Elliot Theis

The new music video from OK Go, made in partnership with...

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:25:18 +0000

The new music video from OK Go, made in partnership with Chevrolet. OK Go set up over 1000 instruments over two miles of desert outside Los Angeles. A Chevy Sonic was outfitted with retractable pneumatic arms designed to play the instruments, and the band recorded this version of Needing/Getting, singing as they played the instrument array with the car. The video took 4 months of preparation and 4 days of shooting and recording. There are no ringers or stand-ins; Damian took stunt driving lessons. Each piano had the lowest octaves tuned to the same note so that they’d play the right note no matter where they were struck.

A little optical illusion for you

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:25:29 +0000

A little optical illusion for you

thenextweb: How would you keep yourself grounded as the project...

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:34:57 +0000

thenextweb:

How would you keep yourself grounded as the project you started at college less than ten years ago prepared to file for a $5 billion IPO? Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg kept this little reminder on his desk during the historic day (via This Memo Kept Zuck Focused During Facebook IPO Day)

parislemon: This is actually the craziest chart about Apple...

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 01:12:15 +0000

parislemon:

This is actually the craziest chart about Apple following their insane earnings today.

There is exactly one company on that entire list that is not an oil and gas company. And they’re not that far from the top.

The MegaUpload Shutdown Effect

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:16:44 +0000

The popular file sharing site MegaUpload was shut down by the US FBI and Department of Justice on Thursday, January 19, and executives from the company were taken into custody. This story is very well covered by the Wall Street Journal and includes a copy of the indictment for your reading.

As you would expect, this was a wildly popular site with users from all over the world. So much so that even notable celebrities appear in a video discussing MegaUpload, almost endorsing it. Previous work by Arbor Networks showed that content providers and hosting sites like MegaUpload are the new “Hyper Giants”. With enough global data, you can actually see the traffic drop when the shutdown occurs. Based strictly on the traffic rates it appears that the shutdown started just after 19:00 GMT on January 19, with traffic plummeting down over the next two hours. The graphic here shows three main client regions – Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the US.

Over the past 24 hours, the top countries (in aggregate) using MegaUpload were the United States, France, Germany, Brazil, Great Britain, Turkey, Italy, and Spain, although dozens more countries are represented.

As for the traffic drop off, we’re not the only ones to notice. As seen on Twitter, South America experienced a dramatic traffic drop at about the same time, presumably due to this MegaUpload shutdown. Furthermore, we’re seeing reports of a fake MegaUpload site that is supposedly a malware infection site.

Friends of mine from elsewhere in the world have been joking that the Internet seems to be running a bit smoother today. That may be, given how much bandwidth appears to have been freed up.

How to Enable TRIM Support For All SSDs in OS X Lion

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:16:00 +0000

Ever since the release of OS X 10.6.8, Apple has been selectively enabling the TRIM command for SSD’s in OS X. This support continues on on Mac OS X Lion, but as many have noted, it only seems to work for Apple SSDs. Here’s how to enable TRIM across the board:

The TRIM command is an important disk command for SSDs that keeps your flash memory appropriately cycled so that you can achieve faster read and write speeds, as well as a longer lifespan for your SSD. As such, TRIM support is not the trivial matter that some make it out to be (although certain manufacturers, such as Other World Computing, include firmware that eliminates the need for OS-level TRIM support).

In you have an SSD that supports TRIM, and you’re running OS X 10.6.8 or Lion, follow the below instructions to enable TRIM. Note: This involves the use of terminal commands, so proceed at your own risk.

Backup the file that you’re about to patch:

sudo cp /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage /IOAHCIBlockStorage.original

Patch the file to enable TRIM support:

sudo perl -pi -e ‘s|(\x52\x6F\x74\x61\x74\x69\x6F\x6E\x61\x6C\x00).{9}(\x00\x51)|$1\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00$2|sg’ /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage

Clear the kext caches:

sudo kextcache -system-prelinked-kernel sudo kextcache -system-caches

Important: reboot your Mac!

To disable TRIM support in the future:

sudo perl -pi -e ‘s|(\x52\x6F\x74\x61\x74\x69\x6F\x6E\x61\x6C\x00).{9}(\x00\x51)|$1\x41\x50\x50\x4C\x45\x20\x53\x53\x44$2|sg’ /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage

Finally, if this does not work as expected, or if something goes wrong, simply restore the backup:

sudo cp /IOAHCIBlockStorage.original /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage

This patch simply edits a file called IOAHCIBlockStoage, removing a string that makes TRIM work for only Apple SSDs.

The MIT Media Lab is against SOPA and PIPA

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 17:49:49 +0000

The MIT Media Lab is against SOPA and PIPA

dpstyles: Our last day at 36 Cooper Square. This is how it all...

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 12:53:59 +0000

dpstyles:

Our last day at 36 Cooper Square. This is how it all started (Feb 2009)

Thanks again Lock & Kevin. We owe you guys a beer or 15,000,000.

(by dpstyles™)

parislemon: Google Is "Surprised" That Twitter Is "Concerned"

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 11:19:53 +0000

parislemon: Google Is "Surprised" That Twitter Is "Concerned":

parislemon:

Just to give everyone their fair airtime, here’s Google’s response to Twitter’s response to Google’s announcement about Search+. Naturally, this was posted to Google+:

We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their…

Scrollorama

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 14:10:22 +0000

dhs:

There’s a nifty new trick appearing on various good-looking websites. The first example of it that I saw was Ben the Bodyguard (scroll down the page to see it). Now there’s an open source library to help you create these effects with jQuery. It’s called Scrollorama and if you’re into web design you should check it out.

The beat of New York

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:57:27 +0000

The beat of New York

Stumbled across this song yesterday after a friend @olliebrand...

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:31:58 +0000

Stumbled across this song yesterday after a friend @olliebrand played it to me. I’m now hooked.

Happy New Year!!

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 02:25:00 +0000

Happy New Year!!

Ice skating at Somerset House, London

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 17:36:03 +0000

Ice skating at Somerset House, London

Facebook Pulls Back Curtain on 'Timeline'

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 21:15:36 +0000

Facebook Pulls Back Curtain on 'Timeline':

Nice article by @wired that includes geeky MySQL details.

Transportation check-ins on foursquare. This is from this past...

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:53:53 +0000

Transportation check-ins on foursquare. This is from this past Thanksgiving, but relevant again with Christmas around the corner. White represents check-ins on highways and roads (really?), orange is for trains, and blue is of course is same-day check-ins at airports. I guess no one takes Amtrak cross-country anymore.

Spotted this piece of modern art in Newcastle today.

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 17:16:00 +0000

Spotted this piece of modern art in Newcastle today.

Photo

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 01:26:15 +0000

Instagram Engineering: What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 13:36:16 +0000

Instagram Engineering: What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies:

instagram-engineering:

One of the questions we always get asked at meet-ups and conversations with other engineers is, “what’s your stack?” We thought it would be fun to give a sense of all the systems that power Instagram, at a high-level; you can look forward to more in-depth descriptions of some of these systems in…

Spotify Technology: How Spotify Works

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 16:24:09 +0000

Spotify Technology: How Spotify Works:

Spotify uses some particularly clever streaming technology to deliver all that instant music. It’s been described in an academic paper by Spotify techno-wizards Gunnar Kreitz and Fredrik Niemelä, who included some very interesting statistics and analysis of their measurements taken during one week in the early part of 2010. It’s a pretty dense technical read, but there are some fascinating stats to be gleaned amongst the computer science.