culture - page 5

Not all of us have the chance to head to Europe, what with the cost of airfare these days.

Luckily, we’ve got the Internet, and amazing videos like this one from filmmaker Andrew Walker at 599 Productions. He filmed the various time-lapse images while exploring Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic last September using a Canon 5D Mark III and several Canon and Ziess lenses.

Check it out, and be sure to strap on a pair of high-end cans or route the audio through your huge Bluetooth speaker to hear the epic soundtrack.

If you got one of those amazing new iMacs with the crazy 5K pixel resolution, you’d be crazy not to watch this stunning animation of the sun by YouTuber James Tyrwhitt-Drake. You can gaze at the star at the heart of our solar system for a full eight minutes, using YouTube’s new 4K resolution setting and that killer new Mac.

This timelapse covers about 16 days of solar activity, focusing on the largest sunspot in the last 22 years (about two solar cycles), which is cleverly named AR 2192.

Check it out and enjoy.

Seriously, outside of an airplane, I don’t think I’ve ever traveled at 207 miles per hour (or 333 kilometers per hour, if you’re metric).

Swiss cyclist François Gissy, however, just set a speed record on a rocket-propelled bicycle designed by his buddy Arnold Neracher.

How’s that for fast? Check out the video of the record-breaking attempt below, but be sure to turn down your sound. Nothing sounds as silly as a rocket bike.

We’ve all taken our fair share of selfies, those ego-stroking quick snapshots of ourselves and others engaged in the most fun moments of our lives, right?

What would it be like, though, if various figures from historical times, like, say, the Renaissance, had camera phones? Would they take photos of themselves?

Olivia Muus at the Museum of Selfies Tumblr blog thinks they might, and set out to prove it with her series of portraits as above.

“This is a project that started when my friend (aka. my right hand) and I went to the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen,” she writes on the blog page. “I took a picture for fun and liked how this simple thing could change their character and give their facial expression a whole new meaning.”

Apparently it caught on, because in addition to her original four photos, more and more folks are contributing their own “museum selfies” to the blog. Check out more of these fascinating portraits below.

Sometimes all a penguin needs is love, says the new Christmas ad from British department store John Lewis.

There’s a young boy with a real penguin. The penguin, named Monty, loves playing with the boy: swimming, sledding, building with Legos. but there’s one thing the boy cannot provide for poor Monty, and that’s a life mate.

Watch the full ad below and be sure to stick around for a delightful Calvin & Hobbesian moment at the end.

In this new, three-minute-long trailer, Warner Bros. teases us with the epic conclusion to Peter Jackson’s Hobbit film trilogy.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies will complete the story of Bilbo Baggins’ journey with Thorin Oakenshield and his company of dwarves as they reclaim the wealth of their homeland. But the heroes also must deal with Smaug (that pesky dragon they unleashed in the last movie) and take care of that badass orc that’s been following them from the get-go.

Check out the full trailer below.

Like many movie fans out there I couldn’t be more excited about the release of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, a spectacular-looking space epic from one of the greatest filmmakers working today. While I’m not going to get to see it until this weekend, its release gave me reason to revisit some of the best movie space epics in history — and dwell on a few of the worst, too.

Are you ready for a guide to both the best and worst the galaxy has to offer? Check out our picks after the hyper jump:

The thing about robots in science fiction, especially recently, is that they’re often portrayed as living in a clean, distant future.

The brilliance of Neill Blomkamp is his gritty, dirty, realistic portrayal of the future, and he’s bringing us a new robot to live there, named Chappie.

Chappie, motion captured by Blomkamp favorite Sharlto Copley, is a gifted young robot, an artistic and emotional prodigy. In the trailer below, you can see how much of the real world Blomkamp sets around Chappie: He-Man on the television, a wristwatch on the main propellerhead kid that befriends the robot, and a variety of militaristic types trying to blow up the special kid.

Check it out.

As vinyl enjoys a resurgence in interest and availability, it’s no small wonder that the publisher of Grand Theft Auto V is creating a special boxed set of tunes on physical media.

The six-disc vinyl and three-disc CD box sets will include 59 tracks from the game, including the original score, songs from the in-game radio stations (including real recording artists like A$AP Rocky and Tyler), and even some new content from DJs in the game, including Big Boy, DJ Pooh, Nathan and Stephen from WAVVES, Kenny Loggins, Twin Shadow and Cara Delevingne. The soundtrack is already available digitally through iTunes, but the new collection will come out on CD and vinyl in a 5,000 copy collector’s edition run. You’ll be able to grab a copy starting Decemebr 9, though no price point has been revealed.

Look, we all love sharing and getting nude photos of people we consensually want to see naked, right?

The problem, as this College Humor video notes, is that “some of you assholes keep sharing our nudes.”

While the big news is in the leaks of celebrity nude photos, even non-celebs want to be able to share sexy shots with their intimates. But if you keep sharing these ill-gotten gains, the amount of nudes out there? Is going to stop.

Check out the video below for more details.

It’s been a full week here at Cult of Mac, so we’ve once again put together a special Newsstand issue — all of the 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 Tim Cook’s historic coming out letter, reviews of the iPad Air 2 (and our reasoning for skipping that iPad mini 3 review), some more great tips for your new install of OS X Yosemite, and some scary horror flicks that you’ll want to watch all weekend long. That and more, as always, in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine.

Dig into Cult of Mac Magazine October 31 Edition, Free on iTunes

We’re all concerned about our privacy lately. Using a different strong password for all our banking and website activities is the best way to keep malicious hackers from getting all up into our grill.

Rapper MC Safesearch, though, needs to remember not to post his passwords in the music video he’s doing about privacy and security.

Check out how this socially-conscious musician gets totally hacked during his own music video.

Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige took to the stage at a special event at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood Tuesday to talk about the next slate of blockbuster films the company is planning to release over the next few years. The full docket, with projected dates, is as follows:

· 5/1/15 – Avengers: Age of Ultron
· 7/17/15 – Ant-Man
· 5/6/16 – Captain America: Civil War
· 11/4/16 – Doctor Strange
· 5/5/17 – Guardians of the Galaxy 2
· 7/28/17 – Thor: Ragnarok
· 11/3/17 – Black Panther
· 5/4/18 – Avengers: Infinity War Part I
· 7/6/18 – Captain Marvel
· 11/2/18 – Inhumans
· 5/3/19 – Avengers: Infinity War Part II

While most of us are clear on who The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy are, there are some lesser-known characters getting the full movie spotlight that you may not be aware of. Here’s how they fit into the larger Marvel cinematic universe.

Two years ago, Nick den Engelsman started a band with a couple of friends. As they worked on recording songs, life got in the way, what with getting jobs, getting married, having babies, and the like.

The group decided it would be really nice to have an app that let them record parts of their songs individually, and then combine all the tracks into one song. They couldn’t find one.

Most multi-track recording apps like GarageBand will let you share files across services like Dropbox, but a simple “record and share” app wasn’t available.

This is how Composr was born. Here’s how it works.

Indie rock band OK Go has a reputation for doing wild and crazy one-shot videos for it’s new releases, and today’s reveal on NBC’s Today show is no exception.

Check out this insane short film where the band performs its second single “I Won’t Let You Down” from the new album Hungry Ghosts. They chair dance atop Honda UNI-CUBs, “omni-directional driving wheel systems” that are in the development stage. Think sitting-down Segways and you’ll have an idea.

Better yet, check out the video below, filmed in Chiba Prefecture, Japan this past August. And make sure you stay for the final, mind-blowing minute where the shot goes high.

Tired of the same old boring pitch that flight attendants have to give you in accordance with FAA regulations? Well, Air New Zealand decided to make its own briefing a lot more epic in the latest video for the official airline of Middle Earth stand-in country.

Watch as Elijah Wood and other cast members grace this light-hearted, good natured air safety briefing, complete with fake Gandalf explaining how to position yourself in the event of a crash landing.

Yes! Another week, another scintillating issue full 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 delightful coverage of the new Apple Pay features in iOS 8, tips and tricks on the latest operating systems, iOS 8.1 and OS X Yosemite, and a couple of great apps you won’t want to miss. That and more in this week’s spectacularly useful Cult of Mac Magazine.

Dig into Cult of Mac Magazine October 24 Edition, Free on iTunes

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:

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.

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.

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).