This and that | Ripple's Web

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Boldly going where no budget has gone before. This Trekkie created his own theater modeled after a “Star Trek” ship bridge.

(Credit:
Electronics Systems Consultants)

For some people, an ordinary old giant flat-screen television and Blu-ray player just aren’t enough.

How much would you spend for the best of the best? Some hard-core videophiles and audiophiles dump incredible amounts of cash on home theater equipment (and fancy home theaters) that can cost as much as the average
car or house.

Over the last couple of weeks, Crave has journeyed into the world of ultra-luxury with opulent smartphones and tablets and jaw-droppingly fancy watches.

In the latest installment in our series, we look at some ultra-high-end home theater equipment — and a few custom theaters — that redefine the notion of excess.

Be warned, though. The gallery below might give you a serious case of upgrade-itis.

Home theater gear fit for royalty (pictures)

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cnet/pRza/~3/4By9xvnVDAY/

Boldly going where no budget has gone before. This Trekkie created his own theater modeled after a “Star Trek” ship bridge.

(Credit:
Electronics Systems Consultants)

For some people, an ordinary old giant flat-screen television and Blu-ray player just aren’t enough.

How much would you spend for the best of the best? Some hard-core videophiles and audiophiles dump incredible amounts of cash on home theater equipment (and fancy home theaters) that can cost as much as the average
car or house.

Over the last couple of weeks, Crave has journeyed into the world of ultra-luxury with opulent smartphones and tablets and jaw-droppingly fancy watches.

In the latest installment in our series, we look at some ultra-high-end home theater equipment — and a few custom theaters — that redefine the notion of excess.

Be warned, though. The gallery below might give you a serious case of upgrade-itis.

Home theater gear fit for royalty (pictures)

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cnet/pRza/~3/4By9xvnVDAY/

ELEPHANTS – Only carbon pencil

June 17th, 2013 · 16 Comments · ART, BLOG

This awesome mural, entitled Elephants, is an astonishing and enormous piece created by artist Adonna Khare using only carbon pencil. After more than 47,000 voters cast 412,560 votes, Elephants was recently pronounced the winning piece of ArtPrize 2012. Adonna Khare, who is also an elementary school art teacher turned stay-at-home mom, took home the $200,000 grand prize.

See the art in incredible detail at the SOURCE.

1,534 views

Article source: http://jaredleto.com/thisiswhoireallyam/2013/06/17/elephants-only-carbon-pencil/

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Kim Kardashian and Kanye West celebrated the birth of their baby daughter on June 15. While Kim’s maternity style was sometimes criticized, it didn’t stop her from taking fashion risks throughout her pregnancy. Here, she and Kanye attend the Met Costume Gala in May. Let’s look back at her other notable pregnancy looks.

Kourtney, Kim and Khloe all sport their Kardashian Kollection.

Kim Kardashian at the E! 2013 Upfront presentation in April 2013.

Kim Kardashian arrives at the 2013 MTV Movie Awards in April 2013.

Kim Kardashian is the lady in red while promoting her Glam perfume in Las Vegas in April 2013.

Kim Kardashian’s “kourtroom” look for her divorce hearing in April 2013.

Kim Kardashian steps out in a bejeweled dress in New York in March 2013.

Kim Kardashian dresses her bump in white for the Elton John AIDS Foundation’s Academy Awards viewing party in February 2013.

Kim Kardashian sports a feathery frock in February 2013.

Kim Kardashian wears a revealing blouse in January 2013.

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On Saturday — according to E!, the network behind her family’s hit reality show– Kim Kardashian gave birth to a baby girl. The report did not give a name for the newborn, but did say she came into the world at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

She’s the first child for the 32-year-old Kardashian, who has modeled, acted and launched business ventures but is best known as a reality TV star with a huge international following, having amassed some 18 million Twitter followers

The father is rapper Kanye West, who was by his girlfriend’s side during the delivery, E! reported, citing a source. The couple started dating last year, shortly after Kardashian filed for divorce from NBA player Kris Humphries after 72 days of marriage.

Kardashian’s divorce is finally final

While the baby’s arrival was somewhat unexpected — coming a few weeks earlier than the July due date — her gender is not. Like many aspects of the Kardashian family’s existence, it was revealed on an episode of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” — the eighth season premiere, in fact, that aired in June — documenting her 19-week checkup at her obstetrician’s office.

“I’m so excited we’re having a girl. Who doesn’t want a girl? I think they are the best,” Kardashian said then. “I know that’s really what Kanye has always wanted. He wanted a little girl.”

Kardashian’s newborn daughter is the third grandchild of Kris Jenner — the former wife of the late Robert Kardashian, best known as a lawyer for O.J. Simpson. Jenner is currently married to Olympic legend Bruce Jenner.

Kardashian’s sister, Kourtney Kardashian, has two children — Mason and Penelope — with her longtime boyfriend, Scott Disick.

As to her own pregnancy, Kim Kardashian told Ryan Seacrest this spring that she didn’t experience morning sickness, though it has been “really painful everywhere.”

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And it’s true, consumers around the world (and around the Internet) loudly expressed how much they dislike the changes Microsoft announced to its game licensing terms (and online requirements) for the Xbox One last Thursday, giving Sony the ammunition it needed to win E3 by basically doing nothing.

The reaction wasn’t a surprise to Mehdi, though. In fact, he said a lot of the way people have responded to Microsoft’s moves was “kind of as we expected.” But the implication of his statements in an in-depth interview with Ars Technica was that this temporary confusion and discomfort among the audience would be worth it as gamers and consumers adjust to a console world without game discs.

“We’re trying to do something pretty big in terms of moving the industry forward for console gaming into the digital world. We believe the digital world is the future, and we believe digital is better.”

Mehdi made a comparison to the world of home movie viewing, where inconvenient trips to Blockbuster Video have been replaced with Netflix streaming on practically any device instantly. On Xbox One, having all games exist as cloud-connected downloads enables new features like being able to access your entire library at a friend’s house with a single login, or loaning games to up to ten “family members” digitally and remotely.

Those digital “benefits” will be available at launch, but Mehdi hinted that the digital rights management transition might unlock some more interesting game access and distribution methods later on.

“In the future, you can imagine the capability to have different licensing models, different ways that people have to access games. This all gets unlocked because of digital.”

Publishers, of course, have been the most forceful proponents of cutting off the used game market, with some suggesting that used games are comparable to piracy for their bottom line. But Mehdi said that Microsoft wasn’t simply “giving in” to publisher demands with its new game licensing terms.

Instead, it was trying to balance the needs of its four main “constituents,” including the consumer (who comes “first and foremost” he said), game publishers, retailers, and Microsoft itself as a company.

“Within that, we’ve tried to optimize, and I think we’ve found a great balance across all of those dimensions,” Mehdi said. “But there are tradeoffs.

“We do want to support everyone in that system, beginning with the consumer. But we want publishers to get paid for the great IP they work on. We want retailers to be able to drive and sell our products and make a profit. So we are trying to balance across all those.”

Mehdi noted that purely digital game marketplaces like the iOS App Store have thrived despite having absolutely no physical media. Implementing that kind of disc-free system on the Xbox One “may not [have been] the best thing for consumers, and it may not [have been] the thing they [would have] wanted,” Mehdi said, which is part of why Microsoft decided to keep discs as an option. Still, he did concede that, without discs, the licensing norms for the system “would be easier to understand.”

The way Mehdi talked about Microsoft’s licensing decisions reinforced the idea that he saw the limited abilities to share and transfer Xbox One games as a step up from other, purely digital marketplaces, even if some others see it as a step down from current disc-based distribution systems.

On the Xbox One, Mehdi said the company has “tried to… bridge the two in a way that no one has done — to give you the power of digital and then give you all this power in physical … . We know we’re providing a lot more value to consumers, but in that comes a lot of need to clarify, ‘How come disc? How come digital? How’s that work?’”

While the Internet is decidedly up in arms about the way the Xbox One handles game ownership and online check-ins, Mehdi said it was “hard to say” what the larger reaction from the less attentive mainstream consumers would be.

“I think it’s fair to say there’s a segment of consumers at this show in particular who really pay attention, who are very passionate about all aspects of gaming, and that we listen to closely. In a broader set of community, people don’t pay attention to a lot of the details. We’ve seen it in the research, we’ve seen it in a lot of the data points.”

One data point in particular Mehdi pointed to was the success of the initial pre-orders for the Xbox One, which started as soon as Microsoft’s press conference concluded Monday.

“Amazon basically says they are on path to sell out … . Amazon is saying it’s one of their best-selling consumer products. We’re seeing the same thing from other retailers.”

To be fair, PlayStation 4 pre-orders were also a quick sell-out on Amazon after the company’s press conference on Monday. Still, “it’s very clear there are a wide variety of other consumers that love to game that are excited about what we have to offer with Xbox One,” Mehdi said.

While the Xbox One will sell for $100 more than the PlayStation 4, Mehdi suggested that the extra money spent would be worthwhile to consumers looking for the best value in their next gaming system.

Besides exclusive titles and gaming content, Mehdi said players would see value in the system being “backed by 300,000 servers backed by Microsoft that enable incredible game experiences.”

For another, the Kinect in each box provides for better gameplay and “ease of use for the entire system.” Things like live TV support and exclusive NFL and Skype partnerships will also help show consumers the Xbox One’s “tremendous value.”

“We want to have our offering be differentiated relative to all others,” he said. “It has value that is in so many areas that is not in competing systems … . That is a thing that each consumer will choose… and ultimately consumers will decide which is better. It’s a big market.”

This story originally appeared on ArsTechnica.

COPYRIGHT 2011 ARSTECHNICA.COM

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In February 2013 Ethiopian-born Yiytish Aynaw became the first woman of African descent to be named Miss Israel.

The stunning 21-year-old relocated to Israel at the age of 12 to live with her Ethiopian Jewish grandparents after the death of her mother.

Less than 10 years later, she’s grabbed international attention after her win at the beauty pageant. She will now represent Israel at the Miss Universe competition.

Aynaw, who also goes by the nickname Titi, hopes that her title will help her carve out a successful career in fashion.

But she is also interested in becoming a positive role model for her community.

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African Voices is a weekly show that highlights Africa’s most engaging personalities, exploring the lives and passions of people who rarely open themselves up to the camera. Follow the team on Twitter.

(CNN) — At just 21 years old, Yityish Aynaw has gone on a remarkable life journey from a little girl playing barefoot in an Ethiopian village to an Israeli beauty queen who’s ready to shine on the world stage.

Last February, the stunning 21-year-old grabbed international attention after becoming the first woman of African descent to be crowned Miss Israel at the country’s beauty pageant.

“To be first, you have all the attention focused on you and I have to represent my whole ethnic group because through me they see the models,” says Aynaw, who will represent Israel at the next Miss Universe contest. “Through me they see and discover our whole ethnic group.”

Read this: Darfur’s amazing street fashion

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Ad agency Shine Limited claims this is the world’s first playable music beer bottle.

(Credit:
Shine Limited)

Aside from delivering liquid courage or serving as an impromptu weapon, what can your beer bottle do for you? As far as we know, nothing you drink out of compares with the Edison Bottle — a beer bottle inscribed with New Zealand indie rock band Ghost Wave‘s latest single “Here She Comes.”

The Edison Bottle, created in collaboration with creative agency Shine Limited and Beck’s Record Label project, contains a fully playable 3-minute, 23-second song etched onto a Beck’s beer bottle. The project required around 600 hours of research and development.

A closer look at the grooves on a normal record (left), and the Edison Bottle (right).

(Credit:
Shine Limited)

Precisely inscribing record-quality grooves onto glass requires incredible accuracy, so the tinkerers at model and effects company Gyro Constructivists designed a special lathe powered by a hard-drive recording head. During development, Gyro also reinvented the century-old cylinder phonograph (record player) with modern electronic components. Watch the musical bottle debut to curious onlookers in New Zealand, or scroll down to watch a more in-depth video about how Gyro created the bottle.

For those of you wondering what Edison — yes, the famous inventor Thomas Edison — has to do with a musical beer bottle, well, he inadvertently invented the only device capable of playing such an exotic (and tasty) record.

Before the conventional disc-shaped record player became prominent in the early 1900′s, Edison, knee deep in acoustic research, spent a great deal of his time trying to boost sales of his music player called the phonograph. The device played cylinders inscribed with several minutes of music. Despite selling musical cylinders for decades and gradually improving the quality of the medium, the format didn’t last.

Aside from competitors flaking out and abandoning cylinders, Victor Records, a huge music label at the time, courted major artists with exclusive contracts to create disc records, which led Edison to eventually concede and focus on disc records and players. Read more about the short history of Edison’s music cylinders at a special Web site hosted by the Library of Congress.

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It’s pretty, but can it lure Android users into its arms?

(Credit:
CNET)

iOS 7 is still not quite the Droid I’ve been looking for in an iPhone.

I’ve been an
Android devotee for about three years now, but ever since the introduction of the
iPhone 4S and Siri — something totally new running on a nice piece of hardware — I’ve been considering making the switch to iOS. As intriguing and enticing as the 4S was, I balked due to the lack of LTE. The iPhone 5 fixed that, but by then iOS seemed stale to me, and the lack of any major new innovations kept me tapping away on my aging
Droid Razr and led me to declare that the iPhone and the ascendant Apple of this century’s first decade had peaked. (Actually, the phrase I used was “jumped the shark” — I suggest reading the original post for an explanation.)

So I watched with great interest on Monday as Apple unveiled a reboot to its mobile operating system in the form of iOS 7, which is being hailed as beautiful and ambitious. CNET editors have dubbed it a “radical new look” and part of Apple’s “quest for perfection and the devotion to creating objects of profound and enduring beauty,” as our Dan Farber put it.

From what I’ve seen of the OS, you’ll hear no disagreement from me, but I’m still left comparing Apples and Androids.

If you believe in the old adage “save the best for last,” as Steve Jobs clearly did, iOS 7 was meant to be the headliner of Monday’s presentation. But the sum total of the updated mobile OS seemed to amount to Apple playing catch-up, and mostly to Android.

I haven’t gone hands-on with iOS 7 yet, and I’m basing my opinion largely on Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi’s very likable and effective sales job. But as many others have observed, the touted updates he and his colleagues ran down — everything from improved notifications to unlimited browser tabs and an easily accessible control center — have been old hat to Android users for some time now.

Arguably, the most anticipated new feature, iTunes Radio, is a clone of Pandora that’s not even as robust as another competitor, Spotify. And, oh yes, Google launched its own streaming music service a few months ago.

I’m really waiting for Apple to wow me again like it did with the iPhone 4S and the introduction of Siri. Since then, it’s Google that has been capturing my imagination through advances like Google Glass and Google Now. (The company has apparently also been gaining in popularity with the young folks, too — a recent survey found young people have a significantly higher opinion of Google than the legendary maker of iPhones.)

Shall we could settle this with a friendly lightsaber duel?

(Credit:

Thor501)

Accuse me of being an Android fanboi if you like, but I’m actually an innovation fanboi. And I’m not the only one who failed to be super-excited with what we’re seeing this week from WWDC, as analyst Mark Moskowitz points out.

“We do not expect investors to cheer the latest software and services rollouts at Apple’s WWDC 2013,” Moskowitz said in an investors note released late Monday.

He says investors are waiting to see a lower-cost iPhone and a new and improved iPhone 5S and higher-resolution iPad Mini.

Those of us who don’t hold stock in Apple are simply waiting for the return of a company that could be counted on to deliver excitement in each new release and show us the way to the future. Like millions of others, I’m invested in the Android ecosystem right now, but I can be wooed away by a tech company that’s willing to put in the hard, innovative work and earn my love.

Fine with being fickle
The good news is Apple is capable of doing just that. Now that it’s all caught up and matching most of Android’s features one for one, it’s primed to again provide us something wonderful that we don’t even yet know we want.

Tim Cook has told us to expect some incredible new products later this year, and it would be crazy to count Apple out at this point. After all, this is a company that was all but written off 20 years ago.

So, while what Apple has shown me this week with iOS 7 sure is pretty, I’m still going to hang out with the robot clan for a while longer. Still, I have no problem with being fickle and I’m ready to be swept off my feet at any time. Maybe Apple and I can make a date for sometime in the fall?

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Comcast’s new X2 entertainment platform includes program recommendations for children.

(Credit:
Comcast)

In its battle against the growing trend of cutting the cord, Comcast instead wants TV viewers to ditch the DVR.

The cable TV giant on Tuesday took the wraps off X2, an upgrade to its X1 entertainment platform, which includes a new compact set-top box that will store recorded programs in the cloud. The box doesn’t even have a hard drive for local storage, resulting in a form factor three times smaller than conventional boxes, and 50 percent less power consumption.

Expected to be available to consumers later this year, the new set-top box also includes voice-activated control, allowing users to change TV channels or search for programming with spoken commands.

“The X1 Platform is an incredible example of what’s possible with cloud innovation,” Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said in a statement. “With the introduction of Web-based content to the platform today, and the promise of a faster and more integrated experience with X2, we’re adding more functionality to each screen in a customer’s home, and transforming our video product into a complete entertainment operating system.”

The new box is part of a platform upgrade that stresses a number of enhancements over the current operating system, including an updated channel guide with personalized recommendations based on program viewing history and the ability to watch recorded content on multiple devices.

The new platform will also include Web-based content from Comcast’s partners and integrate users’ personal social-media accounts. Program listings will include viewer reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, while TV social-media site Zeebox will provide a live feed of which TV shows are generating buzz on Twitter.

The platform is part of Comcast’s effort to discourage subscribers from defecting to online video streaming services. In the past decade, the cable TV industry has lost about 10 million subscribers, down from 66.9 million in 2001 to 56.4 million last year, according to market research firm SNL Kagan.

Comcast did not reveal pricing for the new set-top box. The X1 entertainment platform is currently available in only 12 U.S. markets, but it’s not clear whether new markets will be added when X2 launches later this year.

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