When you have more money than you ever need in your lifetime, what do you do? Well, instead of trying to buy / not-buy / be forced to buy Twitter, or go to space, Yvon Chouinard has taken his company Patagonia and given it away. Valued at three billion dollars, the clothing company that has been a mainstay for decades will be transferred to a non-profit. Meera Navlakha at Mashable has more about how this was done. The Chouinards donated 2 percent of their voting stock to the specially created Patagonia Purpose Trust, which the Times reports will be overseen by family…
McDonald’s is doing what a lot of other companies love to do: cash in on nostalgia. Many things from the ’80s and ’90s are back these days. Now “Mickey D’s” has done something pretty cool: an adult happy meal. It’s a collaboration with a secretive streetwear brand called Cactus Plant Flea Market. Even better, it still comes with a toy. Nicholas Vega at CNBC gives us the details. The Cactus Plant Flea Market Box is a collaboration between McDonald’s and the famous streetwear brand, and will roll out to participating stores starting on Oct. 3. Unlike the smaller menu items…
Read to the end for the ultimate Subway sandwich Hey there! Welcome to everyone who’s new this week. A big shout out to Thomas for buying me a coffee ☕ last week. I sincerely appreciate the support. 🙌🏻 There was big news out of Google last week wherein they announced the closing of their Stadia gaming service. You can be forgiven if you’ve never heard of it because Google did a terrible job advertising it. The idea of Stadia is an interesting one: games are fully streamed to your device and you only own a controller and a small piece…
Ice cream is one of the best desserts out there. There are enough flavors being made all over that there is truly something for everyone’s tastes. But, like most food, cultural and geographic differences can change what is popular. We can now see, thanks to the Top agency, how each state in the US stacks up against the others. Top Data team analyzed digital commerce trends in 2022 to determine the most searched ice cream flavors in America. Looking through Top’s analysis of search data, we get some interesting results. Rocky Road is quite popular, along with Strawberry. One I…
Minecraft, one of the most popular and longest-lasting games out there, made an interesting rule change earlier this year: no integrations with NFTs would be allowed anymore. To many (or even most) players of Minecraft, this would likely be no big deal. But to a few who parlayed their servers into a play-to-earn model, the results would be disastrous. That is how I came across this fascinating story by Neirin Gray Desai at Rest of World. Desai recounts the story of how one savvy player established his own server, used NFTs to create an in-world currency, and make money doing…
Since the invention of disk storage, a drive with spinning platters has been the standard in nearly all computers. Then something interesting happened in the early 2000s: storage on chips became cheap enough to replace a “spinning” hard drive. Hence, Solid State Drives (SSDs) were born. But were they better than the old standard? Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica has the rundown. Over their first four years of service, SSDs fail at a lower rate than HDDs overall, but the curve looks basically the same—few failures in year one, a jump in year two, a small decline in year three,…
Read to the end for signs in all the wrong places Hey there! Welcome to the newest issue of TimeMachiner. For those of you who are new here, thanks for giving me space in your inbox. 🙌🏻 There’s a lot to be said about companies and traditions going away. When you experience it first hand, it transforms into a weird experience. For me that happened by chance this past weekend. I found a K-Mart. It was open for business. Of course, I went inside. Walking into a store that has been around for decades and stocks a similar variety of goods…
Many TV shows and movies have plots involving deadly asteroids plummeting straight for Earth. Us humans here on Earth have been as helpless as the dinosaurs. Now, we’re finally doing something about it and standing up to these Near Earth Objects. Earlier today NASA DART completed a nearly-year-long mission to deliberately slam a satellite into an asteroid. The goal? To see if we can create significant change in the object and protect the planet. Andrew Tarantola at Engadget has more of our planetary defenses. Results and data from the collision are still coming in but NASA ground control confirms that the…
In all the years of Star Wars movies and television shows, one thing has remained a constant: James Earl Jones. The actor who has appeared in countless movies throughout his career is the defining voice of Darth Vader. At age 91, Jones has agreed to call it quits. It makes sense that would want to hang up his Vader mask. But who will replace him? A computer, of course. [Lucasfilm] has enlisted the assistance of Respeecher, a Ukrainian startup that uses AI technology to craft new conversations from revitalized old voice recordings. Respeecher’s relationship with Lucasfilm began with the Disney+…
Facebook Meta isn’t the only game in town when it comes to virtual reality. In an approach based in… reality, Sony is developing their second PSVR hardware for the application people would actually use: playing games. Sony released its first edition of the Playstation VR add-on to the PS4 back in 2016. While it was not a massive success, it was good enough to do what they promised. PSVR allowed for immersive gaming using only a pair of Move controllers, the PS Camera, and your existing PS4. Out the door, the entire kit (minus the PS4) was only $300. This…
Smart home devices are great until they’re not. The earliest device to get smart and go mainstream is the thermostat, thanks to Nest. The device is sleek and easy to use. Over time many others have come to the market. But now we see the downside: a power company in Colorado locked out their customers from adjusting their thermostats during a heat wave. Justine Calma at The Verge has more. When the utility adjusts a customer’s thermostat, the customer typically has the option to opt-out. But, “On rare occasions, system emergencies may cause a control event that cannot be overridden,”…
Read to the end for a tweet about towels and dogs Hey there! Welcome to the newest issue of TimeMachiner. For those of you who are new here, thanks for giving me space in your inbox. 🙌🏻 It’s “windows open” weather here in NY and, if I may steal a line from McDonald’s: I’m lovin’ it. Summer has most certainly left the area and I’m quite enjoying having my windows open for some fresh air. My time this past week has been playing Horizon: Zero Dawn on PS4. I’ll get to the game in a moment but here is the best…
Star Wars has always been a cash cow. However, in the Disney-ownership era, there’s been hits and misses. An early risk they took with their newly-purchased franchise was Rogue One. This was going to be a non-Skywalker side story. Nobody knew what to expect, but it turned out to be fantastic. On the heels of the Andor TV show releasing on Disney+ tomorrow, Shirley Li at The Atlantic looks back on this odd duck of a Star Wars movie. It primarily follows an ensemble of new characters, none of them named Skywalker, Solo, or Palpatine. The Force is mentioned but…
AT&T plugging holes in its G5 network by placing winning bids on “mid-range” bandwidth. These frequencies allow faster-than-4G speed, but now they seem to have pulled a fast one. After confirming multiple times about phones that will support their 3.45 GHz spectrum, they’ve now come out and said JKLOL MY BAD! Only brand new phones will get it. Womp womp. Kevin Purdy at Ars Technica has more. The carrier told CNET on August 23 that it would release a software update that would allow phones like the iPhone 12 and 13, the Pixel 6, Galaxy S21 models, and low-cost Motorola phones…
If I were to ask you “Remember the ‘S’ from school?” I bet more than a handful would answer “absolutely.” If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it is an angular letter S that is drawn with six vertical lines and then connecting them with some diagonal lines. But where did it come from? Over on YouTube, LEMMiNO has gone down the rabbit hole to find its origins. I loved watching this. The “Universal S” is a really interesting design because anyone can draw it. I, who is not artistically skilled in any way, used to draw it all…
While we’re running head-first into a global climate crisis, we might as well unearth some interesting pieces of history. In Europe’s Danube River, the water level is so low, that WWII Nazi warships are resurfacing along with their thousands of onboard explosives. Dipo Faloyin at Vice has more. Twenty explosive-filled German warships have resurfaced after a historic drought pushed the waters of Europe’s second-longest river to its lowest levels in a century. The sunken World War II warships, part of Nazi Germany’s Black Sea Fleet, were discovered along the Serbian stretch of the Danube River. The ships are believed to…
Read to the end for a tweet showing some good autocorrect. Hey there! Welcome to the newest issue of TimeMachiner. For those of you who are new here, thanks for giving me space in your inbox. 🙌🏻 The past week has been the start of what many call “Techtober” even though we’re still in September. What this made up word means is we have now entered the season of companies rolling out new products and software to lock in their holiday lineups. Apple and Samsung have held their events (with more to come from Cupertino) and the battle of “this year’s…
You can’t keep a good classic down. Leave it to the Spielberg movie that made everyone afraid of the water to make big bucks in a limited return to theaters. Recently national theater chains held a National Cinema Day event and movie tickets were a cool $3 to see a movie. Jaws ended up being a big draw. David Pierce at The Verge has more. Playing in theaters around the country, the movie made about $2.6 million over the three-day weekend. That put it 10th for the weekend. On a per-theater basis, Jaws actually outperformed every other movie in theaters…
Stow, Massachusettes is in a bit of a crisis. The small town that sits about 30 miles east of Boston has had the most Massachusetts of slights committed against it: the closing of its Dunkin’ Donuts locations. WBZ’s Matt Shearer reports that where there were once two locations in the small town, there are now zero. Shearer interviews various people. One notable local is frustrated he now has to drive a lot further for his Dunkin’ fix: a mile and a half.
The border of the US and Mexico has a smuggling problem. One that causes hundreds of pounds of meat to illicitly flow into the US. This high-value item is definitely unexpected. It’s bologna. Madeleine Aggeler at Texas Monthly tells us more. The bologna arrives in darkness. Hundreds of pounds cross into the U.S. from Mexico at once. Rolls are stuffed into the backs of SUVs, sewn into car seats, shoved into spare tires, or hidden in suitcases beneath heaps of shirts and socks. Once, in El Paso, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer drilled into a car’s bumper and…
For all the hullabaloo in Apple’s announcements last week, one key item was also announced: the iPhone 14 in the US will not come with a spot for a physical SIM card. eSIM, a software-only equivalent, will be the only way to go from now on. Is this a smart move on Apple’s part? Eli Blumenthal has some reporting from some carriers that say “absolutely”. “I think it’s transformational,” Ahmed Khattak, founder and CEO of US Mobile, a mobile virtual network operator that offers service on Verizon and T-Mobile’s respective networks. “I think the fact that it even happened ……
Read to the end for a nerdy workout. ‘ello! Welcome to the newest issue of TimeMachiner. A shout out to James, Eric, and everyone visiting from HackerNews! Thanks for giving me space in your inbox. 🙌🏻 We’re a day past a long weekend and for many it is the unofficial start to fall. If you’re anywhere related to retail, it is even the kickoff for holidays / Christmas. Super crazy. I don’t like it. For years I read a website called The Consumerist which was all about calling out companies for shady practices and giving tips & tricks for deals. Sort…
On the eve of the iPhone 14 announcement, I thought it would be good to pause and look back on this fantastic comparison the folks at Simple Ghar mocked up. The team over there went through and compared photos from Samsung, Apple, and other smartphones going back to 2000. To compare the capabilities of camera phones over the years, SimpleGhar’s experts gathered data on the tech specs of the best-selling devices and those that made a significant leap in image quality. Then, we created mock-up images of the effect each camera phone would have on a consistent set of sample…
A new entry from the “we never asked for this” department. LG has announced its Arts Lab with this bonehead feature: you can display, buy, and sell NFTs directly on the television. Emma Roth at The Verge brings us this gem of an idea. For now, only users in the US with an LG TV that runs webOS 5.0 or later can access the app, which is available to download from the TV’s home screen. Through the portal, you can buy and sell digital works made available through LG’s NFT drops. The first one of these drops is set to…
The early days of the internet lasted a long time. Notably, the start of people getting online differed from childhood, to something teenagers tried out, to people only getting a computer in the home past 2000. It wasn’t like the iPhone where people all got it within a compressed timeframe. Because of that long time, the “wild west” of the internet remained so for nearly a decade. At the time this new technology was beginning to creep into our homes, this time capsule of a video, Internet Power, was created. And thanks to Andy Baio, it has been digitized and…