Disaster Links

Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower. It is hilarious to me that Apple hasn't updated the Mac Pro in a couple years. Do you have any idea how long a couple years is in PC computing power time? It's like dog years. I'd be surprised if the Mac Pro could even run Zork. If I was a musician or graphic designer who really really "needed" to run Mac OS you better believe I'd build my own. It's insane that they expect you to pay a premium for out of date hardware, but I guess that's the Apple way.

A Tech Bro Charged Thousands for an Island Getaway That Turned Into The Hunger Games. OMG you guys, have you been keeping up with the Fyre festival disaster? I know this story popped last Friday but it's been a busy few days. Long story short is the Fyre Festival was sold as "what if Coachella was in a tropical paradise and everyone there was super rich". Tickets went from a mildly unreasonable $1,200 to an absurd $250,000. Turns out the guys running the festival had no idea what they were doing, all the bands canceled and the people who went there expecting super luxury conditions got cheese sandwiches and disaster relief tents.

I Worked at Fyre Festival. It Was Always Going to Be a Disaster. “Let’s just do it and be legends, man." That's your money quote from some Fyre Festival exec who was told the event would cost 50 million to produce and STILL wouldn't live up to what was hyped. Then they fired almost everyone working on it. I'm assuming to save some cash for those cheese sandwiches. Seriously man, this first hand account of how poorly planned this festival was is amazeballs.

$100 Million Lawsuit Claims Fyre Festival Owners Knew It Was Doomed All Along. And here's your lawsuit! Looks like there's some evidence that the promoters actually told certain high end guests to stay away knowing was a shitshow everything was turning out to be. Of course they let all the other suckers fly out the to Bahamas anyway. The absolute best part about all of this is they're still planning on a Fyre Festival 2018. Good luck selling that amigos.

Underpaid Links

Dragon*Con 2015 Favorite Cosplay. As someone that's put together their fare share of cosplay galleries I can hands down attest tot he fact that Dragon*Con has the best Cosplay. This gallery from our friend Norman is as impressive as it is long.

Sasha Banks, The New Day, And WWE’s Black Revolution. Since Vince McMahon has run the WWF/WWE (30+ years) there have been only one black wrestler to hold the top belt. Plenty of black wrestlers have held the other title belts but the Rock (who some argue that in this context he isn't Black enough, whatever that means) is the only one to be the chosen face of the company. That's a pretty awful track record.

I Went Undercover to Find Out What It Takes to Be an Underpaid NBA Cheerleader. Over the last few years there have been a lot of stories about how being a professional cheerleader sucks. I don't doubt them one bit. However, if there are a thousand girls willing to take your job are you really underpaid? There's sort of a supply and demand thing going on here, if the job's not worth it you shouldn't take it. Maybe they should all unionize.

Hands-on with the iPad Pro, its keyboard, and its pencil. I give Apple a ton of flack, most of it stems back to how awful the original Mac was compared to the Apple IIgs, but the IIgs was buried while the Mac was pushed to the moon all because Steve Jobs didn't really like computers. Also Apple fanboys are the worst. Anyway, this new iPad Pro and the pencil thingy it comes with actually has my interest. I know they're not really doing anything that hasn't been done before but as an artist I really want to play with it. Sitting on the couch watching NXT drawing comics on my tablet eating a big block of cheese. That's the dream right there.

Suck My Surface

Man I have been buried today. During lunch I was able to read up a bit on the big Apple thingamadoo but that's about it. Here's a pretty funny cartoon about the new keyboard/cover thing they've got for the new iPad. They also are giving the Apple TV aps, and the iPad a stylus. Welcome to 2012 Apple!

Streaming Links

Harley Quinn and Suicide Squad In Action With New Set Photos. Hey Harley, How you doin'?

Apple pushing music labels to kill free Spotify streaming ahead of Beats relaunch. Man the guys at Apple are complete dicks, I'd be super surprised if this didn't lead to a lawsuit or at the very least an investigation from the DOJ. It's funny how Apple has this really great public image but they're just as mean and nasty as any other corporation. I guess that's what really clever advertising really buys you.

Infinity Stones Cheat Sheet: What You Need To Know After Avengers 2. It's funny my wife started asking me about the Infinity Gems (I refuse to call them stones) after we saw Age of Ultron and I was pretty clueless about them. How am I supposed to know which on the purple one is? Lets talk about Scarlet Witch and The Vision's demon babies instead.

Joss Whedon Has Deleted His Twitter Account After the Domestic Debut of Age of Ultron. I just don't get people sometimes. It would seem that this all stems from some fan's reaction to how Black Widow was portrayed in Age of Ultron. People were upset and instead of say, going on twitter and telling their followers what they thought of the movie they just started swearing at and threatening Whedon. It's like the opposite of Gamer Gate but just as depressing.

The New MacBook is 90% Battery

Look at that thing... isn't that amazing? I bet it still only goes like 3 hours between charges. Oh, I'm sure it will last 2 or 3 days on standby but that's a garbage way to measure battery life. Just tell me how long it will last while I'm playing Half Life. That's how all batteries should be measured.

Will it Bend: iPhone eddition

So as you may or may not have heard yet, the new iPhone 6 plus gets a little bendy. Whoops. A lot of keyboard commanders are blaming Apple's choice of "premium grade" aluminum as the culprit but redditor FlyingTinOpener gives the absolute best explanation of the problem you'll ever read:

"This isn't right. iPhone's bending problem has nothing to do with aluminum. It has everything to do with geometry. ((Edit: Material choice matters, always. But material has to work together with the geometry it's been shaped into. The choice of aluminum here isn't the limiting factor. The geometric design of the aluminum chassis is.)) Nobody uses pure aluminum for general purpose manufacturing. They use aluminum alloys instead. And the alloys themselves are incredibly diverse.
You can get extremely rigid alloys that will be incredibly difficult to bend even in thin structures prone to bending (such as 7075), but the disadvantage of that is difficulty of machining (and often welding too). This type is dominantly used in transportation industry (automotive, marine, aircraft, etc). Manufacturers take the additional manufacturing costs in order to reap the great strength-to-density ratio.
And then there are buttery soft alloys that are extremely easy to machine (3031 for instance), even manually, but they're also way too deformable to be useful for any load bearing purposes. I don't have too much experience with these, but they're cheap, and generally a good choice for decorative uses.
Apple uses anodized 6000 series aluminum (most likely 6061, possibly a tempered variant like -T4 edit: apparently it's 6003, which is similar to 6061 in properties). This is a good compromise between the extremes, and is the most ubiquitous aluminum alloy out there. It's got good mechanical properties, easy to machine, easy to weld. Their choice of material was correct in this case.
The problem with the iPhone 6 chassis comes from something we call "stress concentration" in engineering and this phenomenon is related to the geometry of an object. More specifically, it has to do with the cross section profile that is being bent.
If you watch the bending test video, you'll notice that iPhone 6 bent exactly at the root of the volume buttons. And if you look even more closely, you'll notice that the bending is actually on just one side -- the side of the volume buttons. The opposite side is actually mostly unscathed. This is because the cross section area of the bending profile decreases dramatically right at that point. They have cut out a hole to accommodate the volume buttons, and when under loading, the internal stresses of the structure are being concentrated at the base of this cutout. So when the structure fails, it fails at that point. The lower cross section area decreases the resistance to bending, and makes it possible to bend the chassis at a lower applied force than what it would take otherwise, had the volume buttons not been there (but of course they have to be there).
The result here wouldn't have changed if Apple had used plastic in place of aluminum. In fact, it probably would have been worse. Typically phone manufacturers use brittle plastic in their devices (ductile plastic is the kind that feels really cheap and terrible), so the chassis would have broken entirely at the same point. They could have avoided the issue, maybe, if they opted for steel or a tougher aluminum alloy but then you run into other problems and have to retool essentially your entire product line. The reason why Galaxy Note 3 passes the bending test doesn't have anything to do with the material it's made out of. It has everything to do with the internal geometry of the chassis. The internal magnesium alloy chassis (which isn't any better than aluminum as a material) has an I-beam cross section that is great against bending, and it's further sandwiched between two shells, which are in this case plastic. It's reinforced very thoroughly, to the point where human-applied forces cannot bend the device beyond its "elastic range" (this is the deformation range within which the device can recover to its original state when loads are removed).
Apple could have designed the aluminum chassis in a way that would accomplish the exact same thing, and if they had, people wouldn't be mistakenly criticizing the aluminum here. They would just be talking about how nice the material feels to the touch (because it does, and yes, it is "premium" much more so than plastic). Unfortunately, they fucked it up. Again, it's all in the geometry.
Edit: Some more detail because people are pointing out the magnesium alloy internal chassis in Note 3, even though the material is not what makes the difference."

-FlyingTinOpener

Christmas Wish List: A New Tablet

Every day in December (newborn baby schedule permitting) I plan on posting one thing from my official DevilDinosaur Christmas Wish List (patent pending). Why? Because I can.

The Christmas before last about half my family pooled their money and surprised me with a Kindle Fire. It was a very nice gift, and way more than I thought I was getting that Christmas. Even though it's not without it's faults (terrible web browsing), I've used it a ton so I feel like it was definitely worth it. The problem now is that it's now 2 years old and 2 years might as well be 1,000 in tech years.

I think it's about time I get a new tablet. One with a bit more functionality than the Fire. The Fire is still great for watching netflix and reading books but it's starting to get a little long in the tooth for anything else. I've run into my share of games and applications that either hang or just don't want to run on it. Even though they're cool and all I don't really feel like getting sucked into Apple's iUniverse so I don't really think I'd like an iPad. However the Surface has a couple features that are really interesting to me. The issue there though is that I still like reading books on the Kindle. I can't see myself reading a book on the surface, plus I'm already tied into the Amazon-verse with all my previous purchases.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I want Santa to bring me a new Kindle Fire DX. Or maybe a Microsoft Surface... I don't know I just want something that will play Angry Bird Star Wars II and supports telepods.

These Links Graduate

The never changing iPad proposition. This is something to think about before you start going on and on about how awesome "the new iPad" is. I get it, it's another iPad and it's a cool way to play angry birds. Thanks.

The 10 greatest Star Wars Micro Machines playsets. Oh man were these things cool. They were just out of my toy playing age, but even as a 14 year old, man did I lust after these things. Speaking of Star Wars and being 14, I'm rereading the Admiral Thrawn trilogy. That's some good stuff. It's hard remembering a time when Star Wars wasn't totally over-saturated.. he says while drinking green tea from his Boba Fett coffee mug.


Trucker's Friend. And we have a winner for greatest zombie/robot/carrot-top apocalypse weapon ever. This all-purpose, all-in-one tool incorporates an axe, spanner, hammer, nail puller, tire chain hook, pry bar, and lever into one bad-ass looking mama-jamma.

Megan Fox isn't allowed to watch 90210. To be fair to Brian Austin Green if you were him would you let Megan Fox watch this?

Treasure Links

The Star Wars Saga: Suggested Viewing order. I've been dwelling on this ever since my son was born. The absolute best order to watch all 6 movies is IV, V, I, II, III, VI. The writer of this particular article suggest that you can eliminate Episode I all together, but If I had to cut out one movie it would be Episode II. It WAY WAY worse than Episode I, it might have more important plot details, but it's not worth it. Just look it up on wikipedia and move along to Episode III.

If Android is a "stolen product" than so is the iPhone. I'll give this to Steve Jobs, he had giant balls. After years of ripping off other companie's ideas he vows to destroy Google over their theft of the iPhone?

PT boat for sale. You guys had better start clicking on those ads. I need a million dollars to buy a Patrol Torpedo boat.

Is the Ark really buried on a small Canadian island? A great read on the treasure pit at Oak Island. Man what I wouldn't give to find a treasure pit in my back yard. Maybe I should just start digging and see what I find.

I'm sorry did you mean "a haircut"?

I know I'm stupid, but I actually think the iPhone commercial for Siri with the kid that starts his own band is clever. However, this "fan" edited version of the same commercial is well beyond clever, it's epic.

Sucker MC's better call me sire

LOL, that dog thinks it's people.

If you've been paying attention, and I don't know why you would, you've probably noticed a significant lack of activity here. Last week during snowpocalypsemaggedeon 2012 my house lost power for about 4 days. Then, the day after we got it restored, I had to report for federal jury duty.

I didn't get sellected for a jury because I'm super racist against white people but I still lost precious blogging hours. It will probably take me a couple of days to get back into the swing of things. I mean all these TPS reports aren't going to file themselves.

Boo, links

Stephen Speilberg blames George Lucas for Indy 4 being awful. My favorite part about this is that Speilberg says it was Lucas' idea to use space aliens which of course "ruined" the movie. However it was Speilberg's idea to have Indy survive a nuclear explosion in a refrigerator. How about we just say it was a team effort?

Yes Google Stole from Apple, and it's a good thing. I can't believe Jobs had the balls to sue google for stealing from Apple given how much IP Apple has stolen. The best part of the article is the apple freaks in the comments section that can't help but defend the double standard.

Real World Star sues MTV. Tanya, who has always been one of my favorite Challenge veterans, claims that a Kenny and Evan sexually assaulted her with a toothbrush. I'm not sure which is worse, the allegation or discovering that MTV actually has a "rape clause" in their contracts.

Patton Oswalt narrates a reality star's trip to the pumpkin patch. I have no idea who he's ripping on but it's highlarious none the less.

Gunslinging links

Dark Tower is going to be an HBO series. maybe. I've never read the Dark Tower books but I have read a few of the comics and they were pretty cool. I'm looking forward to watching this show a year after it comes out on DVD, because I'm cheap.

Steve Jobs Biography hints at apple tv. "It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it" Finally cracked what? The TV? If you need a simpler TV you're an idiot. TV's aren't that hard to figure out.

Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez have inappropriate jerseys. Oh I see what you did here Justin. Very clever.

A Stormtrooper's family album. OMG this is so cute.. reminds me of the the time I used to spend with my son before I bought Battlefield 3 this afternoon..

just kidding, Logan.. kind of

How to use Siri

via scarybear.org

The Dragonmaster's Links

10 of Wizard Magazine's worst moments. Worst moments? Check out that ring! That's a top ten moment for all of humanity!

Elizabeth Hurley to wrestle Wonder Woman. Ok you win NBC, I'll watch your stupid Wonder Woman tv show but I don't have to like it.

Ipad case or bath tub cover. So I think the new ipad looks cool and all, but I honestly haven't seen one app for it that makes me feel like I need one. I prefer the feel of paper to a screen. I have 2 huge HD tvs in my house so why would I watch netflix on it? I can check facebook and e-mail on my phone, what am I missing here? There's gotta be something right? I honestly want to know.

Finally, an iPod I would buy

From all reports you have to have hands the size of a premature chinese baby (not the babies hands, but the actual baby) to operate the new iPod nano, rendering it a pretty useless MP3 player. However, if you shoehorn one of those babies (the ipod nano not the premature chinese baby previously mentioned) into a sega VMU unit you're left with pretty much the greatest invention know to man.

For whatever reason this dreamcast talk really makes me want to go play Shenmue, I guess I'll see you in 3 months.

Apple TV blows in a smaller form factor

"yes I know it sucks, now buy it, buy it!!"
So Apple unveiled some new products this morning. It was all a bit ho-hum. The I pod touch got crazy thin, the shuffle added buttons again and the nano looks weird and completely un-useable all pretty much status quo. However they did unveil a new updated Apple TV. It's insanely great. Take it away huff po.

"The new Apple TV announced Wednesday will only let people rent, not buy, content. For first-run high-definition movies the day they come out on DVD, people will have to pay $4.99. High-definition TV show rentals will be 99 cents.

The revamped Apple TV, which will be available within a month, will give people access to the high-definition version of movies just released on DVD, though he didn't say which movie studios have agreed to include their titles for streaming.

People who watch content from Netflix Inc. streamed over the Internet can also access their "instant" queue through Apple TV. Jobs said only News Corp.'s Fox and The Walt Disney Co.'s ABC have been willing to license their shows for streaming so far, but he said he hoped others would join once the service gains popularity."

That sounds so retarded it's awesome. Now I'm all for some sort of a la cart programming but paying a dollar to rent TV shows that are broadcast on over the air networks is a total scam. A scam that only the most deranged apple addicts could justify.

oh yeah it also only supports 720p not 1080. you suck Jobs, why did you bury the apple IIgs? Were you afraid it of how awesome it was compared to your sucky mac?

Monday Linkaroo

RIP Harvey Pekar. I really only know Harvey Pekar from the movie American Splendor and his apperances on Late night with David Letterman. From all accounts he was a tremendously talented and influential writer. He certianly was a very funny guy with a wry sense of humor. He will be missed.


10 Fascinating Facts about Apple. Supposedly these are facts "you don't know", but I knew some of them. So in your face internet.


500 things I would do to bang Scarlett Johansson. #299 switch to Vonage. #280 Bunk beds with Mark Wahlberg. #183. Bring a Civil War gun to the mall, etc, etc.

Menage a Links

8 Things that Suck about the iPad Nice work Steve Jobs but I already have a Newton

How to Use a Semicolon Finally someone explains punctuation using dinosaurs and bears.

Certafied Virgin Certificates Yep, it's as weird as it sounds