Once considered the future of aviation, the Concorde is now a notable part of flying history. However, it doesn’t stop the fascinating impact it had on air travel. Over on YouTube, the Imperial War Museum channel has a great video going over the history of the Concorde’s testing phases. The video interviews some of the original engineers of the airplane. Originally it was supposed to need a year of testing. It ended up taking eight before it was ready for commercial use. In that span, the cost and environmental blowback led to only Air France and British Airways taking their…
Sometimes the way the web used to be is something we long for. That looks to be the concept behind Plain Text Sports. This website does one thing and one thing only: show sports scores in plain text. I came across Plain Text Sports on Twitter when apparently the developer CodeIsTheEnd decided he could do it better than ESPN, Yahoo, or even the leagues themselves. And honestly, I think it’s awesome. The page is sparse and laid out in a very simple fashion. But, as advertised, there’s no nonsense to be found. The developer’s code has all you need to…
I’m a big fan of electric vehicles (EVs). I used to talk about them extensively in my previous days as a podcaster. With the past decade ushering in actual EVs people can buy, some attention has been put on infrastructure. Some geniuses in North Carolina don’t like the idea of public charging. Now they are looking to stop those pesky chargers in their tracks. Nico Demattia at The Drive has more. Republican North Carolina State Representative Ben Moss has introduced a new bill, H.B. 1049, that would ban free public electric vehicle chargers, unless free gas and diesel pump alternatives…
Read to the end for pet advice. Hello. It’s great to bring you a new edition of TimeMachiner this Tuesday. A big welcome to Josh, Page, Michael, and my newest subscribers to TimeMachiner. Thank you for giving me space in your inbox. 🙏🏻 I’ve been reading a super interesting book written by the fellow who created two incredible things at Apple: He helped develop the Safari web browser and he created the iPhone keyboard + autocorrect. The book, Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda, has been a fun and fast read.…
If there was a Dollar Store for the internet, Wish would certainly be it. Cheap, sub-par, sometimes knockoff goods, Wish is the place where you can buy weird stuff and things that end up looking nothing like the images on the site. At the NY Times, Tiffany Hsu and Sapna Maheshwari report on how Wish, once flush with cash, has stumbled so hard they’re barely keeping afloat. There were unbelievable bargains on “bestdeeal9,” a store hosted on the e-commerce platform Wish, including a $2,700 smart TV being sold for $1 and a gaming computer advertised for $1.30. But none of…
One of the most infamous Apple products to hit the market in the first Non-Steve-Jobs Era was the Newton. This PDA (remember those!?!?) was Apple’s attempt to make a device that could be portable, useful, and have some amazing technology in it. The Newton was an absolute failure for Apple. Now, 30 years later, Jeremy Reimer at ArsTechnica looks back at this device with so much wasted potential. The Newton MessagePad 100 went on sale for $900 in 1993 dollars, or about $1,800 today. For that money, you received a device that was absolutely innovative and different but which still…
Spoiler Warning if you’re not caught up on Stranger Things 4. If you haven’t watched it yet, skip this story. Back in 2016 the kids were doing an interview for the show. At one point, shown below, Gaten Matarazzo who plays Dustin, speaks of a fan theory as to what is going on in the Upside Down. Now here in 2022, it seems this was very much spot on. You can view the video directly on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAuN5yVFkfQ Well played 2016 Stranger Things fan who nailed this. Well played indeed.
For the past two decades we’ve lived cable hell. It’s the place where everything we own has a different charger cable and one where there are so many “standards” that never make things easier. It has gotten a bit better in recent years, but now the US is working to push it even further. Jenny Zheng at GameSpot has more on how there is a big push for “the one plug to rule them all”. A group of US lawmakers are urging the Department of Commerce to establish a standardized common charger for all mobile devices. Spearheading the appeal are…
Read to the end to remember Jenny. Hello. It’s great to bring you a new edition of TimeMachiner this Tuesday. A big welcome to Rick, Cindy, Krista, Mark, and my newest subscribers to TimeMachiner. A shout out to those of you coming from both Adam’s and Matt’s newsletters. Thank you for giving me space in your inbox. This issue is a milestone: reader two-oh-oh. Yes, TimeMachiner has crossed the 200 subscriber mark. 🥳 I appreciate everyone who enjoys it here. As always, thank you and you can hit reply to any email I send if you have feedback. Last week I…
Leave it to the Wide World of TikTok to showcase Austin & Marideth (@Cost_N_Mayor). This pair has come up with a stellar video of dance moves… set to iPhone text tones. There’s 40 in all and this pair certainly has the moves. I don’t know about you, but I find this fun an wildly impressive. It’s also not the first time I’ve seen awesome mixing of tech and music on the platform. @cost_n_mayor Reply to @krustykrustykrab ♬ original sound – Cost n’ Mayor Here’s a link to their video.
One thing I love about retro gaming is the efforts to preserve history. There are many instances where someone stumbles upon a prototype or unfinished game and the community jumps on it to copy the code. Game preservation is super important because this software can be lost to time. Equally important is the literature surrounding those games. Now, thanks to Twitch streamer “Peebs”, every single English manual for the SNES has been scanned and archived for preservation. Luke Plunkett at Kotaku writes more about this achievement. I’m happy to report that, as of July 2022, the project has now completed…
Facebook Meta has been hard in their efforts to get you to know about “the metaverse”. Basically it’s VR. That’s it. That’s their plan. Yes, this is a simplification of what Zuckerberg is doing, but they are investing a ton of time into this. Over at The Verge Adi Robinson, who usually handles anything related to VR, goes through all the prototypes that have been developed. There’s 24 in all. Most are just proofs of concept. None will ship. All are efforts to be a leader in what they think is the next “big thing”. Meta described Half Dome’s tech…
I’ve been saying it for a while now: you never truly own something that is purely digital. We have been sliding into a culture of renting for many years. Now Jon Porter at The Verge has a scoop about Sony’s PlayStation store removing PURCHASED movies from people’s libraries. The shutdown will come into force on August 31st, exactly one year after Sony discontinued movie and TV show purchases through its digital store. At the time Sony said that its customers will still be able to access previously purchased content. Notices posted on the PlayStation website blame “evolving license agreements with content providers”…
Read to the end for a good dog tweet. Hello. It’s great to bring you a new edition of TimeMachiner this Tuesday. A big welcome to Dana, Tim, Donald, and my newest subscribers to TimeMachiner. A shout out to those of you coming from The Weekly Wrapped. Thank you for giving me space in your inbox. I once saw a joke proverb on Twitter that went something like this (I’m paraphrasing here): Check one weather app and you’ll know the temperature. Check two weather apps and you’ll never know anything. It got me thinking about how inaccurate weather data can be…
Somewhat of a moral dilemma over in Chile wherein a man was paid three hundred times his salary and decided to keep it. This surely takes the “bank error in your favor” Community Chest card and tosses it into a real-life scenario. Jasper King at Metro has more. The unnamed staff member at Consorcio Industrial de Alimentos in Chile did initially raise the eye-watering overpayment for May with his manager who then flagged it to HR. He agreed to return the cash and promised to go to the bank the following day. But instead of giving it back, the man…
I came across this fun video last week that visualizes the most popular websites using data going back to January 1993. In only two minutes and thirty-seven seconds, James Eagle’s video shows how much the web has changed in 29 years. Some notable items that caught my eye were just how dominant Yahoo was for a LONG TIME after it was considered subpar to Google. Yahoo held the top spot starting in July of 2000 when it overtook AOL. It took six years for Google to unseat Yahoo in May of 2006. I also love seeing the variety of search…
Stranger Things is all the hype once more. Season 4 has dropped, bringing the next chapter to completion. Two episodes clocking in at 4-hours is certainly a lot of Hawkins kids to watch. However, one thing that makes a great season even better is the incorporation of music this time around. The Duffer Brothers have not shied away from bringing iconic 80’s music into the Stranger Things universe. It’s always been prominent. But, Season 4 took it to a new level. Without giving anything away, music is a means of survival. To help celebrate this deep interweaving of music into…
There is a fascinating time between January 2007 and January 2010 in the world of smartphones. This short 3-year span was one where Apple was blazing a trail with the iPhone and other manufacturers responding in kind. One standout is the BlackBerry Storm phone. It was a revolutionary failure. Rewinding to Steve Jobs’ unveiling of the iPhone, we were told something we’d never considered as consumers prior: the buttons on a phone were set forever. The iPhone could change or hide buttons whenever. At this time the BlackBerry line was THE smartphone to own. Many came for it and it…
It’s hard to know where to start, except to say that I’m simultaneously angry and disappointed. After Friday’s Supreme Court reversal, we have officially entered the “unknown consequences” portion of our program here in America. Things we thought were safe are not. Things we started to take for granted now must be second-guessed. There is a question I keep coming back to: Where do we go from here? Many will say that voting is what is needed. Yes, it is. But we need to take a long look in the mirror about how our country is being led by those…
For over a year the production of Back To The Future: The Musical has been running in London’s West End. The production, which was written and handled by Bob Gale, has won awards and overall praise from people who have watched the show. Now, the DeLorean is flying across the pond to New York. Back To The Future: The Musical will be on Broadway in 2023. Jeremy Mathai at SlashFilm has more. The hit time travel movie, starring the unparalleled Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, has been turned into a musical before, as we previously wrote about here. That…
Leave it to “trends” on TikTok to come up with terrible ideas. The latest viral trend, on the social network that’s definitely not funneling data to China (we promise!), is to buy Kindle books on Amazon, then return them within the allowed window for a full refund. Claire Woodcock at Vice has more of this awful idea. The #ReadAndReturn challenge drew attention to Amazon’s Kindle return policy, which states that readers can “cancel an accidental book order within seven days.” But what’s been presented as a literary community “life hack” is hurting romance-fantasy authors like Lisa Kessler’s bottom line. Vice As…
One of my favorite parts of writing TimeMachiner is finding things that should be on the internet but aren’t. Those little things that fall through the cracks. This video certainly is one of them! Back in the mid-1970s Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, reprised her role on Sesame Street! Thanks to the incredible efforts of people who unearth these things and put them online, we get to see this amazing footage. According to the poster’s description, this was aired only once but was deemed too scary for children. It was shelved and never…
I’ve been saying it for many months: Apple TV+ is a bonafide hit of a streaming service. But what are the best shows on Apple TV+? Of course, we all know about Ted Lasso. Apple promotes it at every opportunity. However, Severance is the latest show to really knock it out of the park. I cannot state enough how great this show is. It combines great storytelling and visuals that drive the ideas home. There’s a lot more than this pair to watch. Keith Nelson, Evan Romaro, and Milan Polk at Men’s Health breakdown of the top 20 shows on…
In an attempt to combat social isolation amongst the elderly, NY state has decided to begin deploying social robots to people who may be in need. Of course, this program will take money and time in order to see if it is effective, but it’s an interesting take on a big problem. James Vincent at The Verge has more. Intuition Robotics’ claim is that ElliQ can project empathy and form bonds with users. The robot is supposed to remember key details about a user’s life, and shape its character to their own. It will crack more jokes if the user…
👋🏻 Hello. It’s Tuesday and that means a new edition of TimeMachiner is here. This past week I’ve been reading a lot of Stephen King’s book The Institute. I mentioned it a few weeks ago and now I’m officially at the halfway point. I can confirm there are some great Stranger Things vibes with this book. It’s given my Kindle a good workout and I love where the story is going. A big recommendation, for sure. We finally got the digital release of a brand new Ninja Turtles game. I go into more detail a bit further down. But, spoiler…
It’s 2022 and incredibly it is only this year that we see the closure of the final location of Howard Johnson’s restaurants. Once sporting a thousand locations, “HoJo’s” as many called it, is really gone for good. The final location resided in Lake George, NY which is a popular summer destination. Many visit the area to camp, fish, and boat along the massive lake. With a captive group of vacationers, it makes sense that this location was able to stay open well past the years of all the other HoJo’s. Ed Mazza at HuffPo has more on this and how…