Every Single Article Written by N - All 1343
I’m Upgrading My Android Phone This Year, But What Do I Get?
The direction I’m leaning. Well, not exactly…
It’s been nearly a year since I told people to not buy a phone. The first half of the year is crowded with price cuts and secondary phone makers who are only bringing an extra half-step with their post-holiday offerings. That said, I don’t qualify for an upgrade until the end of August, so that’s giving me a lot of time to ponder the offerings and whittle down what I want in my next phone. Let me at least block out some absolute choices here.
Oh The Humanity! Yahoo!’s New ‘Work From Home’ Ban Gets Parents All Lumpy
Does this look like a face that could disrupt your work/life balance?
We read about innovation coming out of Silicon Valley all the time, but one company that’s been stuck in the mud for years is Dot-Com classic Yahoo!. You’ll recall last year, their board of directors hired Marissa Mayer, the Queen of Google, to turn things around. As a result, they’re doing some pretty radical things, like giving everyone smartphones, changing their entire home page, and in a recent move that’s irked Yahoo employees with kids, as well as other Valley watchdogs, Mayer wants everyone to come to the office to work. That’s right, employees at Yahoo! will have to physically leave their home and go to another place entirely to conduct their work. Wow. What a real abortion of worker’s rights this will be.
‘Side By Side’ Review: Keanu Reeves Explains The Death Of Film
Woah.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been twelve years since Star Wars: Episode II was the first movie to be shot entirely on high-definition digital cameras, ones that were still physically monstrous in proportion with footage dumped to large tapes. Of course, while it wasn’t shown digitally in many theaters at the time, camera manufacturers and digital projectors have come down in price thanks to names like RED, Sony, and Arri who have helped make filmmaking, end-to-end, an almost entirely digital process. Side By Side, a new documentary produced by and starring Keanu Reeves, goes through the paces of interviewing dozens of industry professionals, from iconic directors like Scorsese, Cameron, Lucas, and Nolan to cinematographers and color timers, through which we learn that, yep, film is pretty much dead.
Facebook Audio Notifications Now Appearing In The Wild, We Show You How To Turn Them Off
DOO-DOO.
While it was announced a few months ago, Facebook is now activating audio chimes with notifications on a standard web browser. I don’t hate it, it keeps me in the loop when Facebook gets lost amongst my many browser tabs, but with however many connected devices you own, it may get noisy to have an extra chime when Sally likes your photo or Uncle Doug replies with a diatribe. So, how do you shut it off? Let me show you.
‘Breaking Bad’ Review: The Rise (And Fall?) Of Walter White
Buy the RV. We start tomorrow.
No one would shut up about how great Breaking Bad is. They’d never quantify it, because in retrospect, I suppose that lures too many spoilers. I knew of the show, but my only exposure came from friends or a behind-the-scenes special they shot for the pilot, involving a not-bald Bryan Cranston stumbling around their RV meth lab in a green shirt and his whities, cracking jokes about how fun the shoot was. On that alone, I didn’t ever want to see the show. I eventually caved and took the red pill (or blue crystal, depending on who you ask) and got sucked in something deep, mainlining the series in less than a week. With a full eight episodes left to go in the entire run, it seems premature to rate the whole effort, so I’ll save a score until later this summer when those have finally aired. In the meantime, let’s talk about Breaking Bad. There will be major spoilers, so if you haven’t caught up yet, you should.
Goodbye, 1UP: Looking Back On The First Gaming Site I Ever Loved
The last iteration of 1UP.com before Ziff-Davis boxes it up.
Today, Ziff-Davis announced that not long after purchasing big media site IGN, they’d be shutting down all the sites that came with the UGO merger nearly two years ago, including GameSpy, UGO, and 1UP. Despite GameSpy’s Arcade software that came bundled with many PC games in the late nineties and early aughts or UGO’s clenched-fist logo from the same era, I have little affection for those sites. It’s not great to see people lose jobs, but they’re old properties that were cool back then and, obviously, mean so little now that Ziff-Davis decided to off them. Also, they’re the competition, so, like, less competition, right?
But 1UP? The site’s been whittled down over the years, but the fact remains that, really, 1UP.com kinda changed my life.
Goodbye Harlem Shake, We Won’t Miss You (February 2013 – February 2013)
Don’t do the Harlem Shake!
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in memory of, ahem, The Harlem Shake. Oh, it might have been a quirky little thing when we introduced the world to it a week and a half ago, but that’s gone now. It’s over. The Harlem Shake is Dead. I could not be happier.
A Blind Date With The PlayStation 4: First Base Grabbed, Home Still Far Away
A snapshot of Killzone: Shadow Falls, a small taste of what the next generation looks like.
Sony knows how to tease. Despite over two hours of presentation, they’ve still only scratched the surface on what the PlayStation 4 experience will be. Due out later this year, we caught a clip of what the hardware’s going to be like, a dabble of what tech demos developers can make for the hardware, and not much else to go on. In a presentation geared toward hardcore gamers, details are still so scarce – and our HD press footage still so unfulfilled – that it almost feels like they’ve jumped the gun. It wasn’t the first time, Sony unveiled the PS3 a full year and a half before it released, long before even the Xbox 360 hit retailers. So how much blood can we squeeze from this stone?
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It’s Better Than Swype, But SwiftKey’s New Flow Feature Isn’t Perfect, Yet
HEY BRO GET YO’ FLOW ON.
I don’t hate Swype, but at several key levels, I despise it. Because all the cool kids want it though, SwiftKey has spent a lot of time developing their new Flow feature, which will satiate your need to gesture a single thumb across your keyboard to generate words on your smartphone rather than pecking them out with both. I love SwiftKey and while Flow is a better experience than Swype, it’s not quite ready to win me over to swipe-based mobile keyboarding.
HTC Unveils Cool New Phone, The HTC One, Will Probably Get Blown Out By Samsung Next Month
HTC is in a pickle, despite how neat the HTC One is.
Last year, HTC – once a titan amongst smartphone makers – decided to focus on two models: the One X super-performance model and the One S for the value-minded customer. HTC had been criticized for having far too many offerings and confusing the hell out of the average buyer. The One series still ended up branching a few variants and carrier-specific models, but keeping it simple(r) wasn’t enough to save the company’s profit. Today, they unveiled the latest HTC One, only one design, with specs that seem to run right down the middle of expectations of a modern phone, perhaps even better. Their biggest problem? Samsung is rumored to unveil their Galaxy S 4 next month, which will proceed to conquer the world, leaving HTC’s cute little offering in the dust.
