What's the best way to experience today's transit of Venus? We've gathered all the best info and ways to watch the event, which begins at 3 p.m. PDT.
When Mark Hurd was still CEO of Hewlett-Packard, he and Oracle Larry CEO discussed a possible merger of the two companies. It never amounted to a material negotiation, but it shows how close HP and Oracle once were. Ellison and Hurd were actually tennis buddies. But the relationship between the two companies soured when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems and HP booted Hurd from its CEO post. The acrimony between the two tech giants culminated in March last year, when Oracle dropped support for HP's business-centric Itanium servers.
If you think the South Park role-playing game developed by Obsidian (Fallout: New Vegas) looks like an episode of the show, wait until you actually play it.
Prometheus, a maybe kinda prequel to the Alien saga, dangles all the usual nerd bait, but the real draw is director Ridley Scott himself.
You've been warned: You'll soon see images like the ones in this post -- part moving, part still -- everywhere. Animated GIFs are making a comeback, and Echograph, a new iPad app, is taking them to the next level. Remember how the newspaper photos in the Harry Potter movies came alive? That's what this app brings to the Muggle world, for $2.99.
As a photojournalist, for me wildland fire is a weirdly addictive thing to cover. The act of fighting fires creates a unique and particularly visual moment where natural elements face off with human technology and strategy. Each summer I usually find myself inhaling lungs full of what has now become the familiar smell of tree smoke.
acebook already designs its own data centers, its own servers, and even its own storage hardware. But it may go even further. Frank Frankovsky, the ex-Dell man who oversees hardware design at Facebook, indicates that the company is at least exploring the idea of building a new breed of networking hardware.
iOS 5 introduced a number of new features and improvements like OTA updates and iCloud. We could be getting a look at the next major version of iOS at WWDC next week, so we decided to pinpoint seven areas we'd love to see Apple update in iOS 6.
The next decade could see a huge shift in the way armed drones and their human controllers interact, with potentially profound effects on future battlefields. At the heart of this change: two-way voice controls for autonomous systems, just like your iPhone's Siri app. Also, vibrating controls like an Xbox controller. A drone operator could literally talk to a drone -- and the drone could talk right back, and also alert its human operator with a sensation similar to touch.
Calling autism "spectrum disorder" is spot on ??? it has as many degrees as the colors of the rainbow. That said, a recent article in the journal Pediatrics distinguishes six "trajectories" of autism ??? the major colors of this spectrum disorder.
The Contour Roam is about four inches long and just over two inches high (including the mounting bit). It's a tiny thing that looks more like a pocket flashlight than a camera. It's designed to let you grab it and start shooting video on the spot, and it works pretty well.
There aren't many superhero titles aimed at the younger crowd, at least not featuring the heroes they know and love from movies or television. Marvel Super Heroes magazine is aimed directly at those kids to fill in that gap.
You can catch me on Spike TV immediately following the Nintendo press conference on Tuesday morning, around 10 a.m. Pacific time. Check it out; I will be giving my instant impressions of the announcements. The embedded video above features Spike’s entire live stream of this year’s E3, including the Nintendo conference. Later on in the [...]
As part of my visit to Pixar in April, I got to sit down in a roundtable discussion with Brave Producer Katherine Sarafian to talk about the film, a project she had worked on for several years. The production of the film lasted long enough for her to meet her husband, get married, and give birth to two children between the first research trip to Scotland and the final edit.
I always try to find the proper words when reviewing a good science fiction story -- I try to avoid those words I would have used in high school -- wicked and totally awesome come to mind. Many reviewers have their Go To words for describing well-written stories, and I have my favorites as well. But I can tell you right now, I don't think I've ever finished a book and had the first few words that came to mind be That was pretty cool. But that's exactly how I'd describe Paul Melko's The Walls of the Universe.
The following gift suggestions were carefully selected by the GeekDad writers. Need more ideas? Be sure to check out the part one of our list.
Does Dad need a new desk toy? Tegu just welcomed a new member to their magnetic blocks family: the Asterisk. There's a wood and steel base and seven magnetic blocks that allow you to create fun little sculptures at your desk. In honor of Father's Day, Tegu is providing a set for one lucky reader. Just fill out the entry form below for your chance to win!
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
Live blog coverage of Sony's 2012 E3 press conference, featuring the latest news about PlayStation 3 and Vita.
The data-dense graphic above may be too reduced to read (here’s the really big version), but its intricacy masks a simple and fairly dire message: The global trade in food has become so complex that we have almost lost the ability to trace the path of any food sold into the network. And, as a [...]
Now that summer is here and most TV shows have wrapped for the year, it would seem that the season is upon us to go into that big beautiful place known as "outside" -- or at least stroll through it long enough to get to a movie theater. But guess what? This is the internet age! You can stay inside all year long and always have something to look at on your boob tube (or laptop, or smartphone). A surging wave of original web programming should keep couch potatoes safely ensconced until fall.
Live blog of Ubisoft's 2012 E3 press conference features Assassin's Creed III, Far Cry 3 and more.
In this week's episode of Game of Thrones, Theon Greyjoy gives a stirring speech in the face of certain doom, Daenerys Targaryen gate-crashes the House of the Undying Ones, and the Night's Watch encampment at the Fist of the First Men gets some unexpected dinner guests. Which one of those developments proves the most disappointing for fans of George R. R. Martin's books?
Ford has taken the wraps off the 2013 F-Series pickup and there's something familiar inside: buttons and knobs. Rather than outfit the new (and optional) MyFord Touch-equipped center stack with the same capacitive controls fitted to the Edge and Explorer, Ford opted for standard switchgear. But why?
Up, up, and very far away. At least, that's the U.S. military's eventual goal for Phantom Eye -- a ginormous, hydrogen-powered uber-drone. The vehicle, manufactured by Boeing and designed as a huge surveillance tool, performed its first test flight at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center last week.
Towards the end of the E3 demo for Dead Space 3, I thought to myself: Who got all this Gears of War in my Dead Space?
As gaming goes digital, what's the future of a show like E3?
It's a scenario that security researchers have long worried about — a man-in-the-middle attack that allows someone to impersonate Microsoft Update to deliver malware to machines disguised as legitimate Microsoft code. And now it's one of the tactics that researchers have discovered that the Flame cyberespionage tool was using to spread itself to machines on a local network.
BP has subpoenaed the private emails of scientists who studied the Deepwater Horizon oil catastrophe, stoking fears of misinformation campaigns and researcher intimidation.
After months of curiosity, speculation and spec leaks, the first honest-to-goodness Windows 8 devices have finally been announced. At the Computex trade show in Taipei Monday, Acer and Asus introduced a large suite of Windows 8 tablets, all-in-one PCs, and hybrid ultrabooks.
Live blog of Electronic Arts' press conference at E3 2012, expected to highlight Dead Space 3 and other new games.
German artist Bartek Elsner's cardboard replicas.
Citing unnamed sources that have spoken with Facebook executives, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the social networking giant is building mechanisms that would connect children's accounts to their parents', letting parents decide who their kids can "friend" and what applications they can use.
Not long ago, malnourishment was embodied by emaciation. Now it's far more likely to be hidden in folds of fat.
Before Danger Room spent a few days aboard the Navy's newest fast-attack submarine, we didn't know what to expect. Would it be claustrophobic? Would there be any privacy? Would the U.S.S. Mississippi's crew go stir-crazy? As it turned out, all these questions had the same answer: No, as this exclusive video explains.
Samsung's Galaxy S III is launching across five wireless carriers, beginning this month, without its highly touted quad-core CPU.
Just weeks after Oracle bought the social marketing firm Vitrue, Salesforce.com said Monday it was buying Buddy Media -- for a cool $689 million. Is this all about chasing the chief marketing office (CMO) market with its Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or more about billionaire tech titans and a brewing battle?
I have been speaking recently with cloud executives from HP, Dell, and other cloud providers. I have been asking what they see as the hurdles to cloud expansion. These are the hurdles that each of them feels they must leap to achieve the market share they want.
It took a while for the mainstream web to catch on, but these days even Google suggests web developers use responsive design to build websites that work on any screen. Now Firefox is showing off some new developer tools designed to help web developers do just that.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison had a 15-minute break with nothing else to do, so he typed up a few sentences that would end up costing HP billions of dollars. Never one to shy away from from the courts, Ellison was on jury duty in March of last year, hearing a case about a woman who slipped on a patch of diesel fuel at a car dealership in Half Moon Bay, California. One afternoon, during a break in the trial, he drafted a press release announcing that Oracle would pull the plug on all software it offered for HP servers based on the Itanium chip, a big, beefy microprocessor that HP had nurtured alongside Intel for more than a decade.
The U.S. Navy just dropped another $2.4 billion on a class of new light aircraft carriers specifically designed to carry the U.S. Marines' F-35B stealth jump jet. Just one small problem: the F-35B is still plagued by design problems -- and there's no guarantee if or when they'll be resolved.
Live blog coverage of Microsoft's E3 2012 press conference includes new info on the latest Halo and Gears of War games.
Those too engrossed in weekend parental duties to spend a dedicated half-hour engaged in pre-E3 console hype may have missed yesterday's Nintendo Direct video reveal highlighting some of the finer points of the Wii U's controller and user interface. Therein Nintendo Global President Satoru Iwata showed off the newly dubbed Wii U Gamepad, complete with its integrated second screen, and discussed its evolution from the prototype revealed last year to final production design.
This week Great Britain and the other Commonwealth nations around the world are celebrating Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee. The celebrations include parades, concerts and community get-together's on all scales, from small community picnics to enormous events for thousands of people.
The attackers behind the complex Flame cyberespionage toolkit, believed to be a state-sponsored operation, used an extensive list of fake identities to register at least 86 domains as part of their command-and-control center, and were particularly interested in stealing AutoCAD documents from infected machines. They also appear to have updated their malware even after it was publicly exposed last week.
For June, the GeekMom Book Club will be reading Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir by Jenny Lawson (AKA The Bloggess). This book is a little different from the previous book club picks but should have lots of??opportunities for interesting discussion.
If you've never had a chance to check out all the cool and ridiculously geeky shirts at We Love Fine Tees then you don't know what you've been missing. They've got everything from The Avengers to Star Wars to Hello Kitty. I wouldn't be surprised if they've got one shirt that combines all three of those things.
How much will wind affect the Red Bull Stratos Jump? Dot Physics blogger Rhett Allain dissects the physics of Felix Baumgartner's upcoming stunt.
There is a big anniversary this week (well, other than our first wedding anniversary) – but I’ll have more on that on Wednesday. Today, I thought I’d update a few bits of volcanic news from the past week or so. If you’re looking for even more details on the week’s volcanic events, check out the [...]
A Jazzy Day is an iOS app aimed at preschoolers with the intention of teaching them about the different instruments that make up a jazz orchestra; the way they look, how they sound and how they all work together.
Diane Falanga has gathered some of the funniest letters from camp that you will ever read. This is actually her second book of camp letters and was compiled from thousands of submissions. It's not just a re-written compilation of the letters, either. The pages of this book are full of copies of the actual letters kids wrote, complete with grammar errors that would make an English teacher cringe and an abundance of hearts and sloppy kid handwriting.
Recess Monkey sings about popcorn, a human cannonball, the tilt-a-whirl, and more with an irresistible energy that delights children and adults alike.
Oracle said the Java APIs were like a beautiful painting. Google said they were more like a file cabinet. And in the end, Judge William Alsup came closest to agreeing with Google, comparing an API to a library that organizes the Java programming language.
When Felix Baumgartner jumps from 120,000 feet later this summer, the one question everyone has is what happens when he breaks the speed of sound. No one knows, which is the point of the jump.
Ari Dyckovsky was 15 when some Bose-Einstein condensate hit him right between the eyes. It didn't really hit him between the eyes. That's just a metaphor. But metaphors are thoroughly appropriate when you're discussing a trip from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., into that alternate universe known as quantum mechanics.
The Montgolfier brothers develop a balloon that will soon be all the rage in Paris.
U.S. Special Operations and Command (SOCOM) is looking to make a few upgrades. Among them: new weapons with adjustable intensity levels -- from non-lethal to lethal -- that are capable of doing everything from thwarting enemy ships to paralyzing, disorienting or barricading individuals.
Laurie Simmons' daughter, Lena Dunham, has recently been thrown into the spotlight with the success of her new HBO series, Girls, but Simmons herself has been a well-known New York photographer for over 30 years. Both women seem to enjoy blurring fact and fiction, with viewers of Simmons' work wondering if what they're seeing is real or simulated, and viewers of Girls questioning how much of the show is from Dunham's own biography.
Last week was a big deal for fans of both space travel and capitalism, as the spacecraft Dragon visited the International Space Station and, like its fantastical namesake, delivered food and computers to astronauts. The reason this is big news is not because the unmanned spacecraft is huge or advanced or armed with photon torpedoes; it's because it's a privately built and privately funded vehicle that will usher us into a shining new era in which space travel becomes banal and tedious.
From the start, London organizers wanted Olympic venues that could be reused, repurposed or removed after the Games.
Year after year, show season after show season, automakers debut one high-style concept car after another, most of which have something in common: the lack of side mirrors. Desperate to throw off the shackles of production car baubles and legislative requirements, automotive designers all seem intent on nixing “wing” mirrors in favor of minuscule cameras [...]
Some goblins have popped into our world through a fairy ring, and you need to send them back - using rhymes! Goblins Drool, Fairies Rule is a kid-friendly card game with some fantastic illustrations of goblins and fairies and a cute rhyme-based mechanic. The game is currently funding on Kickstarter (and has already shot past its original goal) so you've got about two weeks to get in on the fun.
So in summary creative time is good. Here I was able to work out the interactions of the different aspects of MindGear, and develop my drawing skills a little. I have to put off doing a better sketch because financial and budgeting and marketing tasks are still sitting on my desk. And finally I realize I'm about to embark on an experiment. I'm creating conflict by disagreeing with my girlfriend in public in a blog article. Next week will show how well that goes.
Congrats to Chris from Franklin, Tennessee, winner of the Where's My Water? Giveaway pack. Chris will soon be sporting a Swampy the alligator iPhone case, iPad case, a T-shirt, and a set of backpack clips. Thanks to everyone who entered!
Last week, we let you know about a great opportunity for you and your family to appear alongside Wil Wheaton and a gallery of geek celebrities on Geek & Sundry's Tabletop. The deadline is approaching at the end of this week, so be sure to get your entry in soon.
Back in 2008, Geek Dad contributor Bart Leib and his wife (and GeekMom contributor) Kay Holt started up a science-fiction and fantasy magazine called Crossed Genres, which eventually grew into a full small publishing operation dedicated to bringing genre-bending novels to readers everywhere. The business lost money ??? as most startups do at first ??? which Bart and Kay were willing to absorb until both of them lost their jobs. (Update: Kay found a new job last Wednesday!) They've set up a Kickstarter drive to keep Crossed Genres Publications going, and they need your help.
Most of the iPhone cases I receive are intended to offer a combination of protection and style. Adequate protection to minimize damage if the iPhone is inadvertently dropped, while minimizing bulk so the device still retains some of it stylish sleekness. The more effective ones tend to be higher priced, often $50 and up. The latest review unit to arrive at my door throws most of these conventions out the door.
Here's a proud dad moment: my six-year-old, Leif, just walked or ran every step of the 10k Bolder Boulder race. Sure we had to hustle a couple hundred yards to get ahead of the cutoff van, and ended up finishing just a couple steps ahead of the elite female winner, who started about an hour and forty minutes later than we did. But running a race of 50k people to finish in the packed stadium of CU Boulder was awesome.
The iPhone is a Swiss Army Knife for makers. It looks like a brick of metal and glass, but with the touch of a button, instantly becomes almost any tool required.
Tips on how to view Tuesday's Transit of Venus, the last one in this century.
Adam Doppelt is something of a Science Fiction geek. He loves to read Science Fiction, especially really good Science Fiction. He also created some silly app you might have heard of, called Urban Spoon, but that’s not important right now. What is important is that Adam wanted to be able to find all the best [...]
This week's puzzle, while delicious, caused quiet a bit of confusion and a few rather interesting answers. Here is the puzzle as presented: This morning as I was making both Max and Nora breakfast, I noticed that while their meals were rather similar in content and form, they were quite different in their divisibility. Max???s French Toast (or "pain perdu," as he prefers to call it) can be cut an infinite number of ways, as I could vary the cuts both in width/height, as well as angle. Nora???s waffle, with its rigid lines at right angles, can only be cut a finite number of different ways. So this week's GeekDad Puzzle of the Week came to me in a flash: just how many different ways could Nora's waffle be cut?
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
Perhaps best known for hosting the game-show Family Feud, game show host extraordinaire Richard Dawson died today at age 79 from the complications of esophageal cancer.
The summer hasn't even really started, but I'm already declaring it to be the best summer, ever. This year I was invited to attend a parent and child weekend at Space Camp. Yes, this is the same Space Camp that, if you were like me, you dreamed about attending when you were a kid. I'm happy to report it's every bit as awesome as you'd imagined it would be as a child, except for the part where a series of mishaps mean campers must go on a real space mission to save the planet from impending doom.
To test a parachute for a do-it-yourself space capsule, a skydiver jumped out of an airplane and pulled the ripcord. Rocket Shop blogger Kristian von Bengtson shows how the test went using photos and video.
Welcome to the Geek Mom puzzle of the week!
Geode by iCache is the latest in digital wallet technology. After watching the video, I was convinced that it was something I could use. We are, after all, becoming a society of the smaller, the better. From computers starting to fit in the palm of our hand to Bluetooth devices that fit inside your ear, this device seems to fit in with our society's fast paced future.
Olympic freestyle swimmer Rebecca Adlington’s decision to cut ties with the Twitterverse during the Summer Olympic Games so she can avoid morons and trolls is an increasingly common decision by elite athletes who find it necessary to unplug during high-level competition. The 23-year-old Briton, who won two gold medals in Beijing and is expected to [...]
Recently, Lego has been specifically targeting young girls in a variety of marketing campaigns, and with the addition of a Lego Friends line. This has resulted in a lot of heated debate. Enter Limor Fried -- founder of Adafruit and featured on the magazine cover of Wired in April 2011 ??? and the Ladyada's Workshop Lego set.
As usual on Saturday's I get to announce our Puzzle of The Week winner who was selected at random from all the correct entries.
Vic has been doing stunts in movies and on television since the 60's and the list of projects he's been involved with is impressive. He's been Indiana Jones, James Bond and even Superman. He gets to play all the best characters, even though no one knows it's him. Reading his stories about his time on various sets and the challenges of being a stuntman is a behind-the-scenes of some of the biggest movies ever made.
On June 5/6, Venus will transit the disk of the Sun for the last time until 2117. To commemorate this astronomical rarity, Beyond Apollo blogger David S. F. Portree is highlighting Venus missions that were, are, and might-have-been. In the third and final installment in this special series, he describes robot probes that have actually explored Venus and unfulfilled plans for robot probes launched from piloted Venus flyby spacecraft.
Who needs television when there are YouTube channels like Geek & Sundry? One of my favorite shows on Geek & Sundry is TableTop with Wil Wheaton. TableTop is a reality table-top gaming (board games, card games, pencil-and-paper role-playing games) show where Wil invites other geek-celebrities to play new or popular board games.
Google has released a completely visual programming language that lets you build software without typing a single character. Now available on Google Code -- the company's site for hosting open source software -- the new language is called Google Blockly, and it's reminiscent of Scratch, a platform developed at MIT that seeks to turn even young children into programmers.
Google is hosting an event to share the future and vision of Google Maps -- five days before Apple's WWDC conference and about three weeks before Google's I/O developer conference.
The large number of new characters reportedly coming to Game of Thrones next season should give fans hope that the television series will hew more closely to its vaunted source material. Here's a breakdown of what the casting news portends.
In Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson's latest movie, two 12-year-olds fall madly in love with each other on an island off the New England coast in the summer of 1965. Sam sports a raccoon cap, geeky glasses and a scout uniform; Suzy wears lurid blue eye makeup that never seems to come off, and earrings made of fishhooks. Their young love is doomed, of course, and so they run off into the wilderness together, drawing the ire of the adults around them.
Wired senior editors Chris Baker and Peter Rubin, Wired managing editor Marty Cortinas and I have made it our jobs to predict what we think we'll see at the E3 Expo next week.
PASADENA, California -- A federal appeals court appeared troubled Friday by the Obama administration's arguments that the government could break domestic spying laws without fear of being sued. A two-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard an hour of oral arguments here by the government and a lawyer for two attorneys whom a federal judge concluded had there telephone calls monitored illegally without warrants.
Microsoft's Bing search engine gets a makeover with social search results from Facebook stepping into the spotlight.
Ikea media centers and bookshelves have long housed our electronics, but starting this summer, Ikea will become a full-fledged electronics manufacturer. Although it initially garnered protests and confusion among gadget enthusiasts, Ikea's upcoming television is actually a smart move -- and an indicator of the television market's maturity as a whole.
Is arsenic the worst chemical in the world? Elemental blogger Deborah Blum investigates the effects of lethal high doses, as well as chronic low doses of arsenic and reveals the frightening fact that even in this country, millions of people may be drinking arsenic-contaminated water and could be suffering health consequences because of it.
The advocacy group Consumer Watchdog is raising concerns about Google's altruistic motives when it comes to autonomous vehicles. The group sees The Big G's efforts less as a way to reduce crashes and save lives, and more as a ploy to mine and monetize even more personal data. And it wants to block a bill that would clear the way for Google???s self-driving cars to legally cruise California roads unless privacy protections are in place.
Lego is expanding into even more beloved nerd universes. At E3, Warner Bros. will show two major new entries in the cooperative action game franchise: Lego Batman 2 and Lego Lord of the Rings.
Boeing's largest airplane began passenger service today as Lufthansa enlisted the service of the new 747-8 Intercontinental on a flight from Frankfurt, Germany, to Washington, D.C. The newest 747 is a bigger, quieter and more efficient version of the iconic jumbo jet that first flew passengers under the Pan Am banner back in 1970. The 747-8I uses much of the same technology found on the 787 Dreamliner, along with an all-new wing and engines.
With news of the latest souped-up Google Chromebooks, as well as a capitulation by Google that its cloud/web-centric Chrome OS needs to act more like a traditional OS and ditch the browser-only model, it's time to ask if we could be looking at the first post-PC era machines.
Several major PC manufacturers, including Toshiba, Acer and Asus, are set to unveil new Windows 8 tablets at next week's Computex show in Taipei, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Few artists have pushed electronic music's sonic envelope as ambitiously as cosmopolitan composer Amon Tobin. A new limited-edition box set, crammed with early audio experiments, film and television scores, dubplates, live bootleg recordings and other rarities offer an intriguing window into the musician's evolving creative methods. Hear Wired's exclusive preview of the track "Angels & Demons" now.
The humble example of a church supper -- recorded in Google Calendar or Hotmail Calendar, published on a website, and syndicated to other sites -- illustrates a general idea about personal (and organizational) clouds, writes Jon Udell.
