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Remember how Pioneer promised to bring Apple’s CarPlay to its aftermarket infotainment systems? Well, now the firmware update to make it so is available for five of its 2014 NEX in-dash multimedia receivers.

A New iCloud Tool Lets You Check If Second-Hand iPhones Are Stolen

Buying a second-hand iPhone can be a gamble, with the chances of ending up with a locked device relatively high. Now, Apple has launched an iCloud tool that lets you check if the iPhone in question is legit. The service lets owners and future owners check the activation lock status of an iPhone. Armed with…

Netflix Is Making Four Exclusive Movies with Adam Sandler

As well as debuting the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon sequel, Netflix has some other big news: it’s just signed a deal with Adam Sandler to fund and produce four of his movies that will run exclusively on the streaming service. The four movies will be made by, and star, Sandler. There’s no mention of these…

An Insanely Detailed Map of Minas Tirith Covers Every Inch of the City

This is apparently a map made for the Middle Earth role playing games by ICE, and it’s just gorgeous. Not only is the detail in this beyond belief (just look at the legend!), it’s also been planned for maximum visual impact. You could examine it forever. [via Just Maps]

Dropbox for Android now allows you to export your files straight to SD cards, which is pretty neat.

Motorcyclist misses his superman seat grab trick and flies into the air

Whoa. This is crazy. A motorcyclist jumped off a ramp and missed his grab of the motorcycle seat for the superman seat grab trick and ended up spinning out of control in the air. I can’t imagine the sinking feeling of grabbing nothing, though I guess in this case, it’d be more of a flying…

Seeing peanut butter jars get filled makes me want peanut butter on tap

Though Alton Brown taught us how to simply make our own delicious peanut butter at home, sometimes you just crave that store bought goop that reminds you of your childhood. Here’s how that brown spread is made. I kind of wish I could skip the jar and just have a peanut butter on tap at…

Watch Over 100 Baby Turtles Make It to the Sea in This Amazing Video

Filmmaker Leon Duplay’s short film shows over 150 turtles hatching, being helped to the see by residents of Lankayan Island in Malaysian Borneo, and then swimming for their lives. These little guys are adorable! The only question I had after watching this was: What’s the critical mass at which things are not longer cute? When…

Why David Fincher might be the best director in Hollywood today

David Fincher is one of the best directors in Hollywood and if you disagree, you need new eyeballs. Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting shows how it’s not what Fincher does in his movies that make him special, but what he doesn’t do. Fincher’s talent and skills are incredible but it’s his restraint that…

Forever Serves Up Some Delicious Brain Smoothie

Which is awesome. On the other hand, Henry Morgan is an immortal who forgets all his emotional lessons. Seriously, the whole point of this episode is our main character re-learning a lesson that he apparently also learned a century ago. So much for wisdom and experience. Spoilers now… Congratulations, Forever. I was really afraid that…

This visualization of server traffic is like the coolest game of Pong

Taiga is “a free project management platform for startups, developers, and designers.” After being mentioned by Hacker News their servers got blasted with traffic, which they turned into this cool visualization that it like a game of Pong played by a zillion players against one computer. Each little “ball” is a request to the server…

Unbelievably realistic face is actually completely computer generated

The only thing that I think that doesn’t look ‘human’ about Ed, this computer generated human head designed by Chris Jones using Lightwave, Sculptris and Krita, is his ears. Oh and how he doesn’t have a body. But everything else is pretty perfect: the oil and bumps on his face, the wrinkles, I can even…

A normal person’s GoPro video is nothing at all like a GoPro video

We’ve all gasped at GoPro videos on YouTube and thought that it would be so awesome to record all the awesome things we do in our lives. But here’s the truth, our lives aren’t that exciting and worth recording. Reddit user fryest hilariously proved that by splicing his GoPro camera footage with other GoPro videos.…

Person of Interest Lets Us See How Two A.I.s Suit Up for Battle

It’s starting to sink in that the entire United States is in danger from one of the most powerful authoritarian regimes ever to challenge the nation. On last night’s episode of Person of Interest, we watched Samaritan make its first major power moves. From the opening credits (from Samaritan’s POV) to the plot arcs of…

Watch Team America And See How Much Our Geopolitics Haven’t Changed

Yesterday we highlighted a slew of films that were leaving Netflix at midnight this morning. Don’t even look at the list, I’d say, it’s too painful; they’re already long gone. However, Netflix has attempted to heal our wounds with a long list of additions, including the great Team America: World Police. While you watch the…

NASA reveals details of mission to capture and bring asteroid near Earth

By the end of the decade, NASA will send a robotic spaceship to grab a 40-foot (12-meter) asteroid and bring it close to Earth, placing it in an orbit around the Moon, and then send astronauts in an Orion spaceship to study it. They just published six papers detailing this historic mission, crucial for humanity’s…

Secret of NIMH Was Inspired by Hideous Lab Experiments

In The Secret of NIMH there are no musical interludes or tween heroines to lighten the mood—just the desperate struggle for survival of a mama mouse against her invariable predation. And it’s based on a true story. Don Bluth’s The Secret of NIMH traces its roots back to the novel,Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of…

A Movie About Sex, Computers and Growing Up, Inspired by Carl Sagan

The plot arc of Jason Reitman’s new film Men, Women, and Children was inspired by Carl Sagan’s famous “Pale Blue Dot” speech from Cosmos. Like that speech, the movie is about how we are all just a bunch of self-important monkeys on an insignificant rock floating in space. And that’s why we need each other…

David Mitchell’s Bone Clocks Is A Fantastic Successor To Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was a brilliant, confounding book that brought together a host of times and places into an interlocking story of oppression and self-discovery. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could top that — but his new novel, the somewhat more cohesive The Bone Clocks, may have done just that. Some spoilers ahead……

The original Star Wars trilogy summarized in three minutes

I feel like you don’t even have to watch Star Wars to know what Star Wars is about. Just by living on Earth you’d be able to accumulate enough knowledge about it: Darth Vader is Luke’s Dad, Han Solo shot first, the prequels sucked and so on. But if you still don’t know, here’s TL;DW’s…