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Schiit Audio reveals gorgeous six-watt Lyr headphone amplifier, dares you to touch 11
Just kidding. In fact, Schiit Audio won't be responsible if you do wind it to 11 and blow the ear tips right off of your favorite canalphones. The drop-dead sexy box that you're peering at above is the Lyr, a hybrid (tube-MOSFET) headphone amplifier that claims to have zero feedback and more power than most headphones will ever have use for. This guy's pumping out six solid watts into 32 ohms, while loads of rivals are dabbling in milliwatts. It's relying on JJ ECC88 tubes for the input stage and touts less than 0.1 percent THD, and it'll be produced in the US of A using components that were also primarily sourced from American suppliers. It's expected to start shipping in March of 2011, but those already sold on it can commit $449 to a pre-order. And before you ask -- yes, the company name is hilarious. Ha. Ha.
Apple engineer uses Lego to rebuild ancient Greek mechanism, will surely try to patent it (video)
The Antikythera Mechanism is what you call truly old school technology. Argued to be the world's oldest known computer, this ancient Greek invention was used some time circa 100BC to calculate and "predict celestial events and eclipses with unprecedented accuracy." Skipping past the two millennia in which it lay lost on a sea floor somewhere, the Mechanism has now been recreated by an Apple software engineer by the name of Andrew Carol, who has lovingly pieced 1,500 Lego Technic blocks together, creating 110 gears and four gearboxes in total. Each box is responsible for performing one piece of arithmetic, and when the resulting machine is fed with appropriate calendar data, it spits out a (hopefully accurate) prediction for the next time a solar eclipse should occur. All well and good, but we're really just amazed by the beauty of those gears working. Check them out after the break.
App review: Infinity Blade (iPhone)
Aww, would you look at that, the iPhone's trying to play big boy games! Following in the well received footsteps of Rage HD, today marks the debut of Infinity Blade, the second in what's hopefully a wave of gorgeous-looking iOS games boasting advanced 3D graphics, if not 3D gameplay. Epic Games has put aside the chainsaw-equipped projectile weaponry of its wildly successful Gears of War console series to deliver the first mobile game built around its Unreal Engine 3. You won't be surprised to hear that it's utterly delicious to look at, and the visuals certainly helped transport us to this alien realm of swords, axes, shields, and magical rings -- where body armor is optional, but helmets apparently are not. Jump past the break to see this visual feast in motion and to soak up some more of our impressions. %Gallery-110231%
TUAW's Daily App: Expenditure
Expenditure is another great-looking app found via the excellent Well-Placed Pixels blog. It's an expense tracker -- you can add transactions into the app with just a few taps (and even attach a photo, note, or category to each debit or credit), and then browse your collected budget. Obviously, you could use it to just see how much you're spending each month, but it can also be used for things like traveling (the app will automatically calculate currencies for you) or keeping track of business expenses. It's not a super full-featured business application, but it will do the basics smoothly and beautifully. You can find it on the App Store for US$1.99, and as an iTunes commenter points out, using it will probably save you the $2 you spend on it. There is a lite version that only allows eight transactions (enough to see the app in action, though not enough to actually put it to use), so if you're not sure about spending a couple of bucks, you can check it out that way as well. Excellent app -- the functionality is a little limited (by design -- the developers just wanted a simple expense tracker), but the great aesthetic and design elements make up for the simplicity.
The requisite announcement mashup
With every Apple event, we need someone to go in and edit together all of the reality distortion field generators, and this time, it's Neil Curtis, who has cut together most of the "amazing," "great," and "beautiful" adjectives from last week's keynote. Unfortunately, we don't have empirical data (anyone want to actually count up all of them?), but it sure seems to me like "great" and "gorgeous" had a big increase this time around, and "incredible" and "terrific" didn't show up quite so much as previous events. Also: no boom? Did we not get a single "boom" at all? It was a little more serene demonstration than usual, with Steve lounging on a chair to show off how comfy it is to browse the 'net on the iPad, but the A4 processor didn't inspire a single "boom"? That's disappointing. [via FSJ]
Braid comes to the Mac
You have to admit: for all of the gaming woes that the Mac faithful has suffered, there's fortunately never been a shortage of great indie games for us to play. Aquaria made it to our platform, World of Goo appeared pretty early on, and now Braid, Jonathan Blow's terrific deconstruction of Super Mario Bros., has appeared on OS X thanks to the kind folks over at Hothead Games. The game has won more awards than you can count, but I can personally tell you it's great, as I played the XBLA release when it first arrived. It's a classic 2D platformer in the vein of Mario with a very important twist: you can reverse, slow, and replay time throughout the various levels. That twist results in an extremely artistic game that takes apart the original Mario story and ends up with something very much more beautiful and sad."Artistic"? "Beautiful"? "Sad"? Can I say these things about a videogame? Of course I can -- Braid stands in a class of its own as an experience that uses art and gameplay together to tell quite a story. If you're a fan of innovative games or just great interactive experiences, and haven't played through it yet (it's fairly short, maybe six hours at the most), it's definitely worth a look. The Greenhouse is selling the Mac or PC versions for $14.95.
The 15 most beautiful Hunter pets
We hunters love our animal companions, especially Beast Mastery hunters -- many of us view the synergy between beast and master as the biggest reason for choosing this class, and we identify as much with the animal as with the humanoid. Big Red Kitty, arguably the most famous hunter in the world, is a case in point: so much of who he is would be much less clear if he had chosen the name "Short Red Dwarf." The image of dwarf and cat (Hobbes) together is an essential part of his hunter persona.So it's no surprise that so many hunters are willing to go to such great lengths to get the pet that looks just right. Many hunters are willing to spend hours just waiting and waiting in order to find that one special most beautiful pet, and why not? After all, the look of our character will change lots of times as we upgrade our gear, but our beautiful pet will stay more or less the same -- it's worthwhile to put a bit of extra effort into making it look nice.But which pets look the best? Below, I present to you the award winners in the category of Most Beautiful Pets! Check out the gallery below for a look at each pet and a short description of where you can find it.(But what's that you say? You don't care if your pet is pretty or not? You want something that will scare the pants off your enemy? Stay tuned -- winners in the Most Intimidating Pets category are coming up!)%Gallery-36366%
One Shots: Enjoy the silence
Today's One Shot features this lovely Guild Wars vista courtesy of our own Jonathan Northwood. As the weather this time of year is erratic at best, we figured it was a good time to share some lovely fall foliage for those of us whose weather may be less than optimal, or perhaps in an area that never sees the trees change in fall. Of course, don't let the pretty image fool you -- apparently this is a pretty nasty area with beasties at every turn. Still, you can't beat the view. Have a gorgeous screenshot from your favorite MMO? Perhaps you're more the battle type and could send us some screens of you and your friends laying the smack down. Whatever the story is, send it (and a blurb about it, if you would) to us here at oneshots@massively.com. Your image and story could be featured next! %Gallery-9798%
EVE Online is really pretty
I think this is the best shot in CrazyKinux's must see top ten favorites of EVE Online screenshots. Say what you will about EVE's pungent mix of trading, combat, and spaceship destruction (every time I turn around, people are saying they've lost their ships in EVE Online), but there is no question that the game is a work of art. Everywhere you turn, there's an amazing nebula or a breaktaking planet for your ship to pose in front of.And if you like those ten, CrazyKinux has also put a whole Flickr set of his favorites online for your perusing pleasure. Experience the universe of EVE the way it probably should be experienced more often-- all of the beauty, none of the ISK worries.
Is "ugly" the new beautiful, and "evil" the new good? [Updated]
I have a question for all the Horde and warlock players out there -- as well as anyone who plays their character in a so-called "evil" way. But first, let me explain where I'm coming from.As you know, one of the main differences between the Alliance and the Horde is their sense of style. In fact, the question of what looks and feels good to players of either side may be one of the biggest areas of disagreement that actually exists between them. To a lesser extent, this sort of disagreement exists between classes as well. Warlocks give off a very different feeling from Paladins for example, and different people are attracted to each sort of "aura."Like many players, my sense of aesthetics and beauty fits in squarely on one side of this aesthetic equation, and the other side can be rather difficult for me to understand. I play in the Alliance, and my favorite races are usually the ones that are "beautiful" and noble-looking in a traditional sense. To me personally, the Horde races are hard to relate to.I do sometimes start up a Horde character if I have a funny idea for roleplaying him or her, but eventually something about them starts to bother me. Now that the Horde has prettier blood elves to play, I admit this helped me a lot -- I am gradually leveling up a blood elf alt in my free time -- but somehow being a blood elf in the Horde feels rather out of place, as if I'm not really part of the Horde because I'm not hunched over with a ready-to-kill look on my face. For a long time I couldn't play a warlock either for similar reasons. The class just seemed inherently evil; summoning demons and stealing people's souls seemed wrong somehow. Even though I knew it's just a fantasy game, I still had no desire to mimic in the game something that would be abhorrent to me in real life. I often wondered: what is attractive about the look and feel of these characters to Horde and warlock players?
TUAW Hands On with the Apple Keyboard
Yesterday I took a little trip down to my local Apple Store (the Michigan Ave. store here in Chicago) to check out the Keyboard. That's what Apple is calling their latest engineering marvel-- not the iBoard or the MacBoard, just Keyboard. I got a chance to check out the new iMac, and play with the new iLife apps for a bit, then I cracked open TextEdit and started typing. So what did I think? I wasn't kidding when I called it an engineering marvel-- the Keyboard is unlike any other keyboard I've seen. It is extremely, almost dangerously thin-- Apple is already making stuff the width of cardboard, and pretty soon they'll move on to paper-thin. It's not actually flexible, but I got the feeling that if I really tried (or just landed a heavy phonebook on it), I could break it in two. Probably not true, but I still felt that way.But you don't buy a keyboard for its durability-- you buy it to type on, and that's where I ran into problems.
Flickr Find: Geek Your Earings, PowerBook Style
TUAW reader Scott Benson pointed us to these fab-u-lous earrings made from the power buttons of two old Powerbook cases. After drilling a hole in the tab, they make a beautiful and geekalicious pair of earrings. From an Apple-female-wise karma-point-of-view, these earrings go a long way towards making up for the fact that the iPhone was designed in a way that forces women to trim their fingernails or otherwise tupe loke this. [Via Treehugger]
Beauty-rating software could spell trouble for Hot or Not
Facial recognition software has been used in a smorgasbord of positive applications, aiding our soldiers in detecting baddies, keeping weirdos out of clubs, barring maniacs from entering football arenas, and even helping parents know when their infant is truly in a bad way, but the latest usage of the technology could indeed hurt the feelings of the less-than-attractive. A pair of controversy-lovin' Australian scientists have devised a software program that actually rates one's face "from one to ten" in terms of most ugly to most beautiful, and uses a sophisticated database of facial proportions borrowed from some 200 stunning women across the globe in order to give you a very honest answer when questioning your attractivity. Of course, we all know that real beauty lies within (right?), and if your idea of sexy doesn't match up with the generally accepted supermodel "look," the results could indeed conflict with your own beliefs. Currently, the program is designed to work solely with women, but adopting a male iteration could definitely be in the cards, and while we doubt this stuff would be particularly beneficial for your image-obsessed teen, it's primarily intended for use in the cosmetic surgery realm to judge just how effective that ridiculously expensive nose job really was.[Via Digg]
Top Ten Most Beautiful Mac OS X Applications
Top ten lists are all the rage recently and Phillip Ryu gives us a unique one--the top ten most beautiful applications for Mac OS X. He's got a nice write-up and I agree with most of his choices. 10. Transmission9. Voice Candy8. Podcast Maker7. Transmit6. Quinn5. AppZapper4. Acquisition3. Coverflow2. Newsfire1. Delicious LibraryI would add to his list RapidWeaver and Comic Life, both programs that have impressed me with their ease-of-use and well-designed user interfaces. What apps would you add in your own top ten list of most beautiful Mac OS X applications?
