane Jensen is the veteran game designer from the days of Sierra Online with massively popular games like King’s Quest and Gabriel Knight to her credit.

Developed by her new venture Pinkerton Road, funded via Kickstarter and published by Phoenix Online Studios, Moebius: Empire Rising is the first installment in a planned series revolving around Malachi Rector, a modern-day take on Sherlock Holmes with an attitude.

His bodyguard, David Walker, is a bad-joke loving ex-special forces badass with a heart of gold. It’s these two that form the central relationship in the game story, a nice break from the typical romantic love-interest interactions we see all too often.

This week we look at lightweight, easy-to-carry camera bags that are perfect for carrying a mirrorless camera, an iPad and a couple of other bits – because the days of crushing your shoulders with a giant backpack filled with DSLRs and MacBook Pros are over.

Hot on the heels of this morning’s leak of the alleged front panel of the 4.7-inch iPhone 6, a new photo purportedly shows the battery of Apple’s next-gen smartphone. The image seems to support rumors of a larger iPhone, requiring a larger battery.

Apple has chosen LG as its sole supplier for flexible displays to be used in the iWatch, according to a new report coming out of Korea.

The report suggests that Apple is aiming to sell 9 million iWatch units by the end of 2014, that the device will be launched in September, and that the iWatch will come in two different sizes (1.3 inches and 1.5 inches).

A single image showing what appears to be a larger iPhone screen has shown up on Chinese microblogging website Weibo.

The photo — posted by user jiezhixc on Tuesday — depicts what looks like a current generation iPhone 5s being held up as comparison, showing how significantly larger the iPhone 6 could potentially be.

Ever have that situation at school where a teacher who doesn’t seem to like you gives you a bizarrely good end-of-year grade?

That seems to be the case with Apple’s court-appointed monitor Michael Bromwich, who describes the company as being off to a “promising start” with its antitrust compliance program, after being last year found liable for conspiring to raise e-book prices.

Apple’s relationship with Bromwich appeared strained from the very start — with Apple objecting to Bromwich’s “unprecedented” first legal bill ($138,432 for his first two weeks’ work), along with his requests to access top Apple executives.

Oh man. It looks like “fairly well designed photo-storage and viewing services” are the new black. Or something. Now Amazon is back in the game with an updated version of Amazon Cloud Drive Photos, an app with a name only a Microsoft worker drone could love.

What’s new? Nothing less than the return of enjoyment.

Effect Stack is an OS X image editor that costs just $10 and weighs in at 3.9MB. It’ll process any image your throw at it, including RAW files, and its gimmick is that you can stack effects (hence the name) and shift the layers of this stack to switch things up.

It’s not bad.

You know how when you pull that rank-looking piece of meat from the fridge, you don’t really know whether it’ll fill you or kill you? Is that chunk of chicken still fresh? Should you grill that fish or toss it?

Now (or soon anyway), you can use the Peres to answer those questions. It’s an electronic nose that sniffs your meat and tells you whether it’s still good to eat.

In the olden days, format snobbery was a little bigger. Real photographers used medium format cameras, stuffed with big rolls of 120 or 220 film, and they laughed at folks who struggled by with little toy “full-frame” 35mm cameras.

These medium format cameras were also distinctly old school, without much automatic control.

Back then, the Pentax 645 was an odd camera, an affordable medium format camera with auto-everything. Well, not everything, but way more than you’d get in the Mamiyas and Hasselblads at the time.

Which is all to introduce the Pentax 645Z, Ricoh’s new 51.5 megapixel body with a price tag of $8,500, not much more than a top-of-the-line full frame SLR body.

Let’s face it, touchscreen controls just aren’t the same as old fashioned, plastic buttons. Free emulators on the iPhone make it easy to play classic games, but the D-pad doesn’t translate very well to a touchscreen.

If you’re feeling particularly nostalgic for the days of the Game Boy, an iPhone accessory called the G-pad hopes to give you the best of both worlds.

Most Apple fans would undoubtedly love to have CarPlay in their vehicles. But unless you shell out for a brand new whip from the likes of Ferrari and Mercedes, you’re out of luck.

Well, at least for now.

A new report claims that Apple and Alpine Electronics are working on an aftermarket version of CarPlay that will go on sale this fall.

David Fincher, who was previously rumored to direct Sony’s movie about Steve Jobs, is now out of the picture. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Fincher and Sony have parted ways due to disagreements over “compensation and control.”

And if Fincher is out, that means his top pick to play Jobs, Christian Bale, will probably not be involved with the project either.

If busting out your iPhone to catalog your #outfitoftheday is just too tedious, meet the mirror that will take your selfie game to the next level.

S.E.L.F.I.E (Self Enhancing Live Feed Image Engine) looks like your average mirror, but behind the shiny glass facade is a Mac Mini-powered selfie machine that features facial recognition tech so all you have to do is smile snap your picture.

Here’s how it works:

My biggest qualm with the stock Messages app is its lack of a quick reply feature.

A new jailbreak tweak called Auki was released yesterday at JailbreakCon, and it works like the Messages app Apple should have made in iOS 7. In terms of elegance and simplicity, Auki leapfrogs tweaks like biteSMS that came before. It’s quick reply done right, then some.

The idea of aliens invading earth is a theory that has been created and expanded upon for many years. In the app Captain Bubblenaut the invasion comes to life as players help guide an alien as he obliterates Erf and all erflings standing in his way. Drag your finger across the screen to help guide Captain Bubblenaut to victory. How many erflings do you think you can destroy for a spot on top of the high-score charts?

Take a look at the video and see what you think.

What do you get when you combine several hundred serious geeks, two large rooms, five decades’ worth of vintage computers, and a weekend in New Jersey? The Vintage Computer Festival East, of course!

The ninth running of the VCF East was held April 4-7 at the InfoAge Science Center in Wall Township, New Jersey. Hosted by MARCH, the MidAtlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists group, the 2014 show saw the largest number of exhibitors and attendees for a VCF East yet, with exhibit halls expanded from one to two rooms and three days of lectures and seminars available for attendees. The show featured a wide range of computing history, from a seminal, room-size UNIVAC computer, through the DEC, Prime and HP minicomputer era, to the workstations and home computers of the 1970s and ’80s.

MagBak made a name for itself last year as the maker of the world’s thinnest iPad mount. Consisting of a wall holder (called the MagStick) and a strong, yet thin magnetic grip which adheres to the back of the tablet, the project was a huge success on Kickstarter.

Now the team behind MagBak have returned with their latest product iteration: a MagBak designed for the iPad Air and iPad mini. With around three days to go, the Kickstarter campaign has already raised close to twice its $15,000 funding goal.

Everyone knows Apple is incredibly profitable, but did you know that the top-earning tech company brings in more money than Hewlett-Packard, Google, Intel and Cisco combined?

That’s according to the San Jose Mercury News’ newly published Silicon Valley 150 list, which ranks 75 tech companies using data from Bloomberg and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Cups is an amazing proposition, and it’s going to be fascinating to see if it works. The app/service gives you unlimited coffee in NYC, from $45 per month. Yup, subscription coffee, just like Netflix or Spotify.

New leaked images purportedly taken inside a Foxconn plant show the iPhone 6 chassis and a handful of manufacturing molds for Apple’s upcoming smartphone.

The photos, posted on Chinese microblogging website Weibo over the weekend, appear to confirm that Apple will increase the size of the iPhone.