I don’t know about you guys, but when I order pizza, it’s usually because my wife and I are feeling lazy. Oh we do make it ourselves from time to time, but washing the dishes after is kind of a drag and goes against the concept of eating pizza in front of the TV. That’s why this pizza box concept is so brilliant. Not only does it provide you with the plates and a storage box to put your leftovers away, but the whole thing is made out of recycled material. Isn’t that awesome?
[Via Asylum]
In what is to be the first major space suit redesign in over forty years, the new Constellation Space Suit System will be designed in a modular fashion, so that the same suit can be used by astronauts for all aspects of a space mission.
[Via Engadget]
No, this isn’t a joke. It was advertised on TV a few weeks back, and the listed website got so much traffic, it apparently crashed the company’s web server.
Job Description:
Tourism Queensland is seeking applicants for the best job in the world! The role of Island Caretaker is a six-month contract, based on luxurious Hamilton Island in the Great Barrier Reef. It’s a live-in position with flexible working hours and key responsibilities include exploring the islands of the Great Barrier Reef to discover what the area has to offer. You’ll be required to report back on your adventures to Tourism Queensland headquarters in Brisbane (and the rest of the world) via weekly blogs, photo diary, video updates and ongoing media interviews. On offer is a unique opportunity to help promote the wondrous Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.
Other duties may include (but are not limited to)
[Source: Flickr]
As we noted last week, Apple’s vetting procedure for its iPhone app store is mysterious to say the least. While the decisions have involved everything from technical to licensing issues, the company appears to be particularly inconsistent on matters of taste. It rejected an official South Park app which would have delivered clips of the show to users, but approved a baby-shaking game (only to withdraw it after the inevitable outrage).
Now a development company has detailed its journey to get an application approved, a journey which strongly suggests the vetting procedure involves automated keywords as much as human judgment.
Alkali Media twice failed to get approval for Crudebox, an application which features a soundboard of “16 high-quality and mildly disgusting sounds”. (The firm is run by three recent business and advertising university graduates…)
The app was initially rejected for failing to meet Apple’s requirement that “Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”
After the firm tweaked the app to remove one sound, a female orgasm, it got the thumbs down again. Rather than go through the process repeatedly to figure out exactly which sounds were causing the problem, the developers decided to simply give it a makeover.
In the revised version, the functionality was unchanged – users still get the same collection of sounds. However, Crudebox became Prudebox, a snot-like background became a collection of sunflowers, and several buttons were renamed. For example, users can now ‘Sicky’ rather than ‘Vomit’, while the option to ‘Fart’ is now ‘Toot’.
So did this revamp, in which you can make a fart sound but you can’t call it that, get Apple’s approval?
Darn tootin’, it did!
Pathetic, yet hilariously awesome. Don’t you just love stuff like this?
Microsoft has just released two strange new videos envisioning the future of user interfaces. Check them out below.
XUI, which stands for experience-user-interface in theory is the next evolution of computer-human interaction from natural user interfaces (NUI) like Microsoft Surface which itself is an evolution from graphics user interfaces (GUI) like Windows.
[Via TechEblog]
By Jimmy Rogers
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Want to track the swine flu outbreaks on your desktop? A chap named “niman” has created a nifty Google Map of all the swine flu activity…ON EARTH!
Key:
If you go to the full map page (link below) it gives an itemized list of those who have come down with the disease. We can’t make any claims to the validity of this information, but it looks like the person updating it has been digesting headlines, so it’s probably as accurate as something like this needs to be.
[Google Maps via Gizmodo]
General Electric has revealed that it’s created a 500GB optical disk. That’s 10 times the capacity of a Blu-ray disc, and enough room for the content from almost 60 movie DVDs.
Right now, the technology is simply at the stage where it can be proven to work in a lab setting. It’s likely to be at least two to three years before it can be refined to be produced at a commercially viable price.
Whereas Blu-ray is simply a more efficient use of the same technique used in DVDs (a series of dimples in the disk surface read by a laser), the General Electric system uses holograms, effectively turning the data storage area into three dimensions. The firm says it has found a way to make smaller holograms almost 200 times more reflective, thus increasing the number which can fit on a usable disc.
The big problem with such a huge disk is that it appears to be a case of producing something just because you can, rather than because there is any need.
At the moment there only seem three possible mass-market uses for a disk with such a large capacity, all with notable drawbacks:
Firms could use them to produce movie disks with massively increased resolutions and sound quality. The problem there is that these improvements would likely be far past the point where much appreciable benefit could be noticed on existing audio-visual equipment.
They could be used for selling movie disks with much more content on. While this could have some uses – such as putting a full season of an HD television series on a single disk – most customers aren’t likely to pay the price studios would want to charge for so much content in a single purchase.
They could also be used as a home recording system, allowing users to store hundreds of hours of video, or even thousands upon thousands of music files. That might be a useful space saver for people with large collections, but anyone who’s ever had a CD get scratched or a recordable DVD fail will likely be very wary of having the potential to lose so much content in a single swoop.
Instead GE will initially concentrate on specialist uses such as hospitals which need to store extremely detailed brain scan data, or movie studios which want to minimize archive space.
Have you been watching the news at all recently? If so, you’ve probably heard the term “Swine Flu” or “H1N1 Flu” bouncing around a lot. While most people come down with the normal human flu at some point, it’s not really a danger to anyone but the very young and the very old. Why is this flu different and what does it have to do with pigs?
