#HTE

Herman Miller, the furniture brand behind iconic designs like the Aeron chair, has teamed up with designer Yves Béhar for a new suite of smart office furniture launching today at NeoCon in Chicago. Named Live OS (yawn), the system uses sensors that can come preinstalled with Herman Miller desks, or retrofitted to any existing work surface. The sensors collect on-the-fly anonymized data which is then accessed through a dashboard, giving companies insight into how spaces are being utilized.

On fixed-height desks, Live OS only tracks when people are present, but when used with Herman Miller’s sit-to-stand desks, it acts more like a furniture Fitbit. Through an app, people set preferences for things like desk height, which can then be…

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Moscow is home to the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy, an enormous recreation and museum complex. One of its buildings is decked out with a spectacular exterior that’s designed to look like the conductive tracks on a circuit board.

The building in question is the Pavilion of Moscow Information Technology Department, a 1,600 square meter presentation space that showcases Russia’s electrical achievements. Russian architectural firm Wall designed the exterior of the pavilion in 2016, according to Dezeen. The outer panels were formed out of concrete in a local factory, and house an exhibition space, business center, and children’s play area.

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#HTE

Moscow is home to the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy, an enormous recreation and museum complex. One of its buildings is decked out with a spectacular exterior that’s designed to look like the conductive tracks on a circuit board.

The building in question is the Pavilion of Moscow Information Technology Department, a 1,600 square meter presentation space that showcases Russia’s electrical achievements. Russian architectural firm Wall designed the exterior of the pavilion in 2016, according to Dezeen. The outer panels were formed out of concrete in a local factory, and house an exhibition space, business center, and children’s play area.

Continue reading…

#HTE

We recently celebrated that Apple at long last made the decision to change its volume control in iOS 11 to something less intrusive (which, to be fair, would be almost anything but what it currently is). Coincidentally, at the same time, Redditors were having a field day over in r/ProgrammerHumor in a thread that begs the question, “Who can make the best volume slider?” The results have been pouring in since. Some are the volume slider equivalent of chindogu — not useful, but also, not useless — while others are exercises in minutiae frustration. Some are straight up absurd. They’re all delightful.

Which slider is the worst, though? Well, let the games commence.

First, the cringey slider that started it all — a classic-looking interface…

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#HTE

We recently celebrated that Apple at long last made the decision to change its volume control in iOS 11 to something less intrusive (which, to be fair, would be almost anything but what it currently is). Coincidentally, at the same time, Redditors were having a field day over in r/ProgrammerHumor in a thread that begs the question, “Who can make the best volume slider?” The results have been pouring in since. Some are the volume slider equivalent of chindogu — not useful, but also, not useless — while others are exercises in minutiae frustration. Some are straight up absurd. They’re all delightful.

Which slider is the worst, though? Well, let the games commence.

First, the cringey slider that started it all — a classic-looking interface…

Continue reading…

#HTE

Apple just wrapped up one of the most hardware-focused software conferences ever. Aside from updating existing products like the MacBook with new Kaby Lake processors, and announcing the new Siri-enabled HomePod speaker, Apple decided to use WWDC to please its pro users with new iMac and iMac Pro desktop computers.

The new iMac Pro won’t ship until December, but the speed-bumped iMacs are something pro users can buy today. It’s been a while since we’ve upgraded the iMacs in our offices, and we’re currently in the midst of a switch over to 4K video editing. Combine those two factors and you can guess that we spend a lot of time staring at progress bars.

So in the short time we had, we wanted to focus on the performance of one of the…

Continue reading…

#HTE

Apple just wrapped up one of the most hardware-focused software conferences ever. Aside from updating existing products like the MacBook with new Kaby Lake processors, and announcing the new Siri-enabled HomePod speaker, Apple decided to use WWDC to please its pro users with new iMac and iMac Pro desktop computers.

The new iMac Pro won’t ship until December, but the speed-bumped iMacs are something pro users can buy today. It’s been a while since we’ve upgraded the iMacs in our offices, and we’re currently in the midst of a switch over to 4K video editing. Combine those two factors and you can guess that we spend a lot of time staring at progress bars.

So in the short time we had, we wanted to focus on the performance of one of the…

Continue reading…

#HTE

Google’s open-source machine learning project Tensorflow is probably used all the time for helpful things that advance the cause of mankind or something. But in my experience, what it has been best used for is making horrifying auto-generated images out of simple line drawings. I’m referring to edges2cats, which turned any line drawing into a cat. It was a whole thing! Everyone was trying it out, then posting pictures of really demented cats to Twitter for others to laugh at.

Today the same thing has happened, except it’s not cats. It’s human heads. And instead of Google’s project, Dutch Public Broadcaster NPO created its own artificial intelligence system that had only been fed thousands of images of one of its anchors, Lara Rense. As…

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#HTE

Google’s open-source machine learning project Tensorflow is probably used all the time for helpful things that advance the cause of mankind or something. But in my experience, what it has been best used for is making horrifying auto-generated images out of simple line drawings. I’m referring to edges2cats, which turned any line drawing into a cat. It was a whole thing! Everyone was trying it out, then posting pictures of really demented cats to Twitter for others to laugh at.

Today the same thing has happened, except it’s not cats. It’s human heads. And instead of Google’s project, Dutch Public Broadcaster NPO created its own artificial intelligence system that had only been fed thousands of images of one of its anchors, Lara Rense. As…

Continue reading…

#HTE

Back in 2014, MIT debuted CityHome, a solution for tiny living spaces with the ability to pack several home necessities into a single, movable modular unit. Today, the concept — now renamed Ori Systems, after the Japanese art of origami — is available for preorder at $10,000 in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, and other major US and Canadian cities.

A collaboration between Fuseproject’s Yves Béhar and MIT Media Lab, Ori Systems, comes in two sizes, “Ori Full” and “Ori Queen,” and for now, it’s only available for preorder by real estate developers, with delivery beginning toward the end of this year. The Ori Systems prototype has been tested by Airbnb guests in Boston for the past year, and model Ori Systems are currently…

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