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Q101 (formerly on Chicago radio @ 101.1 FM) The Alternative - Chicago's New Rock Alternative - Everything Alternative - Chicago's Alternative - Gen X - Generation X
After shooting with toy cameras, researcher Greg Dash became hooked on the random results and reveal that came with developing film. However, he couldn’t share all his film photos digitally and on top of that, was unable to find a decent-priced fisheye lens for his SLR. He decided to make his own.
Dash’s camera body is about as thick as an iPhone 5, takes HD video and has a 170 degree fisheye lens. Photos are stored on a microSD card and the battery charges via USB. Check out the video, above, for more.
Aside from its size, the camera’s biggest feature is the surprise. There’s no screen to look back on your photos, so users get the experience of film.
With the mini camera, you won’t have to miss an opportunity by going to an app. You can also snap pictures in tight spaces to achieve extreme angles — Dash put the camera in between the gaps of a monkey cage to get up close.
You can buy the tiny camera for $84 with estimated shipping in June, provided the fundraising goal is met.
READ MORE
Source: http://mashable.com/2013/04/02/digital-fisheye/
If you’ve read an article about job searching — ever — chances are you know that 70% to 80% of positions never get advertised. This reality is mega-frustrating when you’re hunting for a new gig. You can hit up desirable employers directly, but the “cold” email method is rife with uncertainty. Is reaching out to someone you’ve never met even worth the effort? Well, yes and no: The counterintuitive trick to cold-emailing employers is to never send a cold email. No matter how clear, concise or witty your message, its likelihood of yielding the desired response — actually, any response — is low. Employers are busy, their inboxes are packed and you’re a stranger. A stranger who is asking for something.
So what do you do? Jess Adamiak is on a mission to help you communicate better. Jess identifies five tips for better chances of getting noticed when “cold” emailing for a job.
Channel your inner detective. Who calls the hiring shots at your dream employer? (Heads up: It is highly unlikely this person works in the HR department). You want to talk to someone with the power to give you, or help you get, what you want.
It doesn’t take much to uncover your own personal hidden network — spend an hour spying on your friends’ LinkedIn and Facebook connections, and you might be surprised to discover who knows whom. (Remember, your pals don’t need to be acquainted with the decision maker — they just need to get you one step closer.)
For the rest of the tips, READ HERE. Good luck!
Source: http://mashable.com/2013/04/06/dream-employer-email/
There are so many ways to burn bridges. And Valentine’s Day could be the PERFECT time for you to dump that annoying soon-to-be ex from your life. Your Facebook life, that is. New mobile app KillSwitch makes it easy to eliminate your ex’s entire presence on your Facebook timeline — in one fell swoop. The app is set to launch Thursday, February 14, you know, the Hallmark holiday of hearts, flowers, and candy.
The caveat is you still have to be friends with your ex to use the app. (So, don’t make any brash decisions, post-breakup.) Simply identify the target ex from your list of friends. The app then crawls your profile for content (photos, videos, wall posts and status updates) linked or tagged with that person’s specific Facebook ID. In the next step, you have the option to delete all the content or manually select and vanquish certain interactions.
The app will cost $0.99 in the App Store and Google Play, and each sale will benefit the American Heart Association of New York.
Don’t have an ex in mind? Use KillSwitch to abort all kinds of Facebook relationships: friends, co-workers, ex-in-laws, etc.
“People might think that Facebook won’t like a service like this,” says Erica Mannherz, co-founder of ClearHart, KillSwitch’s agency, “but in essence, what KillSwitch does is allows users to feel even more comfortable about sharing because it allows them to control and cut down some of the unnecessary negative consequences of doing so.”
If you think breakups don’t happen on VD, they do. Just ask Punkmetalmamma…sniff sniff. You get over it. Eventually.
http://mashable.com/2013/02/13/killswitch/
We’ve all had work days in which we wished we’d be asked to leave and never come back. Then comes the hard-hitting reality that unemployment is about as bad as it gets in the professional world.
Phoenix resident Amy McClenathan, who is still heartbroken over the loss of her mother, learned this lesson after updating her Facebook status with the confession, “I wish I could get fired some days, it would be easier to be at home than to have to go through this.”
Her wish came true. Her getting fired may not have been legal, but she takes full responsibility for the post. If you want to keep your job, keep your complaints off Facebook.
http://mashable.com/2013/01/27/facebook-fired/
I do. I want to see it, touch it, read it, and taste it. I want to OWN IT.
Amazon announced AutoRip on Thursday, a free service that gives consumers a cloud-based backup for every CD they’ve bought from the company since 1998.
For Amazon, it’s another move towards ensuring that consumers consider the company their primary stream of content, whatever the format. However, the introduction of the service raises another question: Why are people still buying CDs in 2013? After all, most music is available online in a format that’s usually cheaper than CDs and doesn’t take up shelf space.
Sound quality
Though there’s some debate on the issue, David Bakula, SVP of client development for Nielsen, believes that the sound quality of downloaded music isn’t on par with music on a CD.
Technology Lag
“The majority of music buyers purchase CDs and don’t buy digital so there’s a large non-digital population,” says Russ Crupnick, SVP of industry analysis for The NPD Group. “They simply never had the need or motivation to buy digital downloads.”
A couple of analysts mentioned country music as a genre in which the majority of purchases are still via CD. “Country fans are still going to big chains [to buy music],” says Glenn Peoples, senior editorial analyst at Billboard.
Cars
People still listen to a lot of their music in their cars,which are still adapting to the digital changes. “As long as cars have CD players, there’s a market for them,” says Crupnick.
Touch Factor
When people really like the artist, they want a physical package with the artwork. CDs offer that offer a kind of connection with the artist.” Crupnick agrees: “Uber fans like to have the physical version in addition to/instead of digital for artists where they have a strong affinity.”
Source: http://mashable.com/2013/01/10/why-are-people-still-buying-cds/
In the search for an Earth-like alien world, astronomers have had their eyes set on planets beyond our solar system, but some moons orbiting these exoplanets may be just as likely to support life, scientists say.
Astronomers have discovered more than 800 exoplanets, with many more candidate worlds awaiting confirmation by follow-up observations. Most of them, however, are gas giants, similar to Jupiter, and only a handful have a solid surface and orbit their host stars in the habitable zone (the range where liquid water, and perhaps life as we know it, can exist).
But a team of astronomers says these uninhabitable exoplanets could host habitable exomoons.
Though no habitable exomoons have been found, Barnes and René Heller of Germany’s Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam say there’s no reason to assume they don’t exist.
Some researchers have already started thinking about how they might use instruments like the planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope to detect alien moons. Telescopes such as Kepler search for planets as they transit, or cross in front of, their star, causing telltale dips in the star’s brightness. Variations in these brightness patterns might reveal the presence of a moon orbiting a planet.
Next up: Getting there will be half the fun.
http://mashable.com/2013/01/11/alien-life-exoplanet-moons/
Go ahead, laugh at me. I didn’t know what GIF stood for until recently. But I AM a fast learner and catch on really quick. Which means that someone else with a somewhat above average level of intelligence probably didn’t know what it means, either. Lucky for you smart people, Mashable has given us all the information you ever wanted to know, and then some, about GIFs.
“GIF” stands for “graphics interchange format,” a mature name for an image format just coming of age in the digital space (the GIF turned 25 this year). Specifically, Steve Wilhite of Compuserve debuted the GIF in June 1987. The GIF improved on black and white image transfers with 256 colors, while still retaining a compressed format that slow modems could load easily. Using the Graphics Control Extension (GCE), the GIF achieved animation via timed delays.
However, in its infancy the GIF met controversy. Allegedly unbeknownst to Compuserve at the time, the compression technique was patented in 1985 by Unisys. The two companies engaged in a copyright disagreement that carried into 1994, whereupon Unisys announced it would allow commercial properties to license the format for a small fee. In response to the disagreement, many developers vowed to boycott the GIF, preferring the new PNG format (1996), a single-image, patent-free alternative to the GIF.
But the GIF would not be stymied. Early World Wide Web users adopted the GIF when designing their webpages — and for a variety of reasons. Some introduced animated placeholders while constructing their web properties, in the form of blinking construction signs and spinning hard hats. Others preferred a flashy banner at the top of their pages — we remember flames, prowling dinosaurs and rolling eyeballs. (Reads kind of like a horror movie, doesn’t it?)
Whether you call it GIF or JIF, These days, people are less concerned with grammar and more fascinated by the GIF itself. The file format has become a default brand of web humor, alongside impact-font memes and viral YouTube videos.
Graphic artist and photographer Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck, respectively, believe the web has returned to GIFs in a desire for speed. “We like things fast,” they write in an email. “If you have something to say or want to make someone laugh, it’s more effective to give them the immediacy of a GIF than send a link and ask them to watch a video, which they may or may not do. [GIFs] eliminate variables that aren’t important to the core message.”
“I think that we, as artists, have gotten better and better at expressing what we want to show and being more brave about exactly what we want,” says Reed, “and just seeing how our work has evolved from being really simplistic eye blinks and hair GIFs to creating complete worlds now.”
A world of GIFs sounds pretty unbelievable to us. But we’re still loyal to our roots — let’s face it, pixelated bananas and animated dinosaurs will never go extinct.
http://mashable.com/2012/10/19/animated-gif-history/
Like you need an excuse to act stupid in public? Now there’s an app for it. Klash, a social-rewards network, is the digital intersection of truth or dare and Foursquare. Launched two weeks ago, Klash allows users to log in to the app via Facebook or Twitter, and begin challenging friends in their networks in exchange for user-set rewards. It’s available for iOS or the Web.
The idea behind Klash came about when three then-students at Spain’s ESADE Business School took a surfing trip in Barcelona, and challenged a friend who had never surfed to catch a wave. His reward? One cold beer. At the end of trip, the friends began brainstorming ways to share their actions on a larger scale, and decided to develop a mobile application.
“With Klash, we try to connect people through their competitive instinct,” co-Founder Alessandro Petrucciani says. “We have seen a lot of people engaging in various klashes with each other. It’s a platform that is not only used in your friend circle, but also helps connecting like-minded people with same interests.”
Users can view the public page and pledge support for specific klashes, or just send challenges to friends within their own networks, and share through social media. Many of the current challenges, such as “Do 30 pushups in the morning in exchange for compliment”, are harmless. Others, such as “Moonwalk through every crosswalk” could get interesting. I would LOVE to see some challenges you Q101ers would dare each other to complete…do share!
http://mashable.com/2012/10/13/klash/
Are you sick of all the junk mail you get in your email box but still want to read it “sometimes”?
The Swizzle, a service that launched last week, lets you easily and securely unsubscribe from commercial e-mails and combine any e-mails you do want to keep into a daily digest. The goal of The Swizzle, which is owned and operated by Keep Holdings Inc., is to eliminate the e-mails you don’t want and help you engage with the brands you do like.
To use The Swizzle, you have to provide your e-mail address and grant the service access to your mailbox. The service will then generate a list of all your commercial e-mails and give you the option to either “unsubscribe” or “move to digest” for each one.
If you choose “move to digest,” you will no longer receive e-mails from that brand. Instead, news and deals from the brand will appear in your Daily Swizzle Digest without you having to sign up for a subscription. You can also browse other brands in The Swizzle Gallery, which has nearly 1,200 popular brands and stores that you can add to your daily digest e-mail.
Users can receive digests daily or once a week, and they can choose the time of day the e-mail is delivered.
http://mashable.com/2012/10/03/swizzle-emails/
Can the average human tell the difference between the Retina MacBook and the regular MacBook?
The new MacBook Pro is here, and by far the most compelling feature is its pixel-rich retina display. The new MacBook packs more than 5 million pixels into a 15-inch, 2,880 x 1,800 screen.
The folks at Mashable.com compared the two. It was hard to convey the difference between the two displays via normal photos, so they went for the extreme close-up by taking pictures of key icons and details with a magnifying glass.
The results are palpable. After firing up Safari and checking out NASA’s Flickr feed on both machines (which has tons of high-resolution pictures), a crowd of Mashable staff was soon oohing and ahhing at how much more detail, color and contrast was visible on the Retina Pro. Most icons and text looked sharper, too.
SEE IT
http://mashable.com/2012/06/13/macbook-pro-retina-examples/
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