Category: Matt Gomez

We can all appreciate a handmade gift, but this is on another level.

Designer Chris Patty was challenged by his family to create something that wasn’t store-bought, and so he made a nifty jukebox for his dad this Christmas.

It’s no regular jukebox, obviously: To play songs, you pick a card — which features a song title and the artist it’s by — and swipe it in the slot on the box. Patty posted a video of the jukebox in action back on Dec. 27, which soon went viral on Twitter.

Patty told The Verge the interest in his jukebox might speak to the fatigue of having unlimited choices at your disposal, thanks to streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. Read more…

More about Tech, Music, Diy, Handmade, and Tech

Chrissy Teigen has already kicked off 2019 with a viral moment, but it must have hurt a bit.

The Queen of Twitter was co-hosting NBC’s live New Year’s Eve from New York’s Times Square with her pal, Saturday Night Live favourite Leslie Jones, when the pair went in for a hug at midnight.

But Jones, shielded from the wet weather by a treacherous plastic umbrella, proved difficult to get to, with Teigen leaning in for a hug but instead taking an umbrella point straight to the eye.

The awkward but rather funny moment was not only seen on live television, but rewatched in videos like the above, which clocked up millions of views. Read more…

More about Umbrella, Chrissy Teigen, Leslie Jones, New Year S Eve, and Entertainment

What’s one of the worst things you could stumble upon in the middle of a rainy night? Say, a handful of lousy cane toads hitching a ride on a python? 

That’s exactly what a farmer in the Western Australian town of Kununurra stumbled upon on Sunday.

According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, farmer Paul Mock was casually checking his dam late at night when he came upon the frankly horrifying sight. 

Mock’s dam had reportedly seen a large build up of water after heavy rainfall during the night, which caused thousands of cane toads — a poisonous, vile Australian pest — living in burrows around the edge of the dam to scurry to higher ground, according to the news outlet. Read more…

More about Australia, Snakes, Reptiles, Toads, and Cane Toads

You might’ve already put together your top nine posts on Instagram for 2018, but there’s also a way you can see which colours dominated your posts this year.

Year of Colour is a web app which builds a visualisation of your posts, arranged in a cluster of cute, different sized bubbles.

Each circle’s size is representative of the frequency of that colour, plus how well-liked it was by your followers. As seen from my own profile, blues and browns seem to represent quite a number of my photos last year.

Launched last year by couple Stef Lewandowski and Emily Quinton, the tool requires you to sign in with your Instagram account. Only public accounts work, and you can request a report for the last year or a particular set of dates. Read more…

More about Tech, Instagram, Social Media, Tech, and Social Media Companies

Queen rocker Brian May used to beg his parents to stay up late, so he could learn about the stars.

Now six decades later, the guitar legend turned astrophysicist has released an arena rock song composed for both the farthest away object humanity has ever visited — Ultima Thule — and the spacecraft sent to scour this distant world, NASA’s New Horizons probe. 

“This mission is about human curiosity — the need for mankind to go out there and explore what makes the universe tick,” May said Monday at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, site of the New Horizons headquarters. 

“I hope you will enjoy it,” added May, who released the song two minutes after midnight local time, during the first minutes of the 2019. “I hope it’s worthy of this amazing cause.”  Read more…

More about Space, Science, Queen, Brian May, and Ultima Thule

Stranger Things is kicking off the New Year in style. 

At the stroke of midnight (East Coast time) on New Year’s Day, Netflix dropped a video announcement for the next season of the series.

The teaser looks like an old Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve clip, but distortion quickly sets in, and a date is revealed: July 4, 2019.  Read more…

More about Stranger Things, Entertainment, and Movies Tv Shows

2018 was a year that cried out for a simple, effervescent throwback tune we could use to forget our present troubles. No one could have guessed we’d find it in a movie that was all about the successful eradication of 50 percent of humanity. 

But that’s exactly what happened this May when Avengers: Infinity War topped the movie charts, and sent a 42-year-old track bouncing up the music charts in its wake. With Infinity War newly available on Netflix as of last week, we’re just a-movin’ and a-groovin’ to it all over again.

The track, of course, is “Rubberband Man” by the Detroit Spinners (full name, please, lest you confuse them with a contemporary British folk group). It’s in the movie for less than 30 seconds, but leaves a hell of an impression — partly because its 1970s bass-twanging  intro perfectly announces the Guardians of the Galaxy, but mostly because Chris Pratt so utterly throws himself into TikTok-like lip syncing.  Read more…

More about Guardians Of The Galaxy, Motown, Avengers Infinity War, Infinity War, and Entertainment

Ultima Thule — an uncharted world over 4 billion miles away — is coming into view.

On Monday, planetary scientists released a fuzzy image of Ultima Thule, snapped the day prior by the New Horizons exploration spacecraft from some 1.2 million miles away. Previously, New Horizons swooped by Pluto in 2015, capturing the icy, mountainous world in unprecedented detail.

Increasingly rich, detailed images of Ultima will start arriving on January 2, but already the deep space object looks elongated, not round, said New Horizons deputy project scientist John Spencer from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the Maryland headquarters of the New Horizons program. The program is a collaborative effort between NASA, the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, where scientists navigate and control the spacecraft. Read more…

More about Space, Nasa, Science, New Horizons, and Ultima Thule

Taylor Swift was the most influential person on the platform, according to Brandwatch. Here’s how the singer pulled it off, as well as who else on Twitter was highly influential this year.  Read more…

More about Twitter, Mashable Video, Taylor Swift, 2018, and Influencers

With its myriad of decisions and endings, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch certainly looked like a hell of a film (or game?) to put together.

So much so that in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, producer Annabel Jones confirmed that Season 5 of the Netflix series would be delayed, with an arrival set for sometime in 2019.

It’s due in part to the “enormous” creative time that the film took, and Jones herself had “forgotten” how many endings there are in Bandersnatch, although the widely distributed number is five. 

The show’s creator Charlie Brooker said there are definitely more endings though, where the unwieldy, wild nature of the choose-your-own-adventure story apparently has parts that are very difficult to reach, and may never be accessed. Read more…

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