A very crisp and fresh replacement for the rather dated Google Talk, the standalone Hangouts app for Android is quite a facelift. Features-wise, it is all swimmingly swipey and let’s you do good things like join a video hangout in just chat mode. I’m surprised Google have not (yet?) integrated SMS messaging and even emails into this app.
However, the lack of chat availability and user status is a big letdown. I used to use Google Talk a lot for work and completely abhor the idea of messaging someone who isn’t online and on work-mode. I miss the list of green bubble friends and hope it comes back in some form.
It’s been 8 years since David Foster Wallace gave a commencement address to a graduating class of college students. This video is an abridged, Hollywood-esque version of his speech but his articulation of the real value of an education remains powerfully intact. My inability to hold back tears every time I watch it remains powerfully intact as well.
R.I.P David Foster Wallace.
In a nutshell, the Othermill is a machine to help make other machines. It is a compact, computer-controlled mill that cuts away at solid material to produce custom circuit boards quickly and cheaply.
It’s a Kickstarter project that was gunning for US$50,000, which (as I write this) has reached slightly more than four times that amount.
Yahoo! banged up upcoming.org and delicious after buying them for lots of money years ago. In fact, how they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory after buying Flickr still boggles the mind. Yahoo!, it seems, is where good companies go to die and I already feel a little sorry for some of the cool Tumblr kids.
It’s been 19 long years… and I’m still dancing.
At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion… When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people.
— Jaron Lanier on the brunt of disruptive technology
There has to be a kid somewhere out there who will see this trailer and have his/her dreams of becoming an astronaut turn into a recurring nightmare.
The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They’re basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking.
›› Clifford Nass, a psychology professor at Stanford University
Personally, I find it a little too monochromatic but it is a beautiful timepiece nonetheless.
A prototyping tool from Adobe for designing responsive sites, with built-in support for Typekit, that works in tandem with Photoshop and has native web controls.
Yeah, I’m feeling a little breathless right now…
[Via Mr Zeldman]
