Disco Ball Cement Truck
What a fantastic idea for a public art piece! French artist Benedetto Bufalino parked this shiny cement truck in Lyon, France for a few days this month and let it shine brightly for a few hours every night.
Unboxing police cars
I never knew people bothered to "unbox" cars. Here's one that most normal people can't really experience -- unboxing a police car. Although these two vehicles aren't rolling off assembly lines (that's what I would really call an unboxing), they do offer a good look at what is inside a relatively fresh police interceptor or pursuit vehicle. Lots of tech, not a lot of space, not a whole lot of comfort (except for the driver), and more power than their civilian counterparts (in this case, the Ford Explorer and the Chevrolet Caprice).
Best roadtrip routes as determined by machines
This is a great data mining project from Randy Olson who was inspired by Discovery News to plot out the optimal road trip path through every one of the 48 contiguous states.
With 50 landmarks to put in order, we would have to exhaustively evaluate 3 x 10^64
possible routes to find the shortest one.
That's a monumental task for a person, but not quite so big for a computer. So that's where Randy used Google Maps API and machine learning to plot out the map. But he didn't just make one map. He made several, and not just for the United States either (London, Canada, France, and Germany are included too!).
You can visit all 47 National Parks with almost no backtracking (efficient!!!), you can simply step foot in 48 states by visiting 50 major US landmarks, you can even skip the boring parts and go straight for popular destinations in all 48 states!
And if you don't drive, there are walking tours too for NYC and Philadelphia!
Langdon Clay: Cars: New York City, 1974–1976
Every year for Christmas I buy myself a nice little gift -- from me to me. You know, what normal people do. Anyway, I thought about not doing that this year simply because I haven't really had any one thing stick out at me as something that I wanted to treat myself to. But I just saw this Langdon Clay book and maybe this might be a good fit.
The book combines two things I love, NYC and old cars, and presents them as works of art in glorious color filmstock. All the images are shot on Kodachrome on a Leica and are beautifully scanned for presentation. Check out some images below.
HDR Gaming on the Xbox One S with Forza Horizon 3
I am extremely impressed with the Xbox One S's HDR gaming mode. Obviously, you need a game and TV that has HDR capabilities, but once you do, the experience is striking. Everything looks real. Maybe even hyper-real (which is ok for video games in my opinion). Check out this video of Forza Horizon 3 on the Xbox One S utilizing all the most update to date HDR features.
Uber turns on always-on location tracking in their latest app
Well, this is unnerving. Not only did Uber recently make their latest app update have ALWAYS-ON location tracking (it used to be set to only use location when the app was open), but a report says that Uber employees often tracked celebrities, politicians, and friends using the location from the app. Well, goodbye Uber!