creativegear

If you think drones are evil, you must watch this video.

The MUWA drone, developed by the University of Tokyo can:

Find you in the water and toss you a floatie

Land and roll like a wheel, which conserves energy and lets it fit into tight spaces

Spin and create 3D maps of locations

Sony released three new cameras at 2 a.m. today (night owls are the target demographic, I suppose…). Of the three (the a7, a7R and RX10) the new a7R is by far the coolest.

Full frame sensor in a tiny, little camera body

Interchangeable lens mount (an oddball one, however)

Weather sealed

Wi-Fi

36.4 megapixel (holy crap)

No low pass filter (which means the best image quality possible)

Electronic viewfinder

Tiltable 3” LCD

Beastie Boy Mike D designed a Brooklyn-themed wallpaper, or, toile, if you will, and you can purchase it here: http://www.flavorpaper.com/wallpaper/brooklyn-toile

Earlier this week, ex-con Martha Stewart dropped and cracked her iPad:

I just dropped my iPad on the ground and shattered two glass corners. What to do?does one call Apple to come and pick it up or do I take it?

— Martha Stewart (@MarthaStewart)

September 25, 2013

Volkswagon will no longer be producing the Type 2 Microbus, which is still currently produced and sold in Brazil. The country now requires all vehicles to be equipped with airbags and anti-lock breaks, which the little bus lacks.

If you want to get your hands on one (and face it, you do), you need to get yourself to Brazil and cough up $35,637. The only major problem is that your van will look like this:

The mysterious Twitter account called @Horse_ebooks is, in fact, 29 year-old Jacob Bakkila, a Buzzfeed employee and self-proclaimed performance artist. Jacob posted a constant stream of non sequitur (m-w.com defines non sequitur as "...a statement that is not connected in a logical or clear way to anything said before it.").

Many people found the posts to be funny, when, in fact, they were intended to be conceptual/performance art, not comedy:

According to this article in the New York Times Bits Blog, the idea behind @Horse_ebooks was to present a spambot that was out of control. Think of those automatically-generated, out-of-context spammy comments you often find on blogs. This is the voice of @Horse_ebooks.

A big part of the today's reveal was the following video, which warns of a man named Dalton, who apparently has the power to crash the stock market:  

The video, which hints at being a mockery of the Occupy Wall Street movement, links to a page that acts as a malfunctioning site for, what appears to be, a video game called Bear Stearns Bravo.

Billionaire CEO and Coca-Cola bottling heir Alki David (pictured above) is apparently really really mad at Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia. Alki tweeted the following at Chet in the afternoon of Sunday, September 22nd:

@ckanojia - hey fuckhead, if you keep ddosing FilmOn you are going to pay in more ways than you can imagine.

What is ddosing? Wikipedia calls it "...an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users." In layman's terms, it's a cyber attack. Alki is convinced that the attack came from Chet. So, like any responsible, professional person, he violently lambasted his assumed foe on Twitter. 

Alki and Chet both own similar companies. Their businesses use small antennas that capture local TV broadcasts, and their customers pay to rent these antennas, so they can watch over-the-air broadcast TV through on computers and mobile gadgets. Alki's company is called FilmOn, and Chet's company is called Aereo. It's worth noting that Alki's original name for FilmOn was "aereokiller."

Read more about it in this Greg Sandoval piece on The Verge:

It's clear that the Surface project has been an abject failure. However, to Microsoft's credit, they haven't given up. You can't help but wonder if HP had fought for the Touchpad, that it may have found a way to become a sustainable product by now.

At today's event in NYC, the new Surface2 was announced. Microsoft also showed off a new Touch Cover called The Remix Project. There's no QWERTY keyboard to be found here. What you get are dedicated controls for DJing and manipulating sound.

The 3 faders, 8 keys and 16 pads are pressure sensitive and backlit, so they have at least something that you can't get with on-screen software controls. A dedicated Remix Project app lets you quickly remix tracks, and, presumably, DJ to your heart's content. The app and new Smart Cover are compatible with the original Surface Pro, the new Surface2 and Surface2 Pro. None of this will work with the Surface RT.

Here are the questions it raises:

Are Surface-owning DJ's going to invest in a hardware accessory that's limited to 3 faders, 16 pads, and 8 buttons?

If the answer is yes, will enough people buy this to make it wildly successful?

Grand Theft Auto, the video game title that, this week alone, generated 1 billion dollars in sales in three days, started out life as a somewhat experimental project led by relatively inexperienced people. The following video by The Guardian tells the tale eloquently: