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See every square foot of asteroid Bennu, Earth's little frenemy
Bennu has the distinction of being the subject of the highest resolution mosaic ever made of any planetary body.
The Pixel 3 and Galaxy Note 9 top DxOMark's new selfie camera scores
We use the selfie camera on our smartphones up to 40 percent of the time, yet most testing puts the emphasis on the rear camera. To address that issue, DxOMark has introduced scoring for front-facing smartphone cameras based on criteria like skin tone and color accuracy, sharpness, contrast, exposure and more. A number of cameras have already been tested, and the models on top, by a wide margin, are Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 and the Google Pixel 3, both with overall scores of 92. Rounding out the top five were Xiaomi's Mi Mix 3, the Apple iPhone XS Max and Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus, with scores of 84, 82 and 81 respectively.
Choose My Adventure: Craft it one piece at a time
Sometimes, a well-planned weekend turns into a complete mess. Case in point: This past weekend, which I fully meant to use to get more of a footing in Ryzom, wound up being almost entirely dominated by a mixture of other responsibilities and necessities. As a result, I didn't get nearly as much time playing the game as I would have liked. The plan is to spend more time crafting away over the course of the week, but this article needs to be written up earlier than that. As you can imagine, this results in a little bit of a hole in the narrative. Fortunately, crafting is pretty deep as a system but fairly thin in terms of a core narrative, unless you find "and then I made another set of light sleeves" to be engrossing. So while I didn't get several hours of story, if you're not familiar with what the system offers, there's still plenty of ground to cover.
Google Art Project offers gigapixel images of art classics, indoor Street View of museums
Google's been hard at work over the past 18 months on something not many of us have been paying attention to lately: art. Specifically, the search giant has hooked up with 17 art museums around the world to offer tours of their internal galleries, using its familiar Street View tricycles, while also doing high-res images of 1,061 artworks that may be viewed on the newly launched Art Project web portal. Also there, you will find 17 special gigapixel images -- 7,000-megapixel versions of each participating venue's proudest possession. The resulting level of detail is nothing short of astounding and we've got videos of how it's all done after the break.
Sony's forthcoming VAIO Z series laptops unofficially detailed
Hooray! More Sony VAIO laptops with naming schemes impossible to decipher! Following up on those tasty new FW and SR lappies that we were informally introduced to earlier this week comes even more foreign images detailing a 13.1-incher. On the surface, it looks like said machines will feature a Core 2 Duo processor, 1,600 x 900 native resolution, 4GB of RAM, 250GB HDD, dual-layer DVD burner, a 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 9300M GS graphics card, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, WiFi, integrated HSDPA connectivity and a modest array of ports. For more details on which model gets what (off the record, of course), dip on into the read links below.Read - Images / specs of new machinesRead - More details on rumored VAIOs
Behind the Curtain: Less realism, please
One cry I hear a lot during my travels is that we need more realism in MMOs. Greater realism, I have heard it argued, will give a greater sense of immersion, a sense of belonging somewhere, and would make it easier for people who are traditionally non-gamers to join in with us, the enlightened ones – a 'realistic' MMO, I've been told, would be the MMO for people who normally avoid MMOs. I wonder if people use 'realism' where they really mean 'detail'. I don't want too much realism in my MMOs – imagine Orgrimmar with a 'realistic' downtown area that your character refused to enter after dark? If Shattrath was made more realistic, the Lower City would be rife with dysentery – just how many toilets have you counted down there?
AT&T to subscribers: less detail, we promise
So it seems that AT&T has recognized the error of its ways in sending out entire trees' worth of paper for its monthly bills, firing off text messages today to subscribers that read as follows: "We are simplifying your paper bill, removing itemized detail. To view all detail go to att.com/mywireless. Still need full paper bill? Call 611." So yeah, if you actually need 400 pages of gibberish to recall everyone you sent a text to last month, go ahead and dial 'em up. Otherwise, take solace in the fact that your postal carrier won't have to lug that bad boy around anymore.[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Twilight Easter Eggs
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was in development for approximately, oh, say, forever. That intensely long cycle, besides making a game epic and wonderful and amazing, usually gives rise to an extreme attention to detail. Some savvy forum-goers have compiled a list of little easter eggs for your enjoyment, which can be found after the jump.How many of these did you find, or even notice? Do you feel as though these little details even make a difference in the overall gaming experience? We ourselves find that we're occasionally drawn back to the world of Hyrule for a few minutes, just to feel that epic sense of adventure ... or maybe it was just those bomb arrow fireworks.
On resolution independence
There is a lot of buzz and speculation floating around as to what we'll see in the Mac OS X 10.5 update that will be previewed (and I suspect released) at this August's World Wide Developer's Conference. One exciting 'fundamental feature' John Gruber hinted at last November has been mentioned again by a developer named Dustin MacDonald: resolution independence.Gruber broke this concept down in a November '05 post titled Full Metal Jacket (under the Display heading), but to summarize: most of the dimensions of elements in Mac OS X (and other OSes to my knowledge) are defined in pixels - the menu bar is 22 px high, for example. This explains why things 'seem to look a little smaller' when you move from the 1024 x 768 dimensions of a 12" display to the 1440 x 900 resolution of the latest 15" PowerBook G4 or MacBook Pro displays. Conversely, if you decrease the resolution on the machine you're working on now, things will look a bit bigger; you have smaller resolution and fewer ppi (or dpi) on screen, so some elements change size. This can become a problem in the context of notebook displays and their resolutions - if you take the 15" MacBook Pro's resolution higher than 1440 x 900, things could become smaller than what many might consider usable (these same rules apply to Windows and I believe Linux as well). Further, you can't just keep increasing notebook display sizes like you can with desktop displays; I've heard of the 19" notebooks Engadget has come across, and I personally don't consider a 16 lb computer worthy of the 'portable' adjective.
