.::REALITYRECALL::.

The first photo of our daughter Billie and I made it while she wasn’t even completely born yet.

For me personally this is the most important photo of my life. It’s like all these years I have been practicing just to make this one single shot work.

Barbara was amazingly strong both before and while she was giving birth and I’m just incredibly proud of her. She’s awesome, nothing less.

So why this title? Well, not because I think she’s going to be a movie or a rock star, but because she will be *my star*, forever, and I’m pretty sure she’ll have about a million photos by the time she’s grown up. 🙂

Oh yes, one last thing: I’m absolutely convinced that she’s got special powers, because when I’m holding her in my arms and I look at her, I feel something that I’ve never felt before… it’s like she’s enchanted me.. yes.. magic.. that’s the best way to describe it.

Facebook to launch in-browser video chat powered by Skype? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 17:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dropbox, a popular tool used for sharing files between computers and friends, recently updated their Terms of Service. They attempted to reduce some of the tedious legalese in order to make it easier for normal people to understand. It appears that they have succeeded in that mission and in the…

By analyzing the gamma-rays emitted by a gamma ray burst, a European satellite may have inadvertently found evidence contradicting the holographic universe hypothesis.

We’ve long believed in the mystical power of quantum dots, so it makes perfect sense to us that one day they’ll be used to fully harness the Sun God’s rays and thereby save the planet. The nano-particles turn light into electricity, and could potentially be manufactured cheaply and abundantly enough to coat surfaces in current-generating paint. The main obstacle to this has so far been efficiency: the clever little dots just don’t work very hard. However, scientists at the University of Toronto now claim to have discovered a fix. Instead of using a single layer of particles, which can only harvest one meager wavelength from the full gamut of solar light, they added a second coat on top and configured it to be sensitive to an additional part of the spectrum. By adding third and fourth layers, the researchers hope to achieve a commercially viable efficiency of 10-percent within the next five years. We humbly call on Ra to be pleased with their efforts.

Quantum dots could coat the world in nano-sized solar panels originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 18:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In this week’s app roundup: Google+, unveiled; GPS, painted with direction; North Korea, photographed; iPhones, playing dead; Instagram, challenged by Google; background checks, forever creepy; fourways, on Fring; and much, much more. More »

Oh boy. Oh boy oh boy oh boy. So you know how Netflix said they were bringing every Star Trek everything to Watch Instantly? They finally delivered, just in time for you to celebrate your independence trying to track down that one episode of TNG where Tasha Yar wasn’t incredibly annoying. More »

WHEN I WAS YOUNG
you didn’t have to tell kids not to try this at home. we weren’t complete retards back then.

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xunholyx

Ever wonder what the best methods for surviving an alien attack were? Then sit back and learn from the best when a group of your favorite actors and actresses share their expertise with you in this fun mashup video!

How It Should Have Ended: How to Survive an Alien Attack [YouTube]

How To Encrypt Your Cloud-Based Drive with Boxcryptor	HTG Explains: Photography with Film-Based Cameras	How to Clean Your Dirty Smartphone (Without Breaking Something)

Thanks to Google+, Picasa users—whether they're on Google+ or not—now can upload virtually all photos to their accounts without going over the storage limits; the same holds true for videos 15 minutes or under. A new photo-tagging feature lets your Google+ friends tag your public photos. More »

Here’s an easier way to manage and create Facebook friends lists: drag them into circles, a la Google+. Circle Hack is a very simple app that connects to your Facebook account and lets you drag your friends into the appropriate orbs. More »

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser continues to lose overall market share in the great browser wars, especially to Google’s Chrome browser. Net Application’s latest survey of web browser usage show that Internet Explorer dropped from 54.3 percent in May to 53.7 percent in June. By contrast, Google’s Chrome browser jumped…

Google has created a stir recently by changing a lot of their services’ interfaces to coincide with the announcement and private beta release of their Google+ social networking service. So today we’re sharing our opinions of the changes that Google has made, considering so many use their services, and giving…

Your bookmarks bar can get awfully crowded. To make more room and pretty it up a bit, remove the site titles from the bookmarks so that just the distinct favicon appears. You’ll get more room and a cleaner look. More »

Whoops. Diet soda might have no calories, but that doesn’t keep it from growing your waistline. A new study finds that diet drinkers might be even worse off than regular soda drinkers.

Diet soda is not, it turns out, a panacea for overeating. But it’s not just because ordering a burger, fries, and a diet soda means you’re still consuming too many calories; it’s because diet soda itself may increase your waistline.

The news comes from a University of Texas study that examined data from 474 participants in the San Antonio Longitudinal
Study of Aging, a continuing study of elderly Mexican and European Americans. The result: Diet soda drinkers saw a 70% increase in waist circumference compared with non-drinkers over the course of a decade. People who drank more than two diet sodas a day saw a staggering 500% greater waist circumference compared to non-drinkers.

Part of the problem may be traced back to aspartame, the artificial sweetener used in many diet sodas. According to a study from other researchers at the university, heavy exposure to aspartame may directly increase blood glucose levels, leading to an increase in diabetes risk. “Artificial sweeteners could have the effect of triggering appetite but
unlike regular sugars they don’t deliver something that will squelch the
appetite,” explained Sharon Fowler, an obesity researcher who co-authored both studies, in an interview with the Daily Mail. (If this sounds familiar, here’s why.)

So what’s the solution? Cut down on your soda intake–both diet and regular. And while you’re at it, stop driving so much and exercise more at your job. Or get your employer to join Keas, where you’ll get rewards, instead of just being scolded.

[Image by Flickr user “Cowboy” Ben Alman]

Reach Ariel Schwartz via Twitter or email.

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