Books are in a weird resurgence right now. Barnes & Noble, once the villain of the bookseller world, is seen now as a refuge where books can be given space. Let’s face it, they’re the only bookseller with space large enough to house all these books. Finally, B&N has decided to give the old Nook eReader another try. But they mean it for real this time. Alex Cranz at The Verge has more. The Nook GlowLight 4e charges via USB-C and has 8GB of built-in storage, which is standard for an e-reader at this price. It also has a 6-inch…
Tag: culture
It’s impossible to write TimeMachiner and not talk about the reveal of the “New Delorean”. For a few months the Delorean Motor Company (no relation to the original DMC) has been teasing something new. A couple of silhouettes were put onto their homepage and that was it. Some rumors were floating around on whether it would be stainless steel, how powerful it would be, and what it would price at. Now we have our answers. This new “delorean” is dubbed the Alpha5. It’s a fully-electric car sporting a 100kWh battery pack, a 2.99 second 0-60 and a $175,000 price. From…
Pianist Glaucio Cristelo, who goes by the name “Piano Rock” worked some magic on a piano at a Brazilian shopping mall. With over half a million views, his rendition of the Foo Fighters song Everlong is amazing to hear and watch. His channel is chock full of great songs. I highly recommend checking them out!
The march of time and technology never stops. The latest item to be reduced to the trash is the final payphone in New York City. In a place where payphones were on every single corner, the city that never sleeps now relies on wireless technology to keep New Yorkers connected. The bank of two phones was on 7th Avenue and 50th Street in Midtown Manhattan. And, as you might expect in Manhattan, graffiti was scrawled on it. The city began removing payphones in 2015 and replacing them with public Wi-Fi hotspots. The removal marks the end of the payphone era…
Last week was a rough week for Netflix. The company that basically invented modern-day streaming, binge-watching, and kicked off the endless rebooting of shows, is in a world of hurt. Last week Netflix officially let go 150 employees. On the surface, this may seem like no big deal. Netflix is a giant company with many thousands of employees. The company is losing hundreds of thousands of subscribers. They’re seeing their stock slide on all this news. However, there’s more to it than that. This is the culmination of a company whose MO led them to catch lightning in a bottle…
Straight out of “My Time To Shine” or “Oh Crap” depending on your comfort level comes this story about a passenger turned instant pilot. Darren Harrison was on a small plane when the pilot become unresponsive. Harrison, taking control of the situation, hopped into the pilot seat and got down to business. After leveling out the airplane he radioed Palm Beach Airport for assistance. It was in that tower that one of the controllers walked him through the entire landing procedure. Controller Bobby Morgan is a flight instructor and was able to verbally guide the plane to the airport and…
From the “hell yeah” department, things are looking pretty dire for the town of Passadumkeag, Maine. This small town has had a clerk working in the town’s offices. It’s now in the past tense because she walked off the job over denied vacation. Jhanvi Mehtalia has more of how a single person literally shut a town down. Christen Bouchard was the town clerk in Passadumkeag, Maine, since 2020. She requested a two-week vacation about a month and a half ago. Her plea was denied by the board of selectmen. They claimed that no one was available to step in for…
The internet is an amazing place to mix two separate things together and create comedy. Over on YouTube, someone took a Legend of Zelda animated short and overlaid it with audio from Beavis and Butt Head. Not only does it work, but it’s quite funny. Back in the 80’s the Super Mario Bros Super Show was a massive hit. Part live action and part animated shorts, the show was a quick pulling-together of work in order to get something related to Nintendo on the small screen. One great part of the show was that on Fridays, the animated short changed…
Vanity Fair’s Anthony Breznican has a huge writeup about the current state of Star Wars, Lucasfilm, and the upcoming Obi Wan Kenobi show on Disney+. It’s a lengthy writeup featuring interviews with many castmembers of various shows. However, this quote from Kathleen Kennedy of Lucasfilm misses the mark. The 2018 movie Solo explored Han Solo’s younger years, with Alden Ehrenreich taking on the role of the smuggler originated by Harrison Ford. The film has its admirers, but it made less at the box office than any other live-action Star Wars movie. Solo’s swagger may be too singular for another actor to replicate. “There should…
60 Minutes has a great interview with a young fellow named Peter McIndoe. On a whim, during a protest he saw, he decided to start his own movement: Birds Aren’t Real. Sounds crazy? Think again. Birds Aren’t Real is a fun way for McIndoe to show the absurdity of many of the conspiracy theories raging through the world today. From vaccines to QAnon to election fraud to 5G, all these cockamamie theories rile up real people to act on real ambitions and beliefs to advance their cause. But McIndoe is different. His goal is to hold up a mirror to…
Scammy call centers in parts of India are notorious for bilking people out of millions of dollars. It’s no secret that people fall victim to these schemes all the time. It makes scammers a lot of money. So it’s not hard to see why they keep doing it. Well, glitter bomb builder Mark Rober decided to have his way with them. Rober, whose YouTube channel boasts 21.8 million subscribers, teamed up with two other channels to exact revenge. The scammers’ locations were revealed with the help of scam-baiter Jim Browning. Armed with this information, the Trinity Media folks flew over…
It’s hard to imagine Apple without the iPod. In the Steve Jobs era, the iPod was the device that took them from “doing okay” to becoming a monumental success of a company. Even if you weren’t (or aren’t) an Apple fan, you had or were surrounded by iPods in the early aughts. And now that era is over. On May 10th Apple put out a press release stating what we all knew was coming at some point: the iPod Touch was being fully discontinued. Since its introduction over 20 years ago, iPod has captivated users all over the world who love the…
The same news comes around every few years: Friends, the TV show that shows no slowing down in popularity, moves to another streaming service. From Netflix to HBO Go Max, this is one show that always makes headlines when it moves. Plenty of others makes the rounds too: Seinfeld, classic Disney films, etc. But there are those who are immune to this Where’s Waldo of programming. People who look to own their media and have it always available at the press of a button, regardless of where it’s available for streaming. In their cases, they may not even have a…
Autocorrect is both an amazing invention and a royal pain in the ass. Since the original iPhone, users have struggled against the “smart” system meant to fix misspellings and tapping on virtual keys much smaller than our fingers. But what does the inventor of Autocorrect think about the system? Luckily Joanna Stern at WSJ interviewed Ken Kocienda, the person himself. One thing that strikes me the most is how open Kocienda is to improving the system. I personally run into the “We’ll” and “Well” assumptions all the time. Most of the time my phone gets it wrong. Further, her tip…
Apple, who has historically been anti-remote work, has made a lot of headlines in the past months. Their policy has shifted in this COVID reality to one where they will move to a hybrid model. It ramps up with 2-days a week and then to 3-days a week in the office. Many are not happy about it. And how, Apple’s refusal to all fully-remote work has compelled their Director of AI to resign. The story by S. Dent at Engadget has the details. Now, Apple has lost director of machine learning Ian Goodfellow over the policy, according to a tweet…
Bargain hunters should be on the lookout when rummaging through Goodwill or any other thrift store. You may end up with a rare piece of world history in your living room. Sounds crazy, right? Well that’s exactly what happened to Laura Young who purchased a genuine Roman bust from Goodwill. Her cost? $35. Chantal Da Silva at NBC News has more. Laura Young, a Texas antiques dealer, thought she had found a steal when she came across a stunning statue at a Goodwill store in 2018 for just under $35. And while she suspected she had come across something “very…
Ford’s F-100 pickup truck is pretty iconic. The design was one that was around for a long time. It was popular and has a retro-cool look to it that only few vehicles can achieve. Now, Ford is doing something awesome: putting a Mach-E motor into it. Umar Shakir at The Verge tells us more. Ford Performance, the automaker’s motorsports division, designed and commissioned the F-100 Eluminator and was built by MLe Racecars in Washington. And like many of Ford Performance’s other one-off projects, this F-100 won’t be available for purchase. It exists solely as an auto show car that displays…
Some friendly competition is happening with multiple stores over in Christiansburg, Virginia. In recent weeks many local shops have begun flinging lighthearted and funny “insults” toward one another. Jen Cardone over at WHSV has more. The Christiansburg Sign War started as a friendly business sign competition. The first two businesses to fire the first shots were a music and shoe store that inspired others to get into the game. Now, more than 13,000 people on Facebook are sitting on the edge of their seats to see what businesses will post next. The war began when Jim Bohon, a guitar and…
Hotels across the globe provide soap and shampoo to their guests. It’s been a mainstay of hotels since the beginning. For years there was an effort to move away from single-use items. I’ve been to a few hotels with pump bottles in the showers in order to reduce waste. Of course, COVID changed things and single-use items are back in fuller force. But, where does all that unfinished, but used, soap go? Zachary Crockett at The Hustle tells us. Shawn Seipler launched Clean the World and set out on a mission of getting those millions of bars of wasted soap to children…
Breakfast cereal has been a staple in homes for decades. The marketing for it has been quite clever. Cereal was positioned as something integral for breakfast and by doing this, companies like Kellog’s and Post have become morning empires. Now Tropicana, yes THAT Tropicana has decided they want a piece of the action. Orange juice on cereal.Some call it weird. Some call it breakfast. We . . . didn’t even know it was a thing. But turns out, there are totally normal people amongst us juicing up their cereal bowls. You might be one of them! So for those who…
Leave it to Snap, the makers of SnapChat to do something actually interesting with products. Sure, they started the app with disappearing photos, but they branched out with the viral camera glasses Spectacles a few years ago. They want to be more than an app, and now it looks like they’ve come up with something whimsical. The Snap Pixy is a $229 lightweight drone that is now on sale. The flying yellow square has a few preset modes wherein it can follow a person, fly away slowly for a ‘reveal’ effect, and even do an ‘orbit’ around someone. It doesn’t…
It seems the dam has broken when it comes to retail and warehouse workers for major companies. Not long after Amazon’s JFK warehouse location and Starbucks’ Buffalo store both successfully unionized, efforts are now underway elsewhere to unionize as well. Apple is the latest company to see its employees band together to work for better pay, protections, and fair working conditions. It’s no surprise, given the tough work their store employees must do in a retail environment that can be unforgiving. Rachel Kraus at Mashable has more on one store’s mission to unionize. Workers at the Apple Store in the…
Get ready Xennials and older folks because I’m about to say something that will make you shudder: Gen Z has deemed Grunge music as Oldies. 😱 I know, right? But there is a big plus to this admission of age: rediscovery. When it comes to Nirvana, songs the band put out are reaching 20 years old. But, because of TikTok and videos talking about “songs you should know”, these tracks are making some big moves. Richie Assaly at the Toronto Star has more. As of this week, “Something In The Way” has been used to soundtrack nearly 200,000 TikTok videos.…
For all the whiz-bang features Tesla keeps pumping into its cars via software updates, there are many that do not live up to the hype. Full self driving with AutoPilot has been shown to still be in its infancy regardless of what Elon Musk promises. Another feature that is quite rough around the edges is the Smart Summon feature. This is supposed to summon your car to you automatically without anyone driving. The idea is if you want to get into your car but not walk to it, your car will come to you. Well, what everyone failed to realize…
One of the greatest things to come out of the TV show Ted Lasso is the character of Roy Kent. The brash, unfiltered, and ornery soccer player is so wonderfully written that it’s hard not to like him. In a nod to how much viewers have enjoyed Brett Goldstein’s work playing Kent, he achieved a fantastic new role: guest-starring on Sesame Street. They talk about Brett’s favorite letter of the alphabet and a word that begins with that letter. I’ll give you one guess as to what it can be.
Musical mastermind Danny Elfman performed at Coachella this year. And boy did he go all in with some amazing pieces. Bill Pearis at Brooklyn Vegan has more about his legendary set. On the Oingo Boingo front, Danny’s set included “Insects” (which he reimagined for his 2021 solo album Big Mess), “Nothing to Fear,” “Just Another Day,” “Insanity,” “Only a Lad,” “Dead Man’s Party,” and “Who Do You Want to Be?” which closed out his Coachella set. He and the orchestra also performed a medley of The Nightmare Before Christmas songs, the themes from Batman, Spider-Man, and The Simpson’s, as well…
It’s a tale as old as time: books being banned for Reason X that Group Y feels threatened by its contents. However, an idea is something that cannot be contained. Books are one of the oldest forms of communication and to censor books goes against human knowledge. Fighting the good fight, The New York Public Library has announced four banned books are available nationwide to anyone without any wait times. A. Khalid has the details. The New York Public Library made four banned books available nationwide on SimplyE, its free-reader app. The titles include Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, King and the Dragonflies by…
For all the pomp and circumstance film franchises get, nothing is ever a sure bet. Many films that had humongous budgets flopped while other movies were sleeper hits. Then you get into an interesting realm: movies that were supposed to become franchises but did not pan out. The Divergent film is a good example where a movie studio worked to bring a book series to the big screen and burned a ton of money in the process. In the end, even with a massive budget and marketing push, it became nothing. A breakdown of some of the more-promoted fizzled franchises…
Twitter. Elon Musk. Insert sigh. Yeah, it’s been a lot over the past two weeks with these two. It’s difficult to go into the entire Elon / Twitter fiasco because I simply can’t gauge how much this affects or even is on the radar of people who aren’t fully in tune with social media. The true TL;DR is Elon bought a ton of Twitter stock. Twitter, knowing this could be bad, offered him a board seat in exchange for not buying more. Elon said yes. Celebrate. Elon says no a few days later. Elon offers to buy Twitter. Twitter begins…
A funny thing happened this past week with Bandai / Namco re-releasing the classic game Pac-Land onto the Nintendo Switch. Pac superstar Miss Pac-Man was nowhere to be found. Instead she was replaced with a character named Pac-Mom and, yeah, there was confusion as to what is going on here. Kyle Orland at Ars Technica goes down the rabbit hole that is Pac-Man, the reason such an incredible sequel exists, and the convoluted copyright situation that’s come along with it all since the 80’s. While the original Pac-Man is a wholly owned Namco creation, the Ms. Pac-Man arcade cabinet started life as a “speed-up kit”…