No Star Wars spoilers! From the Boonta scrapyard, Ben, Felix and Karen get hacking with electronics, grinders, bearings, laser cutting and a CNC router to build their own R2D2 cooler, who wouldn’t want a robot that gives you a drink when you use the force? Join the Ben Heck Show team at the element14 community for construction files, behind the scenes footage and join other makers, creators and engineers.
The Funniest Star Wars Parodies of All Time
Everyone from Family Guy to Robot Chicken, from Saturday Night Live to independent filmmakers have all skewered Star Wars to great comedic effect. Out of the literally hundreds of parodies out there, these are our faves:
Shorter Bits:
Lando Learns Never to Make a Deal with Darth Vader
Princess Leia Attempts to Record Video Plea for Help
Star Wars Toy Commercial
Death Star Napkin Design Sketch
Kevin Spacey Playing Christopher Walken Blowing the Han Solo Audition
Death Star Architectural Standards Not Up to Code
Emperor Gets the Phone Call After Death Star Destruction
Kevin Spacey Playing Jack Lemmon Auditioning for Chewbacca
"The Force Awakens" Auditions
Longer Bits:
George Lucas in Love (i.e. The True Inspirations for Star Wars)
"Troops" ("Cops" Parody)
Auralnauts: Kenobi Visits Kamino, Part 1 – "Larry"
Auralnauts: Kenobi Visits Kamino, Part 2 – Bass Wars
Excerpt from Clerks: "Death Star Contractors"
Got any favorites that we missed? (I’m sure we’ve overlooked a bunch in the Robot Chicken library alone.) If you’ve got a good one, please link to it in the comments!
Guns Save Life Sues Cook County Over Ammunition, Gun Taxes
Guns Save Life, Inc. has filed suit against Cook County’s blatantly unconstitutional new ammunition tax, and along with that, the recently passed firearms tax in Guns Save Life v. Ali. The suit relies in part on the United States … Read More
The post Guns Save Life Sues Cook County Over Ammunition, Gun Taxes appeared first on The Truth About Guns.
via The Truth About Guns
Guns Save Life Sues Cook County Over Ammunition, Gun Taxes
The Weather Today: Star Wars. Nothing but Star Wars…
Today’s forecast calls for Star Wars. But I don’t have to tell you that. You’re living it. Star Wars fever is at an all-time high. Be careful not to get spoiled people. Anyway, meteorologist and awesome pun-maker…
via MightyMega
The Weather Today: Star Wars. Nothing but Star Wars…
Angry blacksmith takes on 9/11 truthers
Backblaze B2 Offers Dirt-Cheap Cloud Storage for Half a Penny Per GB a Month
There isn’t much you can buy for less than one cent these days, but you can store a whole lot of files in the “cloud” for $0.005 a month with Backblaze’s new B2 storage service. It’ll even give you 10GB for free.
Backblaze B2 is similar to Amazon S3 (which starts at $0.022 a month) or Amazon Glacier (which costs a penny per GB). It’s pay-for-what-you-use online storage—petabytes of space, even—that you can use as a backup solution (like you can with Glacier) or to host files on the web. B2 seems to be built with developers in mind, in fact, since there’s an API for it and you can upload or download data using the command line (CLI).
Like Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, you pay for both storage and retrieval (downloads). Downloads cost $0.05 per GB, so this isn’t really a Dropbox replacement or for frequently accessing files. But you could store 100GB of photos or videos there for safekeeping for just $0.50 a month, which is pretty cool.
The service comes with a web interface to upload or download files into your buckets, as well as alerts for when you’re reaching a storage limit you said. If you need to download a big bunch of files at once, you can get a flash drive with your files sent to you (128 GB) for $99 or a USB hard drive (3 TB) for $189.
In any case, if you sign up you’ll get 10GB of storage to try B2 out for free.
B2 Cloud Storage | Backblaze
via Lifehacker
Backblaze B2 Offers Dirt-Cheap Cloud Storage for Half a Penny Per GB a Month
Star Wars A Capella
Jimmy Fallon enlisted the help of The Roots and the cast of Star Wars: The Force Awakens to each sing a part of John Williams’ Main Theme from Star Wars. And yes, Mark Hamill is nowhere to be found yet again.
via The Awesomer
Star Wars A Capella
Using the aggregate functions ANY, SOME, EVERY with MySQL
Hello! I have posted this entry on the MySQL Server team’s blog:Using the aggregate functions ANY, SOME, EVERY with MySQL .
via Planet MySQL
Using the aggregate functions ANY, SOME, EVERY with MySQL
Your phone is a lightsaber in Google’s desktop browser game
Since real lightsabers don’t exist (yet), Google and the studios behind Star Wars: The Force Awakens are offering the next-best thing: A program that turns your smartphone into a lightsaber, which then takes out bad guys on your computer screen. Lightsaber Escape is live now — open it in your desktop browser and then punch in the unique URL on your phone (or vice versa), and you’re good to go. Your phone becomes a lightsaber handle and, as you move it around, the actual glowing sword moves on the desktop.
Lightsaber Escape is a Chrome Experiment that Google made in conjunction with Lucasfilm and Star Wars visual-effects studio Industrial Light & Magic. It uses WebGL for the 3D graphics, plus WebRTC and WebSocket for the real-time communication between your phone and desktop. It may be a Chrome Experiment, but this one works in other browsers, too.
If Chrome and Safari can get along, maybe there’s hope for the First Order and the Resistance, after all.
via Engadget
Your phone is a lightsaber in Google’s desktop browser game
Speed Up OS X Photos by Reducing Motion
We all know about the motion effects in iOS, but it turns out they’re tucked away in OS X as well. OS X Daily points out that the Photos app has it, and you can speed up performance by turning it off.
Open up Photos, then Head to Photos > Preferences and select the General tab. Click on “Reduce Motion” to disable the various animations, and you’ll be on your way to making Photos a little less cumbersome to use. If you feel like your Mac’s been pretty slow lately, you might try disabling a few other animations.
Speed Up Photos App in OS X with Reduce Motion | OS X Daily