Using CSS 3d to create an earth with shading and layers. It is not as good as using WebGL but it theoretically works on iPad.

CSS 3D Earth →

Takes a snapshot with your Mac’s built-in iSight/FaceTime webcam every time you git commit code, and archives a lolcat style image with it.

lolcommits →

We’re in the early phases of moving from being an information engine to becoming a knowledge engine

Looks like Google is going after Wolfram|Alpha

Before you get too overly excited by the title, no this isn’t a full recreation of the 1997 DMA classic. Instead it’s a WebGL tech demo put together by Niklas von Hertzen as an experiment, to test out the creation and performance of large static environments. It works by loading in the original GTA map files which are now freely available, parses all of the data out of them and re-creates the city in WebGL driven 3D.

Several of the game objects are also present, and a basic collision system allows you to teasingly walk around the city in pedestrian mode. I guarantee you’ll walk up to a car and try to get into it, but alas that won’t do much right now.

Having fooled around with GTA (Classic) quite a lot back in the day — remember Junction25, M1, Cops, and GTA Cars? — I’m quite stoked to see this kind of awesomeness!

GTA WebGL Demo →

(via creativejs)

As a result of being resource-starved, Flickr quit planting the anchors it needed to climb ever higher. It missed the boat on local, on real time, on mobile, and even ultimately on social—the field it pioneered. And so, it never became the Flickr of video; YouTube snagged that ring. It never became the Flickr of people, which was of course Facebook. It remained the Flickr of photos. At least, until Instagram came along.

Also:

The reason we bought Flickr was not the community. We didn’t give a shit about that. The theory behind buying Flickr was not to increase social connections, it was to monetize the image index. It was totally not about social communities or social networking. It was certainly nothing to do with the users.

A long, but interesting read.

How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet →

This movie, built with data collected during ESA Huygens’ mission at Titan on 14 January 2005, shows the operation of the DISR camera during its descent up to touch-down. The almost 4-hour long operation of DISR is shown in less than five minutes – 40 times the actual speed up to landing and 100 times the actual speed thereafter

Wow! For a full explanation of the visualization, ESA has prepared a PDF with all info.

(via Michel)

The only thing Edison truly pioneered was douchebaggery.

Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived →

(via frank)

When a browser vendor implements a new css feature, it should support it, from day 1, both prefixed and unprefixed, the two being aliased. If a style sheet contains both prefixed and unprefixed, the last one wins, according to the cascade.

Authors should write their style sheets using the unprefixed property, and only add a prefixed version of the property (below the unprefixed one) if they discover a bug or inconsistency that they need to work around in a particular browser.

If a large amount of content accumulates using the a particular vendor prefix to work around an issue with the early implementation in that browser, the vendor could decide to freeze the behavior of the prefixed property while continuing to improve the unprefixed one.

Makes sense, but still the problem will exist that many examples that exist now only contain a prefixed version (those “Webkit only”-demos) of a property, breaking in other browsers — hence Opera about to support -webkit prefixes.

Proposition to change the prefixing policy →

With more than $200 million in box office revenue, The Avengers had the most successful first weekend in movie history. It broke the record set by Harry Potter last year by more than $30 million, despite the “massive” piracy.

The Avengers: Why Pirates Failed To Prevent A Box Office Record →

The future is happening, and there’s just nobody paying attention.