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Stopping Time UX doesn’t have a blog. Members share a single email account. Lazar Kunstmann is not on Facebook and the group’s other members do not speak to the press. In this era of full disclosure, of never-ending networking, forwarding and sharing, they are an organization that refuses friend requests. They have only as many…
La-zar Kunst-mann The Painted Lizard, wrote the American journalist Christopher Ketcham, is “one of the nastiest pranksters in the underworld.” Cavannus, a former Parisian now living in Montreal, says something similar: “Dangerous. To avoid.” Another catacomb rat goes further. “The guy’s a megalomaniacal jerk and deserves no publicity of any kind,” G——- wrote in an…
Flying Saucer On December 24, 2006, after 50 years of silence, the clock of the Paris Pantheon began to ring. Two and a half years later, I arrive at the building for a tour. My group’s guide is a man in his fifties, bird-haired, who talks in clipped and concentrated French. He doesn’t mention the…
Deeper For Kunstmann and his associates, there is little appeal to wandering around underground. Their cinema aside, the catacombs are a means, not an end: a way to access UX work-sites or to hide their tracks. But as a first-time visitor plunging into these gray chambers, the experience is thrilling. It is a labyrinth of…
D’Enfers Parisians call it a “gruyère.” For hundreds of years, the catacombs under the city have been a conduit, sanctuary and birthplace for its secrets. The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables’ Jean Valjean both haunted these tunnels; striking students descended in 1968, and patriots during World War II. The Nazis visited too, building…
Porte-parole I am late. Paris’s decaying public-transit system almost strands me at Gare du Nord and I arrive at Le Pantalon out of breath, panicked, terrified that Lazar Kunstmann has left. I slip past students in this noisy bar, searching for the face I have seen in a handful of photographs. I crossed the ocean…
Instead of constantly buying new lens caps on eBay after foolishly losing them (much like, err, me), you could just try the LensCapTrap, which attaches lens caps to the camera strap with a bit of velcro. It only costs $6, but as PetaPixel points out, you could easily make this yourself. Or just stop losing…
In the first seven weeks that the iPhone was available on Verizon’s steadfast network, 2.2 million of the handsets were activated. That is—not surprisingly, given the pent-up demand—about 12,000 more units per day that AT&T activated in the first quarter, and goes a long way towards explaining the monster iPhone tally Apple put up yesterday…
That MacBook Air was pretty fancy. And the iPad? No slouch either. But Apple’s not the type of company to just sit on its heels, no matter how much money they’re stuffing in their coffers. And as Conan O’Brien shows us in this parody ad, Cupertino’s already introducing the next big thing… even if they’re…
Not only did Barack Obama tell people at his Facebook town hall lecture that he wants science to be cool, he also said he wants “people to feel about the next big energy breakthrough and the next big Internet breakthrough the same way they felt about the moonwalk.” Can we do that, folks? Can we…
A new mass-market service called E la Carte is now testing their tablet menu at twenty different restaurants around Boston and San Francisco. The tablets are specially rubber-coated, and won’t die out on you when you’re ordering because they’ve got day-long battery life. Sure, iPad menus have been done before! But these E la Carte…
Let’s face it, Apple’s computers are gorgeous. Not many manufacturer’s can match them on design, but this new MSI All-in-One looks like it came from the chopping block of Jony Ive’s design desk. The Wind Top AE2410 has some nice muscle to match its beauty too. It sports USB 3.0 with MSI’s Super Charger technology,…
If you’re hooked on Apple’s Smart Cover design and you’ve wished you could somehow mimic its propping functionality on your laptop, AViiQ’s Portable Quick Stand might work for you. Like the Smart Cover, the stand goes from flat to a 3D Toblerone shape, supporting laptops like yours (or others’, up to 17 inches in size).…
0 to 100 is an iPad app filled with the faces of complete strangers. Why should you care? Because all those people come together in the app to show each stage of life, from birth until 100 years old. Each picture comes with a little info about the person and when they’re young, it captures…
This is the Code-38 Pro Stealth, also known as the $410 corkscrew. Four hundred and ten dollars make for “a complete blend of blasted textures and vaporized titanium based finishes” that opens bottles and uncorks wine. Which is fucking ridiculous. I’m all for spending excessive amounts of money on unreasonable things, its one of the…
One of my life goals is to throw the first pitch at a Dodgers baseball game. I daydream about it regularly, actually. But the nerves! What if I miss the catcher or, gasp, one-bounce it across home plate? I don’t think I could go home after that. And I was okay with C-list and D-list…
The White House, trying to please both platforms, just released an app for Android. It gives you behind-the-scenes photos and videos along with mobile alerts about major events. Oddly, it lacks the live streaming option that the iPhone has. [Android Market via The White House]
Fixing This | One year on, we take a look at the technologies used to combat the worst oil spill in US history Why Capping a Blown Oil Well at the Bottom of the Ocean is so Insanely Difficult https://gizmodo.com/why-capping-a-blown-oil-well-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean-5785036 Last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill dumped an estimated 2.6 million gallons of oil A…
Man, sometimes all you want is to just settle in at the library, fire up some internet porn, and have yourself a time. That’s what Brooklynite Santiago Real had in mind before he was beat up by another patron. The two proceeded to punch the crap out of each other, after which Santiago’s attacker, Durail…
If you’re contemplating your next car add-on, consider replacing your boring, old spark plugs with lasers. Yeah, lasers. Lasers that cut down on noxious emissions and provide better fuel efficiency! If Japan’s National Institutes of Natural Sciences has its way, a replacement of that sort may not be so far off (or strange). The traditional…
