Behind the scenes with iFixit tearing down the new iPhone X on launch day

How iFixit Became the World’s Best iPhone Teardown Team

Motherboard: Every year there’s a race to become the first to tear down the phone, with teams from around the world flying to Australia—where it’s first released—to compete to be the first to look inside the world’s most coveted new phone. Motherboard embedded with iFixit, a California-based company whose primary mission is to make it easier for the average person to disassemble and repair their electronics, for its iPhone X teardown.

We went inside iFixit’s office, the “headquarters of the global repair movement, which features a tool laboratory and a parts library with thousands of electronics parts and disassembly tools. Then we went to Sydney, Australia, as iFixit tried to become the first team to tear down the iPhone X.

“Historically the only things that were close to the precision of what you see in an iPhone was in something like a Swiss watch.”

See also

• iFixit’s iPhone X teardown
• Phones for the people — What changes when you stop designing phones for companies and start designing them for people?
• Tractor Hacking: The Farmers Breaking Big Tech’s Repair Monopoly

What makes a ‘high concept’ movie idea?

What Is High Concept? Different Thoughts On Big Movie Ideas

Film Courage: What is a high concept movie idea? It’s something that has been brought up a handful of times in our interviews. We know it can be an elusive topic. Here is the best of what we have, hope you find it helpful.

See also

• Why every Hollywood movie feels the same — Peter Suderman writing for Slate on the 2005 screenwriting book that’s taken over Hollywood—and made every movie feel the same.
• Every story is the same — Will Schoder explains Dan Harmon’s story circle.
• Editing as Punctuation in Film — A video essay by Max Tohline.

The Story of Tetris

Gaming Historian: In 1984, during the Cold War, a Russian programmer named Alexey Pajitnov created something special: A puzzle game called Tetris. It soon gained a cult following within the Soviet Union. A battle for the rights to publish Tetris erupted when the game crossed the Iron Curtain. Tetris not only took the video game industry by storm, it helped break the boundaries between the United States and the Soviet Union.

See also

• Tetris: The Games People Play — A graphic novel by Box Brown telling Alexey Pajitnov’s story.
• Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris — A fun music video.
• PC gaming history: Quake & Doom

Tractor Hacking: The farmers breaking big tech’s repair monopoly

Motherboard: When it comes to repair, farmers have always been self reliant. But the modernization of tractors and other farm equipment over the past few decades has left most farmers in the dust thanks to diagnostic software that large manufacturers hold a monopoly over.

In this episode of State of Repair, Motherboard goes to Nebraska to talk to the farmers and mechanics who are fighting large manufacturers like John Deere for the right to access the diagnostic software they need to repair their tractors.

See also

• ZeroPhone: a $50 Raspberry Pi smartphone — A Pi Zero-based open-source mobile phone that you can assemble for $50 in parts.
• PirateBox is a DIY anonymous offline file-sharing and communications system built with free software and inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware.
• US government framework for handling cyberattacks

The stories maps tell

Entertain the Elk talks about the history of real world maps and the design of the fantasy maps for Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia and Game of Thrones.

Throughout history, maps have always communicated ideas and stories to its audience, but what about maps of fictional worlds? In this video, I examine the maps of Middle Earth (Lord of the Rings), Narnia (The Chronicles of Narnia), and The Known World (Game of Thrones) in order to find the tiny details the mapmakers chose to include that point to their larger stories.

See also

• J.R.R. Tolkien’s annotated map of Middle-earth discovered
  & See the sketches Tolkien used to build Middle-Earth
• Concept art for the Game of Thrones opening title sequence
• Urbano Monte’s remarkable 430-year-old map of the world
  

VHS Distributor Logos

Reagan Ray has compiled an extensive gallery of retro VHS distributor logos on his blog: I was a little surprised to find out that there have been over 2,000 different movie distribution companies since the late 70s. Most of the heavy hitters are still around, but a lot of them are long out of business.

Super Video

Children’s Video Library

Medusa Home Video

Walt Disney Home Video

GoodTimes Home Video

Midnight Home Video

Thorn EMI Video

VCR, Inc.

Trans World Entertainment

Cannon Video

Wizard Video

CIC Video

See the rest →

(via The Latest)

See also

• Reagan Ray: 80s Movie Studio Intros
• The evolution of the Star Wars logo
• The best Logos from the Commodore Amiga Scene

Julia Evans: Blogging principles I use

“I constantly write things on this blog like “I’m not sure about this part…”. I try to not be falsely modest (when I do actually know something, I try to just state it without hedging), but when I don’t know something, I say so.”

See also

• Follow Juila on Twitter: @b0rk
• The Shapes of Stories, a Kurt Vonnegut Infographic
• Lessons about language from a Turkish typewriter

Antineutrino Global Map 2015

The open source AGM2015 provides fundamental data for experiments, assists in strategic detector placement to determine neutrino mass hierarchy, and aids in identifying undeclared nuclear reactors.

“The open access availability of these antineutrino maps represents the next generation of cartography and gives important insights into the basic understanding about the interior of our planet.” Shawn Usman — NGA R&D

“This is what Earth would look like if you could see its glow of neutrinos–from natural radioactivity mostly, but lightly dotted with nuclear reactors. Amazing map. [⋮] Continental rocks are enriched in uranium and thorium, so the continents “glow” in antineutrinos.” — @coreyspowell

Further reading

• NGA.mil: New NGA global map advances R&D in geophysics and nonproliferation
• Nature.com: AGM2015: Antineutrino Global Map 2015
• Ultralytics.com: Interactive Google Earth presentations of the AGM2015 data

See also

• Man wearing gas mask and sandals explores Fukushima’s Exclusion Zone — “The radiation level is still very high in the red zone. not many people seen this town for the last 5 years…is like it vanished … i can find food,money,gold,laptop and other valuable in the red zone….I’m amaze that nobody looted this town clean.”
• Genetic map of the UK shows which invasions created Britain’s DNA — Peter Donnelly and colleagues use such data from a selected geographically diverse sample of more than 2,000 individuals from the United Kingdom to reveal remarkable concordance between genetic clusters and geography.
• What’s up in the Solar System? — A diagram by Olaf Frohn, updated once a month, of active space missions traveling beyond Earth orbit.

Ten letters we dropped from þe alphabet

10 Letters We Dropped From The Alphabet

Austin McConnell: Think you know the English language? Here are 10 letters folks used to use, but didn’t quite stand the test of time. Elemenopee, my homies.

See also

• To be or not to be… original — Shakespeare’s language not as original as dictionaries think.
• Merriam-Webster: How a word gets into the dictionary — An infographic.
• Lessons about language from a Turkish typewriter — by Marcin Wichary, Design lead & typographer at Medium

Urbano Monte’s remarkable 430-year-old map of the world, full of places and creatures, real and imagined

Altas Obscura: Born near Milan in 1544, Urbano Monte lived a life of leisure and luxury. For him, such freedom meant scholarship, and the accumulation of a library renowned in the region. In his early 40s, his interests turned to geography, and a mammoth 20-year effort to synthesize and consolidate everything known of the world’s geography into a few volumes. More than that, he wanted to make a planisphere map of the world “to show the entire earth as close as possible to a three-dimensional sphere using a two-dimensional surface.”

Douglas Trumbull: Lighting the Starship Enterprise

Douglas Trumbull painstakingly crafted the visual effects for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Faced with an impossible timeline, him and his team completed more composites in six months than both Star Wars & Close Encounters of the Third Kind combined.

The first Star Trek film is often jokingly referred to as ‘The Slow Motion Picture’, and this sequence revealing the refitted Enterprise for the first time is by any reasonable standards hugely overlong. But honestly… I love it!

See also: Other posts tagged ‘Star Trek’

The Collection: Letterpress plates for print film advertisments

The Collection

The Collection is a short documentary about two friends, DJ Ginsberg and Marilyn Wagner, and their discovery of an astonishing and unique collection of movie memorabilia, comprised of over 40,000 printer blocks and 20,000 printer plates used to create the original newspaper advertisements for virtually every movie released in the United States from the silent period through 1984, when newspapers stopped using the letterpress format.

The collection, which spans nearly the entire history of the film industry from the silent era to 1984, was recently appraised at ~$10 million and is available for acquisition. (via Kottke)

What appeals to me about this story is less the collection itself, and more the opportunity to enjoy a project like this! To unpack all of these plates, clean them, print them, catalog them… Fun! One day I hope I make a similar discovery.

See also

• The man who made some of cinema’s most iconic movie titles — Title designer Dan Perri explains how he designed movie titles for films such as “Star Wars,” “The Exorcist,” and “Raging Bull.”
• The Great 78 Project — The Internet Archive will soon be home to hundreds of thousands of audio recordings that would otherwise be lost forever.
• Movie posters in motion — Wonderful animated movie posters by Pablo Fernández Eyre.

If Birds Left Tracks in the Sky, They’d Look Like This

National Geographic: If birds left tracks in the sky, what would they look like? For years Barcelona-based photographer Xavi Bou has been fascinated by this question.

Ultimately he chose to work with a video camera, from which he extracts high-resolution photographs. After he films the birds in motion, Bou selects a section of the footage and layers the individual frames into one image.

This current work, he says, combines his passion and his profession. “It’s technical, challenging, artistic, and natural. It’s the connection between photography and nature that I was looking for.”

See also

• Movile Cave: The unique life isolated deep underground for 5.5 million years — “Almost 30 years after its discovery, Movile Cave remains perhaps the most isolated ecosystem on the planet.”
• Timelapse: The “slow life” of a coral reef, sped up — Time lapse cinematography reveals a whole different world full of hypnotic motion.
• Pigeons are gross. They’re also wildly underrated.

The Internet, as photographed by ​Peter Garritano

Quietly tucked away in a few unassuming buildings in lower Manhattan, massive flows of data pulse through some of the world’s largest and most heavily guarded hubs of global internet infrastructure.

​Peter Garritano is a photographer based in New York City.

See also

• The seven keys to the internet — “It sounds like the stuff of science fiction: seven keys, held by individuals from all over the world, that together control security at the core of the web. James Ball joins a private ceremony, and finds the reality is rather closer to The Office than The Matrix.”
• Ye olde submarine cable map — TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map has been updated for 2015. The latest edition depicts 299 cable systems that are currently active, under construction, or expected to be fully-funded by the end of 2015.
• The 10 Immutable Laws of Computer Security, by Scott Culp c.2000

DIY animator’s stopwatch with Arduino

Mateusz Urbanowicz:

Just me making another DIY solution for my work. This time a stopwatch that counts time not in seconds and milliseconds but seconds and frames.

See also: Mateusz Urbanowicz’s incredible watercolour paintings of Tokyo storefronts

The Smash Brothers: How it became a competitive phenomenon, a documentary

The Smash Brothers documentary series

The Smash Brothers is a 9-part documentary series about seven of the greatest “smashers” of all time. Through years-long rivalries spanning coasts and countries, discover the passion for a game which started as a casual experience only to become a heart-pounding competitive lifestyle.

• Watch the YouTube playlist
• A history of ‘Doom’ & ‘Quake’.
• The Death & Rebirth of Final Fantasy XIV — A Noclip documentary series.

Why an elbow is one of Time magazine’s people of 2017

Why this elbow is a Time Person of the Year

Vox: That elbow in the lower right-hand corner is attached to a young hospital worker from Texas, who anonymously reported her harassment for fear of the negative impact it could have on her and her family. It represents a much larger contingent than the women on the cover: the silence keepers.

The Story Behind the Woman You Don’t See…

Time: The worker, who made a sexual harassment complaint anonymously, told TIME she remembers vivid details about what happened to her, and she couldn’t stop wondering whether she could have prevented the encounter. She said: “I thought, What just happened? Why didn’t I react? I kept thinking, Did I do something, did I say something, did I look a certain way to make him think that was O.K.?”

See also: Other posts tagged ‘equality’.

The Great 78 Project

The Outline: The Great 78 Project is preserving our sonic past

The Internet Archive will soon be home to hundreds of thousands of audio recordings that would otherwise be lost forever.

George Blood’s four-armed turntable

Zoë Beery: So, the original set of records that started this project off came from the Internet Archive itself. Since they’re known for hosting so much old stuff, the guy who founded it, Brewster Kahle, has just slowly accumulated 78s over the years, from museums, libraries, collectors, anybody who has it and is like, “Oh, they like old stuff. Maybe I’ll give it to him!”

• The Great 78 Project — a partnership with New York’s Archive of Contemporary Music and the Internet Archive.
• What is the function of music? — “I feel like I should have a really good answer for this, but somehow I also feel that the question is wrong.”
• Extended score for Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan… new on vinyl!

How Star Wars was saved in the edit

A video essay exploring how Star Wars’ editors recut and rearranged Star Wars: A New Hope to create the cinematic classic it became.

This RocketJump video essay has been doing the rounds, but it’s well worth watching if you haven’t seen it. It is full of examples that demonstrate the power of editing and includes some quality Star Wars trivia and fascinating deleted scene footage.

• Samuel R. Delany’s 1977 review of the original Star Wars — “This film is going to do very well, if not phenomenally so…”
• The Plinkett Test: How to sort characters from cut-outs — Game critic and writer Andy Kelly uses a clever test to identify if characters in video games he plays actually qualify as characters.
• ILM’s concept art for ‘The Force Awakens’ — “Out of our brainstorming sessions emerged visual imagery of where we might want to go and what it would look like when we got there.”

Goodbye uncanny valley

Alan Warburton: It’s 2017 and computer graphics have conquered the Uncanny Valley, that strange place where things are almost real… but not quite. After decades of innovation, we’re at the point where we can conjure just about anything with software. The battle for photoreal CGI has been won, so the question is… what happens now?

The future of visual effects

The Daily Conversation:

The future of visual effects in films, TV, and VR; from crossing the uncanny valley in human animation, to light-field camera technology that will change the way moving images are captured.

Scoring DOOM: Mick Gordon on his amazing 2016 game soundtrack

DOOM: Behind the Music

GDC: In this 2017 session, Doom composer Mick Gordon provides a detailed look into the compositional process, production techniques and creative philosophies behind the hell-raising soundtrack to the 4th installment of the seminal first-person shooter franchise, Doom.

This is one of the best talks I’ve seen on the GDC YouTube channel! In addition to the new Doom game, Mick Gordon has composed music for the new Wolfenstein games and Prey. In his talk Gordon covers a lot of ground, including how he approached the brief, making satisfying bass come across on unsatisfactory equipment, hiding subliminal messages and courage vs. confidence.

See also

• A history of Doom — If you had a PC — you had to have Doom.
• The art of Firewatch — A recreation of Jane Ng’s talk from Game Developers Conference 2015.
• Black MIDI — Have you ever been listening to a normal song and thought, “I really wish this normal song had 280 million notes and took up 1.1 terabytes of data and was literally unplayable on any computer?”

The Death & Rebirth of Final Fantasy XIV

The Death & Rebirth of FINAL FANTASY XIV Part #1 – “One Point O”

Noclip: In the first video in our three-part series, we tell the story of how the 1.0 version of FINAL FANTASY 14 came to be. How FINAL FANTASY 11 inspired its design, the ways in which the game fell short and how Square-Enix and the development team reacted to its failure.

See also: Other posts tagged ‘games’.

How Andrew Saladino makes his video essays

Push Process

The Royal Ocean Film Society: I’ve been asked a lot what the process of making these essays is like, but rather than just droll on about recording voiceover, late night editing sessions, and falling into despair upon seeing the first cut, I want to take these few minutes to talk about how that working process has evolved creatively over the past year, and about where I’m trying to take these essays in the future.

See also

• Cutting on sound: David Lean’s scene transitions — Despite whatever presets there are in Premiere, scene transitions are not limited to wipes, fades, or dissolves.
• Explore the ‘filmmaking’ tag or my new ‘video essay’ tag for lots more like this.

How to make a blockbuster movie trailer

Auralnauts: We provide you with the winning formula that turns any trailer into the blockbuster smash hit of the season it was meant to be.

See also

• Five ways movie trailers are all the same
• How to make a movie trailer (a song)
• The history of the movie trailer
• Other posts tagged ‘trailers’

Hitler rehearsing, 1925

Mashable: Hitler asked his personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann to take photos of him rehearsing speeches. Hitler would try out various gestures and expressions, then review the pictures to see if his postures looked stunning or stupid.

Though Hitler ordered Hoffmann to destroy the pictures for being “beneath one’s dignity,” the photographer kept them in his studio. He later published the photos in his memoir, Hitler Was My Friend.

See also: Hitler was high during most of World War II

ZeroPhone

Hackaday blog: There are several open source phones out there these days, but all of them have a downside. Hard to obtain parts, hard to solder, or difficult programming systems abound. [Arsenijs] is looking to change all that with ZeroPhone. ZeroPhone is based upon the popular Raspberry Pi Zero. The $5 price tag of the CPU module means that you can build this entire phone for around $50 USD.

Features:

• Raspberry Pi Zero in a PCB sandwich
• No proprietary connectors, hard-to-get parts or chips that are tricky to solder
• All the specifications for making this phone yourself will be available
• Python as the main language for developing apps (aiming to add other languages later)
• UI toolkit making development quicker and easier
• Numeric keypad, 1.3" 128×64 monochrome OLED screen (with screen header supporting other types of screens)
• 2G modem for phone functions, can be replaced with a 3G modem
• WiFi (using an ESP8266), HDMI and audio outputs, a free USB host port
• GPIO expansion headers for customization
• RGB LED and vibromotor – for notifications
• Tons of Pi Zero-related hacks that were discovered along the way, that I'll share with you as the project goes =)

See also: Other posts tagged ‘Raspberry Pi’ & Phones for the people

Inkwell, by Hoefler & Co.

A tiny universe of fonts that combines the informality of handwriting, the expressiveness of lettering, and the versatility of type.

This typeface family is gorgeous. I am itching to use it for some publication!

Typefaces, by design, are unyielding in their style: a good typeface commits to a single visual idea, and explores it with thoroughness and consistency to produce a dependable tool for designers. Contrast this with handwriting, which serves only to record the thoughts of an author, but has the freedom to move from style to style as the message dictates. A writer might scribble a paragraph in cursive handwriting, but punctuate key points with capitals, or backtrack to over-ink some crucial point with darker and more deliberate strokes. It’s a flexibility that makes handwritten communications compelling, and makes the medium of writing infinitely expressive. By comparison, typography can feel almost stifling.

Time for Sushi

Directed by David Lewandowski. Previously: going to the store and late for meeting.

Stick around until the end of this video for some ads for the incredible goods on offer in the official store of Lewandowski’s channel: goingtothe.store.

The future of independent, artisanal, high-effort nonsense on YouTube is uncertain. I appreciate your choice to support this work with the purchase of my unusual merch.

Deluxe Dakimakura Body Pillow

Enjoy the intersection of luxury and comfort in this Japanese-style body pillow. The 160 x 50cm pillowcase is made from durable, silky 2-way tricot material.

The incredible $90,000 Premium Edition Chess Set

Remember that time you watched that YouTube video? Why not commemorate the experience with a premium chess set carved in ethically sourced arctic mammoth ivory and rare meteorite alloy. Handcrafted by artisans specializing in these elements for a combined 38 years, this product reflects a dedication to premium YouTube memorabilia.

There are other more modest items too, like towels and pillow cases.

See also

• History of Japan — By Bill Wurtz.
• The Chickening — An insane remix of The Shining.
• Still File: Real recreations of computer renderings
• The business of GIFs: Then and now
• Master Works: Beautiful and unusual chess sets

Roman Roads

Sasha Trubetskoy: It’s finally done. A subway-style diagram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire of ca. 125 AD.
Creating this required far more research than I had expected—there is not a single consistent source that was particularly good for this. Huge shoutout to: Stanford’s ORBIS model, The Pelagios Project, and the Antonine Itinerary.

I’m not a big fan of the ‘fantasy subway map’ genre, but it’s the research and real data that make this one special. I think I’m going to order the PDF to print my own! (via kottke)

See also

• Genetic map of the UK shows which invasions created Britain’s DNA — Britain has a long history of invasions: over the past two millennia, various armies from the Romans to the Anglo-Saxons conquered the bulk of the British Isles. A new genetic analysis of the country has revealed which invading force had the greatest impact on its DNA.
• Mini Metros — Peter Dovak — a graphic designer and self-confessed ‘lifelong transit nerd’ — has shrunken and simplified 220 metro and light rail maps from around the world to produce this fun poster.
• Anglo Saxon London, mapped — a map showing the London area in Anglo Saxon times (roughly speaking, 500－1066AD)