Eugenia Loli Archive

Moto 360, a futuristic watch scooped up its share of praise before it'd even landed on store shelves. The now there's also the LG G Watch R, a device which tackles the smartwatch problem from a slightly different angle. Read the review here.

News broke this morning that Google, alongside a number of venture capital firms, led a $542 million investment in a mysterious startup named Magic Leap. The company is promising to "build a rocket ship for the mind" that will completely reinvent the way we experience the world. Founder Rony Abovitz calls his technology "cinematic reality" and says it goes way beyond what virtual or augmented reality have so far been able to accomplish. More at Engadget, and NYT.

When my 3+ year old DELL laptop died a few weeks back, I decided to give Chromebooks a try. So the Acer C720, at just $199, became my new laptop. This is my experience with it so far.

The Acer C720 is similar in specs to other Chromebooks currently on the market. It's a Haswell architecture with a dual core Celeron, 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB flash, HDMI-out, 3 USB, webcam, Bluetooth, and a 1366x768 px screen. It's 0.8" tall, and weighs just 2.76 lbs. Its battery life is rated for 8.5 hours but in real world usage rated at about 7 hours. You can view its specs in detail here.

The laptop feels very light, sturdy and of a good build quality. Its keyboard is easy to get accustomed to, and I had no trouble at all, coming from a radically different keyboard design on the DELL. The ChromeOS function keys are really handy too, e.g. to change brightness, volume etc. The touchpad has the right size, position and responsiveness too.

One of my recent endeavours involves surreal digital collage, which currently has its own, rejuvanated, underground movement. In my search for inspiration I came across a talented artist, _meta_ ("Kim" in real world). At the time Kim happened to only publish his works for his followers on Instagram, so few people has seen his works. The biggest surprise for me was that Kim's artwork doesn't come to life via Photoshop or The Gimp, but via an iPhone 4s. Modern collage works require quite some cutting precision, so I found this fascinating-enough to ask Kim to walk us through his creation process.

By reading various media news in the last year or so, a very disturbing pattern appeared. When media providers like Amazon, Apple, Google, Netfix, Microsoft tried to license content off of Hollywood, they were either given extremely high prices, or they were being rejected altogether. Microsoft even canceled a finished XBoX360-related video product recently because they couldn't license content easily, Netflix is given harder and harder time as time goes by (notice how only a few good movies were added to their streaming service in the last few months), and even the almighty Apple had the door shut on its face numerous times.

Twitter is currently buzzing about the death of Dennis Ritchie, the visionary creator of UNIX and C, among other things. We hope it's just a false rumor. Story developing, we will be updating. Update: Unfortunately, it seems to be confirmed. Rob Pike, co-creator of the Plan 9 and Inferno OSes, who has worked with Ritchie in the past, and he's currently working for Google's GO language, posted this.