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Orange Whip
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In the right hands, a whip can be an incredibly painful and precise weapon. But most of the whips we’ve seen are made from leather or paracord. This TikTok clip posted by masterlolik_yt shows how a heavy length of chain can be even more dangerous as a whip as it literally makes oranges explode on contact. More here.
fun
via The Awesomer https://theawesomer.com
April 8, 2020 at 02:45PM
Making Skateboard Lumber
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We’ve seen lots of nifty objects made from old skateboard decks, but what Woby Designs is showing off here is something different. By laminating together 20 wood decks, he was able to create a usable lumber with a colorful pattern running through its center. The prep work looks like the most time-consuming part.
fun
via The Awesomer https://theawesomer.com
April 8, 2020 at 12:30PM
Netflix now lets you lock your personal profile with a PIN to keep kids (and roommates) out
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Want to let your kids poke around Netflix without them wandering their way beyond the kids section? Got a roommate who keeps inexplicably forgetting to use their profile and is totally screwing up your “Continue Watching” list?
Good news! Netflix is now letting users set a PIN to keep individual profiles locked down.
The new feature comes as part of a wider update this morning focusing on improved parental controls.
Other new features include:
It’s all pretty basic stuff… but with more people working from home with kids in tow right now, it’s a good time for all of it to land.
Looking for the new controls? Visit Netflix.com in a browser, make sure you’re toggled into a non-kid profile, tap the dropdown arrow in the upper right, hit “Account”, then look for the “Profile & Parental Controls” section — everything should be nested in there, with individual settings for each profile on your account.
technology
via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com
April 7, 2020 at 04:06PM
And now for something completely different: “Quarantine” a song by Mat Best and Tim Montana
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Today has been too dark, we need something light.
Thanks to brother Jim K.
guns
via https://gunfreezone.net
April 7, 2020 at 02:41PM
Oil Platform Fly-through
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With the help of Tac Gas, drone pilot NURK FPV had the rare opportunity to visit an abandoned gas and oil platform. There, he zigged and zagged his aerial camera through the rusted out facility, capturing some fascinating and truly unique visuals. The over-water footage had us hanging on for dear life.
fun
via The Awesomer https://theawesomer.com
April 7, 2020 at 12:55PM
Firedisc Propane Cooker
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| Buy
This portable cooker works differently from other propane grills. Rather than open grates, the Firedisc has a smooth surface that can cook just about anything you’d make in a pan or a griddle, from eggs to pancakes to meats, and you can even use it as a fryer. Its curved edges keep food warm, while its center cooks nice and hot.
fun
via The Awesomer https://theawesomer.com
April 7, 2020 at 10:15AM
500-year-old manuscript contains earliest known use of the “F-word”
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“Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”
Monty Python’ and the Holy Grail
‘s family-friendly approach to swearing handily avoids the F-word.
Scotland has much to recommend it: impressive architecture, gorgeous Highlands, and a long, distinguished intellectual tradition that has spawned some of the Western world’s greatest thinkers over several centuries. It’s also, apparently, home to a medieval manuscript that contains the earliest known usage of the swear word “F#$%.”
The profanity appears in a poem recorded by a bored student in Edinburgh while under lockdown as the plague ravaged Europe—something we can all relate to these days. The poem is getting renewed attention thanks to its inclusion in a forthcoming BBC Scotland documentary exploring the country’s long, proud tradition of swearing, Scotland—Contains Strong Language.
The Bannatyne Manuscript gets its name from a young 16th-century Edinburgh merchant named George Bannatyne, who compiled the roughly 400 poems while stuck at home in late 1568, as the plague ravaged his city. It’s an anthology of Scottish literature, particularly the texts of poems by some of the country’s greatest bards (known as makars) in the 15th and 16th centuries. According to a spokeswoman for the National Library of Scotland (where the manuscript is housed), “It has long been known that the manuscript contains some strong swearwords that are now common in everyday language, although at the time, they were very much used in good-natured jest.”
The five sections to the compilation are devoted to religious themes, moral or philosophical themes, love ballads, fables and allegories, and comedy, especially satire. The latter section is where one is most likely to encounter the swears, particularly in the poetry of William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy. Both poets feature in the poem where the notorious F-word appears: “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie.”
Flyting is a poetic genre in Scotland—essentially a poetry slam or rap battle, in which participants exchange creative insults with as much verbal pyrotechnics (doubling and tripling of rhymes, lots of alliteration) as they can muster. (It’s a safe bet Shakespeare excelled at this art form.)
Dunbar and Kennedy supposedly faced off for a flyting in the court of James IV of Scotland around 1500, and their exchange was set down for posterity in Bannatyne’s manuscript. In the poem, Dunbar makes fun of Kennedy’s Highland dialect, for instance, as well as his personal appearance, and he suggests his opponent enjoys sexual intercourse with horses. Kennedy retaliates with attacks on Dunbar’s diminutive stature and lack of bowel control, suggesting his rival gets his inspiration from drinking “frogspawn” from the waters of a rural pond. You get the idea.
And then comes the historic moment: an insult containing the phrase “wan fukkit funling,” marking the earliest known surviving record of the F-word.
Of course, as the BBC Scotland documentary notes, that first “F#%$” is nothing compared to author James Kelman’s 1994 stream-of-consciousness novel, How Late It Was, How Late. The work is noteworthy not just because it won the Booker Prize and is written in a lowbrow Scottish dialect, but also because it uses the F-word over 4,000 times. Bannatyne would be proud of the legacy his first “F$#%” wrought.
Game of Thrones‘ Tyrion Lannister tries to negotiate with the insulting Frenchman from Monty Python and the Holy Grail in this mashup from Funny or Die.
geeky
via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com
April 6, 2020 at 07:34PM
Disney Works From Home With Its At Home With Olaf Digital Series
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Like the great Fifth Harmony once said: “You can work from home, oh oh, oh oh.” Disney Animation is keeping kids entertained remotely with a new digital series all about Frozen’s Olaf, created at home by animator Hyrum Osmond and voiced by Josh Gad.
As stated on Twitter, Disney Animation is releasing a new recurring digital series called At Home With Olaf. The episodes will spend time with Olaf as he gets into mischief, presumably while his human friends are social distancing. The first clip, which you can watch below, is all about Olaf having some fun with his snow buddies during a solo snowball fight.
More Olaf is not necessarily good Olaf—lest we forget the tragedy that was Olaf’s Frozen Adventure—but it’s great to see Disney working on some fun projects to help keep kids happy during social distancing. And hey, if it keeps animators working from home, all the better. This isn’t the only project Gad’s been working on during the covid-19 pandemic; he’s also been hosting regular storytime sessions online.
The first episode of At Home With Olaf is set to debut online later this week.
For more, make sure you’re following us on our Instagram @io9dotcom.
geeky,Tech
via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com
April 6, 2020 at 10:48PM
AppGyver launches Composer Pro, its new no-code editor
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AppGyver, a startup that has been on the forefront of low-code development since it first launched in 2013, today launched the latest version of its visual development platform. This update, dubbed Composer Pro, has been three years in the making and promises to overcome many of the limitations of today’s low-code environments. It allows developers to build applications for the web, PC, Mac, iOS and Android, using React Web and React Native — and can be extended with plugins for those frameworks. And unless you are a large organization, Composer Pro is available for free — and that includes the ability to use the platform’s database service, CDN and publishing tools.
“We want the Composer Pro to be used to really remove the last limitations of no-code and making no-code as powerful as writing code. That’s what it comes down to and that’s when a whole new world opens,” Marko Lehtimaki, the company’s CEO and co-founder, told me.
As Lehtimaki told me, the company already has plenty of enterprise customers and is cash-flow positive, so with all investors aligned, the team decided that it could give away its platform to individual developers, schools and startups for free. The company’s over 100 enterprise users currently include the likes of DHL and Fingrid.
While the core of the service is obviously the visual editor, a lot of the platform’s power resides in its tools for visually creating logic functions and managing your database, for example. As expected, Composer Pro offers plenty of pre-built UI components and logic flow blocks for building your first application. The company is also creating a marketplace where developers can share (and potentially sell) their own components.
“After releasing Composer 2, we laid out a vision for what we wanted to do next and this was really at the core of it,” Lehtimaki said. “How do we bring the same level of expression of programming languages to visual development? Basically what we thought that this means is that in practice, everybody likes building blocks and to create these big, complex structures, but we wanted to make it possible to create those building blocks themselves without any line of code so that there would be no place where you would ever need to add code.”
While previous versions of the service made an early bet on HTML5, the team is now all in on React and React Native. The company argues that it has spent a lot of time on optimizing the code it creates, beyond what most developers are able to do to optimize their own React Native projects. With that, the company can now take the same code base, with an adaptive design on top, and build apps for virtually any modern platform.
If you really need to, you can get your hands dirty and still write formulas and custom JavaScript by hand, for example, but for the most part, you shouldn’t have to touch any code to build even relatively complex apps with Composer Pro.
That, of course, is the promise of virtually all low-code services, including those from industry giants like Microsoft, which continues to invest heavily in its PowerApps platform, for example. Appgyver’s generous free account makes it worth a look, though, especially if you are an indie developer.
technology
via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com
April 6, 2020 at 01:18PM
A Beautiful “Observation Tower” as Countryside Escape Home
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After purchasing a parcel of land in the Tennessee hills, the new owners built this beautiful, and relatively small "countryside observation tower…the first in a series of structures on the property," according to Style Blueprint, a female-run and female-targeted digital media community. In this time when many of us could use a little escapism and eye candy as well, this structure is well worth a look.
"The idea was to have a small getaway for the owners," says Jamie Pfeffer of Pfeffer Torode Architecture, the firm that designed it, "and to have a place where they could entertain and enjoy the natural setting."
Pfeffer collaborated with Ben Page of Page|Duke Landscape Architects, who points out that they "used native, indigenous materials and were particularly careful to make sure the existing tree canopy was essential to the final design."
The structure itself is pretty compact: With 680 square feet spread over three storeys, we estimate that it sits on a footprint that’s roughly 10′ x 20′. But if the downstairs appears tight…
…"all of the compression that was emphasized below is relieved" when you reach the top storey, Pfeffer states.
I…want to go to there.
fun
via Core77 https://ift.tt/1KCdCI5
April 6, 2020 at 12:36PM
