Sandi Preston has owned the Astoria, Oregon home used for the filming of The Goonies since 2001 but after getting up to 1,500 people a day taking pictures there, she’s finally had enough…
Kraken D20
When your RPG takes a nautical turn, why stick with a dull old D20 when you can throw this three-inch Kraken die from Nvenom8 Designs? It’s available in eight metal variants or eight plastic colors.
Quadruple Lightning Strike Causes Google Data Loss
Google has confirmed that four lightning strikes led to a tiny amount of permanent data loss in its online cloud processing service. It appears to be an extremely unlikely freak incident, though Google says it will continue to work to reduce such risks.
The incident took place near a data center in Belgium where Google carries out some of its work for Compute Engine, which offers virtual machines for processing on a scalable, pay-per-minute basis.
The four lightning strikes didn’t hit the center itself but rather hit a local electricity grid. That led to a “brief loss of power” at the data center, rather than any hardware being fried.
For the most part battery-powered backups did their job. Around five percent of the disks had some sort of failure as a result of the outage, though Google engineers were able to recover data in virtually every case.
The only irreversible problems appear to have come in the very few cases where the power outage caused an error right as the system was carrying out a “snapshot” backup.
Google says this led to a few recent writes being unrecoverable, meaning a permanent data loss equivalent to less than 0.000001% of the total disk space. The BBC believes all affected customers were able to restore the data from their own backups outside of Google.
In one sense it’s a reminder that even with the best organization and protection, data you have stored at somebody else’s facility is vulnerable (though the same is true on your own machines.) But it’s also a good illustration that with a sturdy enough set-up, even an unpredictable shock doesn’t cause that much permanent damage.
Amazing Spintop Tricks
Takeshi Kamisato is one of the world’s leading Yo-Yo tricksters, but in this clip he shows off his skills with the spin top. It may actually be even harder than it looks: one poster noted that “Almost everything about learning how to spin tops defies logic, is counter-intuitive, or is otherwise generally frustrating. It’s all backwards, I tell ya! ”
Pikachu Line Dance is Terrifying
It doesn’t matter how many times the annual Pikachu festival takes place in Yokohama, it still remains adorable terrifying.
Rube Goldberg Machine Is Stationery (Not Stationary)
This machine, designed to promote 3M, reportedly uses 25,000 Post-It notes and 75 rolls of painter tape among other components.
Back To The Future Themed Engagement Pic
Amazingly this wasn’t even the first movie themed part of the engagement. The groom-to-be dressed up as Michael J. Fox and jumped out to surprise his now fiancee with a ring.
[Via: Imgur]
Suitcase-Eye View Of Airport Luggage Handling
While we’ve all heard of luggage taking an unscheduled trip to Rio, this bag-eye clip shows it goes on quite the automated ride when things go to plan. Keep an eye out for the robotic arm at the end!
[Via: LikeCool]
Make Your Own Doctor Who Adventure
The BBC is running a competition to make your own short Doctor Who movie, animation or images to tell your story of how the Doctor wound up facing the Daleks once again. Sadly the competition itself (with a prize of meeting Peter Capaldi on set) is only available to UK residents, but the good news is that the BBC has made a range of clips and images available as fully licensed “asset packs.”
Inside Out DVD Feature Shifts Perspective
In this trailer for a bonus short movie on the forthcoming DVD for Inside Out, we get more insight into the perspective of emotions inside Riley’s parents‘ minds at a particularly emotional moment… her first date.