Posts Tagged ‘romance’
HTC rekindles its old Microsoft romance and bets on Windows Phone 8
Author: Nancy Kennedy
High Tech Computer (HTC) has grown up with Microsoft, from the old HTC-built iPAQ’s running on Microsoft’s Pocket PC operating system, to the Orange SPV — Microsoft’s first Windows smartphone. The Taiwanese company has always been a loyal aid to the software giant, but lately that close relationship has started to feel a little dated. HTC’s investment in Android and its Sense user interface has taken precedent over its initial work with Windows Mobile, and the company’s Windows Phone flagships have been impressive, but overshadowed by Nokia’s colorful Lumia range and partnership with Microsoft. That all appears to be changing though.
“We’re super excited about being there for the next launch.”
Speaking to The Verge recently, HTC’s…
Incoming search terms:
Related Posts:
Amazon and Avalon in a tree, publishing romance books di-gi-tal-ly
Author: Charity Woods
Amazon Publishing and long-running book-maker Avalon now has more in common than rhyme schemes. The pair have struck up a deal to publish over 3,00 titles from the publisher’s back-catalogue, broaching its romance, mystery and western genres. It’ll be the first time that these books will be digitized and, well, Oprah’s always looking for stuff to read.
Continue reading Amazon and Avalon in a tree, publishing romance books di-gi-tal-ly
Amazon and Avalon in a tree, publishing romance books di-gi-tal-ly originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 05 Jun 2012 16:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | 
Amazon | Email this | Comments
Related Posts:
Study shows love for music relates to brain chemical, not to My Chemical Romance
Author: Mark Jeffries
Study shows love for music relates to brain chemical, not to My Chemical Romance originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 Jan 2011 01:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | PhysOrg | Email this | Comments
Engadget
Related Posts:
In the Kitchen with Roger Ebert & A Rice Cooker
Author: Eric Moss
Promotional photo via rogerebert.com.
Roger Ebert’s blog is consistently so smart, warm, and well-written — not just about movies, but about books, politics, biography (auto & regular), and more — that it didn’t surprise me in the slightest when he started writing about how much he loved his rice cooker. His rice cooker posts were likewise so funny, intelligent, and passionate that it doesn’t surprise me that Ebert’s written a cookbook, titled The Pot and How to Use It: The Mystery and Romance of the Rice Cooker. (You can preorder it now; it should be in stores later this month.)
Ebert’s 2008 post sporting the same title lays out the book’s program:
First, get the Pot. You need the simplest rice cooker made. It comes with two speeds: Cook, and Warm. Not expensive. Now you’re all set to cook meals for the rest of your life on two square feet of counter space, plus a chopping block. No, I am not putting you on the Rice Diet. Eat what you like. I am thinking of you, student in your dorm room. You, solitary writer, artist, musician, potter, plumber, builder, hermit. You, parents with kids. You, night watchman. You, obsessed computer programmer or weary web-worker. You, lovers who like to cook together but don’t want to put anything in the oven. You, in the witness protection program. You, nutritional wingnut. You, in a wheelchair.
Rice cookers really are ingenious, versatile little devices. They bring liquid to a boil, cook whatever’s inside, then shut themselves off. Add a microwave, crock pot, and toaster oven, and you can cook almost anything without cleaning a pan, reaching for an egg timer, or worrying about leaving something on too long ever again.
The Secrets of the Pot [Roger Ebert's Journal/Chicago Sun-Times] and Roger Ebert: No Longer an Eater, Still a Cook [New York Times]
See Also:
- Sous Vide Supreme Countertop Immersion Circulator
- Wired 12.06: The Thermochemical Joy of Cooking
- Pixelated Grill for Close-Up Cooking
- America's Test Kitchen for the Nintendo DSI XL Makes Cooking With …
- Touch-Sensitive Cooker Detect Pans, Changes Shape
See the rest here:
In the Kitchen with Roger Ebert & A Rice Cooker
Related Posts:
Tags: Book, changes-shape, Ebert, Food, Household, Music, roger-ebert, romance, Space, started-writing | 
No Comments »Put. The Kraken. Back!
Author: Tyler Evans
Photo: Warner Brothers
My kids, my wife and I have been saying “Release the Kraken” for months now, ever since we saw the commercial for the new Clash of the Titans movie. At baseball games when the boys are batting, we yell “Release the Kraken!” We were very excited to hear Bruno Tonioli say it on Dancing with the Stars.
As a family, we enjoyed the original movie from 1981, which definitely had geek appeal. The special effects were, well, not up to today’s standards, but overall the movie followed the original mythology (more or less) and was effective storytelling.
Last night we Redboxed the new version and made it into a family movie night. We weren’t willing to go see this in the movie theater, partly because I can’t go to a 3D movie without feeling like I’m getting ripped off to rent a pair of glasses that don’t add much to my experience. For a family of six, the ticket prices add up fast.
If the first movie was all about Ray Harryhausen’s animation, Harry Hamlin’s big curls, and the original mythology, the new version is all about Sam Worthington and a big pile of computer animation. The story is almost entirely new and does not correspond to what my mythology geek wife knows about Perseus. The writers started with the same set of characters and pulled a different story out of somewhere. Sure, it’s got giant scorpions, but what about the romance between Perseus and Andromeda? What about Perseus’s origin story?
Sam Worthington shows the same dramatic range as Russell Crowe in Gladiator, which is to say he scowls and looks dirty and sweaty through most of the movie. You would think it would be a better movie, with Liam Neeson as Zeus and Ralph Fiennes as Hades, but even their talents aren’t enough to push this film past mediocre.
Something about the cast jogged my memory, and late at night I realized that the last time I saw Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes together was in Schindler’s List, which makes Clash of the Titans look positively puny. C’mon, Ralph, I’m sure you’re glad to get your nose back, but you should really have a different voice for Hades and Voldemort.
Was it worth the $1.08 we spent on it? Maybe. In the end, we might have been better off watching the curls and claymation of the original.
Here is the original post:
Put. The Kraken. Back!
Related Posts:
Geeks of Note: Meg Cabot Embraces the “Geek†Label
Author: Margo Tipton
Meg Cabot admits it. She’s a total geek.
I had the pleasure of interviewing the bestselling author while attending the Romance Writers of America conference in Orlando in late July. In person, she’s is like a grown-up version of her writing voice: friendly, open, irreverent and very smart.
Cabot is the author of the Princess Diaries series and the young adult paranormal Mediator and Avalon High series. Her latest book for adults is Insatiable, a modern retelling of the Dracula story from Mina Harker’s point of view. We talked about her books, her readers, Harry Potter, e piracy and her love of Macs, not necessarily in that order.
I had heard her speak at a previous RWA luncheon where she talked about her love of science fiction, so the first question I asked was if she considered herself a geek.
Her answer was affirmative. She’d just visited the new Wizarding World of Harry Potter attraction at Universal Studios in Florida which she enjoyed very much, with some reservations.
“You have to tell them [Geek Dad's readers] about this because they’ll want to know,” she said. “The ride through Hogwarts [Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey] is not in HD and if you’re going to wait two hours, the video shouldn’t be fuzzy.”
She wished  the ride had included more of the fun stuff from the books along with the scary stuff. “There was no dining hall, no moving stairs, no Harry & Ron’s bedroom.” She did decide to sort herself into Hufflepuff during the ride, however. She has a longer review of the entire visit at her blog.
When we moved onto her books, I told her that I’d noticed something of a transformation trend in her writing: for young readers and  young adults: the girl on the outside, sometimes a geek, is transformed through adventure and experience to a person with more confidence. Or, in the case of the Airhead series, is literally transformed into a supermodel. Sorta of a geek fairy tale.
I asked her if this was based a bit on her experiences.
“I was a freak, I had no friends,” she said with a smile. “You could say some of the heroines in my books are like that too. But that doesn’t mean the beautiful girls are always bad and the others always good. Sometimes, it’s complicated. You could say that you can’t always judge things from the outside.”
Cabot isn’t a mother herself but she did once work as a resident assistant in a dorm and now she’s sort of the de facto cool aunt to many of her readers. (I certainly got a zillion cool mom points for interviewing her from my eldest daugher.)
I asked Cabot if she felt responsible to her underage audience because her books have influenced so many.
“I do get so many emails, tweets, and messages from my readers and there are a lot of questions about boys and all the other issues growing up. We try to get to as many as we can. Unfortunately, some of them are fleeting questions that we don’t get to in time, like ’should I ask this boy out tonight.’”
Cabot loves that her readers are from all over. “I also get emails from Muslim readers and girls in Dubai and other parts of the world,” she said. I related that my eldest daughter has an internet friend her own age who lives in Dubai.
“They are a huge readership there and it’s so great,” Cabot said and said she had planned to attend a young adult book conference in Dubai last year that was, unfortunately, canceled. She said it’s very hopeful that New York University has opened in extension college in Dubai. “So many young women and girls are hungry for learning but their parents are naturally wary of sending them so far away to a place that seems so different. So this is good.”
I asked her if she worries much about internet piracy but she said it’s hard for her to get too concerned. “I was at the Rio Book Fair last year and they don’t even have access to iTunes. They can’t download legally in many of these places so they feel they have a right to them. The publishers really need to get the answer on this and I’m totally supportive of something like iTunes for books.”
I asked what type of technology she uses for her writing.
“I have a Mac everything. Macbooks, iMac, iPods…” she said. “I switched after I had a whole book I was working on [on of the Avalon High stories] eaten by a PC virus.”
I told her that some Geek Dad readers would point out that maybe she wasn’t protecting the PC well enough. She shook her head, animated. “Oh, no, you tell them I did all the right things and I still had problems. Now I just use Macs.”
For the latest news on Cabot, check her website . She also has a very active forums page on the website where readers can ask her questions.
Read more:
Geeks of Note: Meg Cabot Embraces the “Geek†Label
Related Posts:
Tags: Air, armchair geek, ATT, avalon-high, cabot, eldest, florida, iMac, LED, Love, meg cabot, Places, romance, science-fiction |
No Comments »iPad misses out on Office romance, but gains a $900 app and more
Author: Brandon Zimmerman
Stephen Elop, el presidente of Microsoft’s business division has stated that his company has “no current plans” to port its Office productivity suite over to the iPad. Contenting itself with a “wait and see” approach, the Redmond outfit isn’t willing to completely close the door of possibility, but earlier hopes of seeing family favorites like Word and Excel on the iPad might have to be doused for the time being. Should that hamper the enjoyment of your new slate, you might want to console yourself with the extravagantly priced SiteClone Publisher, also available for the iPhone, which converts $900 of your hard-earned cashola into a tool that downloads data off particular sites while online, so that the user may access that content even without a connection. Doesn’t sound worthy of a tenth of its price, but maybe the government and corporate entities it’s aimed at will appreciate it more. Finally, Apple Insider is reporting whispers that Apple retail employees will be getting freebie iPads at some indeterminate point in the future, while NeoSmart has a particularly insightful breakdown of the differences between PowerPC, x86, and ARM CPU instruction sets. Hit up the links below for the full edifying experience.
iPad misses out on Office romance, but gains a $900 app and more originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 04 Apr 2010 19:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | Business Week, Wired, Apple Insider, NeoSmart | Email this | Comments
Props to Engadget
