Tech Hacker U

Friday, January 2, 2015

The MacGyver intro is so much funnier without the theme song

I'm packing for next week's CES. I have a toothbrush, some toothpaste, a stack of button-up shirts, and a few pairs of pants. But if I were MacGyver I wouldn't need any of this. All I need are my wits and what's on my back. Hell, I wouldn't even need to attend CES. The new technology of billion dollar corporations would have nothing on my clump of lent, used razor, and half pound of chewed bubble gum.

This version of the MacGyver intro, which replaces the All-American theme song with goofy sound effects, makes me love the character even more. He's like a cross between Indiana Jones, an IT manager, and Dad.

Here's what to expect from CES 2015

With 2014 now firmly in the rearview mirror, the tech industry is gearing up to start 2015 off with a bang as it gathers for the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This grand-scale exhibition of the near future attracts thousands of companies and hundreds of thousands of attendees every January, setting the tone for the year ahead. CES amplifies the trends that are coming and exposes the ones that are fading. Last year, it was the stage for a spectacular deluge of new wearable devices, spanning the full gamut from a basketball shooting coach to a wrist-worn speaker. There were also bendable TVs, self-driving cars, and Sony’s ultra-ambitious PlayStation Now cloud gaming initiative.

Director Michael Bay also etched into our...

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Box office attendance hits lowest level in 19 years

Americans bought 1.26 billion movie tickets in 2014, according to preliminary estimates published by The Hollywood Reporter . It sounds like a big number, but for the film industry, it's frighteningly low — a five percent decline since last year, and the largest year-over-year drop in nearly a decade. Most importantly, it's the lowest attendance figure since 1995, suggesting dire news for a film industry still struggling with digital piracy.

Montblanc announces e-Strap watchband to smarten up traditional watches

As smartwatches from Apple and Google threaten to take a bite out of the market for traditional watches, older brands are stuck playing defense. But how do add features like notifications and health-tracking to a watch that still runs on gears and springs?

These four spacey tracks are built out of NASA rocket noises

When NASA first joined Soundcloud back in October, sample-minded musicians everywhere took notice. Suddenly, there was a vast resource of rocket sounds, radio transmissions, and otherwise space-related audio tracks from the NASA archive. Now, we're starting to see some of the music that's come out of it. This four-track EP from Bad Panda is built entirely out of NASA sounds, with the fuzzy rocket roars serving as kick drums and radio whines turned into remarkably poignant leads. The artists were only allowed to use sounds from the NASA archive, so every sound you hear started life in the archive, however crazily it was pitch-bent and processed in between.

Music streaming and vinyl boomed in 2014, but everything else tanked

We're less than a day past 2014, and Nielsen has already released its summary of what 2014 meant to the music business. Overall, the news was bad: total US album sales dropped 11 percent, a shortfall of 32 million, ending up at 257 million albums sold. Even digital sales weren't immune to the trend, falling nine percent since 2013 to only 106 million total sales in 2014. The only bright spot was vinyl sales, which grew more than 50 percent to a total of 9.2 million sales, the highest year for vinyl sales since Nielsen began tracking them in 1991.

Twitter starts rolling out 'while you were away' recap to users

Twitter's taking a slight turn away from the chronological structure it's stuck to for so long. Just as the company outlined in November, it's now starting to roll out a new "While you were away" feature that recaps tweets you've missed since last opening the app and surfaces them at the top of your timeline. It's not entirely clear how Twitter picks and chooses which tweets are worthy of the special treatment, though presumably metrics like retweets and favorites factor in. "Every time you open the Twitter app, you’ll see something great," the company said of the feature in November.