If there is one subset of PC hobbyists that can simultaneously become a rabbit hole and an obsession, it’s those who are enamored with mechanical keyboards. These fans create custom keyboards, cobbled together from bespoke keycaps and individually suited switches in order to make their perfect input device. It is a fun hobby and can be an expensive one. For those looking to level up, Scharon Harding at Ars Technica has the story of an awesome keyboard in Elvish, the fictional language from Lord of the Rings. The Drop + The Lord of the Rings Dwarvish and Elvish Keyboards ($169) are the first to gain official Lord…
Tag: culture
With the rise in remote learning, partially due to COVID, there have been a fair number of companies working to get in on this new way of education. Many colleges and universities have purchased service agreements with electronic proctoring companies in order to achieve some form of honesty amongst test-takers. However, the means by which these companies are conducting themselves have run afoul of the law. Monica Chin at The Verge has a story about one student who fought back. Chemistry student Aaron Ogletree sat for an online test in the spring 2021 semester. Ogletree was asked to show the…
Coffee that is brewed by laser beams. What better combination could there be? Well, fantasy is becoming a reality thanks to Anna Rosa Ziefuss. She is a German scientist who has invented a speedy way to make cold-brew coffee. Total time? Three minutes! Jesus Diaz at FastCompany has the scoop. Ziefuss and her colleagues used a stock, ultrashort pulse laser from the lab, arranging a series of optical lenses to enlarge the beam and point it at a vessel that contained the coffee powder. While regular cold brew sits undisturbed for several hours, in Ziefuss’ method, the solution gets stirred,…
The phrase “OK, Boomer” is nearly played out, but still makes a point to an older generation about the way to do things. Playing on this, Bronwyn Petry at MoneyWise makes a list attempting to equate “old things” with “don’t do this anymore” or “this is a good skill to have”. The weirdness of Petry’s list is that it tries to ride a line between “things we don’t need” and “things you should still know how to do”. However, it is lobbed into a single list. Many of these are things modernized by current technology while others are things that…
Notable and famous people come from nearly every town in the world. Sure, you likely know some famous people in your area, but most people don’t know anyone just outside that area. Now, Topi Tjukanov has gone ahead and made an interactive map letting you zoom in and out to see all the famous people from any area. Using data from Morgane Laouenan et al., the map is showing birthplaces of the most “notable people” around the world. Data has been processed to show only one person for each unique geographic location with the highest notability rank. The map interacts…
Weird Al is one of those national treasures of incredible talent. The man has been making parody music for over four decades and he hasn’t stopped. Most musical eras contain clever parodies of his and original music that easily gets stuck in your head. Recently, there’s a video has hit YouTube with an entire alternate take of his Eat It music video. The three-and-a-half-minute song is here in full, but you can see the camera work is a continuous take. It is obvious that this film would be cut and spliced with other takes and scenes used in the music…
There’s the saying “Better late than never” but this definitely takes it to a whole new level. At the Sheffield Cathedral, a building that is 800 years old, now has finally received back its 300-year book loan from a patron. David Kessen has more over at The Star. Now the book, The Faith and Practice of a Church of England Man, is set to go on display at the church, which was well known for its library until Geogian times. The Reverend Canon Keith Farrow, vice dean and canon missioner at the cathedral, said when it was still a church it…
Back in November, Netflix announced it was getting into the gaming business. A slate of five titles was rolling out to start, which is really nothing. However, there was no extra charge for it. Now here we are 3/4 of a year in the future and basically, nobody’s using it. Zack Zwiezen at Kotaku has more of this not-surprising news. Data shows that less than one percent of its users are actually playing any of these games. And while the streaming giant has announced more games coming to its service, very few of its over 200 million subscribers will likely…
On this anniversary of TimeMachiner, I wanted to highlight a few of my favorite stories of the past year. There have been many random happenings I’ve written about that I think are still funny, insightful, and interesting today. The archive has filled up nicely since I started and I want to share with you the stories I think are the best. Let’s dive in. “Best Sellers” Trailer Gives Entire Movie Away (8/21/21) – A true pet peeve of mine is when you can watch the preview for a movie and then not even bother with going to see it because…
There are musicians and then there are musicians. Leave it to the Barcelona Guitar Trio to do something truly spectacular. This group of four men uses a single guitar to play Michael Jackson’s famous song, Billie Jean. It’s truly a sight to watch and listen to them play. The song sounds great and I could only imagine the immense practice they went through to put this performance together. You can watch the video here and if they allow it to be watched on other sites sometime in the future, you will be able to watch it directly below.
Animals and internet videos are a great mix. Nothing new there. We’ve had countless animal videos go viral over the years. This time around we have an unusual species gain the TikTok spotlight: Emmanuel the emu. Taylor Blake runs a hobby farm called Knuckle Bump Farm. She has a variety of animals there and that includes Emmanuel the emu. Blake has posted over 200 videos to her TikTok account. Lately Emmanuel has decided to crash the party and hog the spotlight. @knucklebumpfarms Emmanuel and I wanted to pop in and say THANK YOU for all of the love and support!…
A terrible loss in the sci-fi world this past weekend as Nichelle Nichols has beamed up to join some of her fellow Enterprise crewmates. Nichols, best known for playing Lieutenant Uhura, was active throughout the years between Trek shows and movies. Nichols was a groundbreaking performer, sharing American television’s first scripted interracial kiss with “Star Trek” co-star William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk, in the 1968 episode “Plato’s Stepchildren.” Nichols also used her celebrity to shed light on the civil rights struggle in the 1960s. In an interview for the Archive of American Television, Nichols explained how she wanted to…
The Nissan Leaf was one of the first electric cars to sell en masse. The automaker made a big splash in 2011 with a car that was somewhat affordable, but also had decent styling. Now, the Nissan Leaf is no more. The company has announced they will be phasing out the car by 2025. Nathan Bomey at Axios has the story. After its debut in 2011, the Leaf quickly became the best-selling EV in the world. But it soon ceded the throne to Tesla, and never came close to achieving the vision laid out by former Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn:…
Over in Littleton, Colorado they’re doing something I strongly believe should be adopted worldwide: they elect a dog mayor. The winner of this race is a 5-year-old Basset Hound named Murdoch. Donning goggles and some antlers on a headband, his job is to bring joy and awareness to the small town. KMGH has more of this tail. It was a contest to bring attention to historic preservation within the city. “We wanted to heighten awareness,” Roxborough said. Each dog candidate posed for photos in front of historic sites in Littleton. Voters responded, casting a total of more than 6,000 votes.…
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…
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…
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.
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”…
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…
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…
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…
Sharks in ridiculous situations have been a thing for a long time. From B-list films, to Sharknado, to the ever-lovable Blahaj Ikea Shark. Now, we get the real deal holyfield: friggin sharks in a friggin (underwater) volcano. AJ Dellinger over at Mic has more. The Kavachi Volcano, an underwater volcano located in the Pacific Ocean’s Solomon Islands, erupted on May 14, according to images captured by NASA’s extensive monitoring equipment. That’s not a huge surprise — Kavachi is one of the most active submarine volcanoes in the Pacific, according to the agency, and has been in an eruptive phase since…
Imagine waking up and feeling your dog in your bed. You roll around a little but when you sit up, you see something really weird: the dog laying next to you isn’t yours. Sounds crazy, right? Well, that’s exactly what happened to the Johnsons over in Benton, TN. Here’s more from the CBC. The interloper was “big, brown and furry,” Johnson said, and most importantly, “absolutely not my dog.” “I rolled over and I stared [at my husband] and he stared at me, and we were like, is this going to hurt us? You know, what do we do? Where…
For fans of The Office (a show I’m just now watching for the first time), there’s a great interview with Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. Appearing on Seth Meyer’s talkshow, the duo from our favorite paper company talks about how the show was saved by an unsuspecting device. The episode from 2005 revolves around an iPod as a Secret Santa gift. Apple shortly thereafter announces its 5th generation iPod, which can now play video. Part of this enhancement was a new offering to sell individual episodes of TV shows on the iTunes Store. Sure enough, The Office was one of…