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• The most comprehensive guide on drone photography. Detailed instructions on choosing your first drone, extra parts, gymbal stabilizer, notes on the max time of flight and carried weight (aka how big camera can you attach to the drone without it falling back to Earth). The article is filled with pictures and videos of drones in action, explaining every intricate detail of owning and flying the camera drone.
• Last Kodak film factory is about to be closed. Handful of Hollywood directors managed to convince their studios to try and save this factory. JJ Abrams is filming new episode of StarWars on film, Quentin Tarantino is also full of warm feelings towards the analogue feeling of shooting on celluloid. The plan is to order as much film as they can for the future needs, and so provide factory with necessary money to continue operations (for some time). Personally I'm not a huge fan of 35mm film, but 70mm IMAX film with 15 perf still remains the best way of capturing moving pictures (if you know what you doing, of course). Likely not for long.
• Nice post by Jean-Baptiste Quéru on the complexity of our world and software.

Тechnology has done such an amazing job at hiding its complexity that the people regulating and running the patent system are barely even aware of the complexity of what they're regulating and running. That's the ultimate bikeshedding: just like the proverbial discussions in the town hall about a nuclear power plant end up being about the paint color for the plant's bike shed, the patent discussions about modern computing systems end up being about screen sizes and icon ordering, because in both cases those are the only aspect that the people involved in the discussion are capable of discussing.

• City of London police figured out their own way to fight piracy on the Internet. They are buying ad placements on the (allegedly) illegal sites and putting banners that urge visitors to leave the site immediately. Interestingly enough, this way they are actually sponsoring said sites.
• Film director Martin Koolhoven asked good people of the internet to share his featured film on torrents. He didn't own the copyright on his film titled Suzy Q (which is a normal practice), and those who did, didn't own the copyright on the music used in the film. The original license on the soundtrack has expired and nobody wanted to renew said licenses. In the end there was a film, which nobody could legally distribute or broadcast. Thanks to the torrents, the film and it's cultural values are again available to the humanity.

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• World's largest model of the Solar System can be found in Sweden. The Sun is represented by Ericsson Globe in Stockholm, all the planets and asteroids are placed and sized proportionally and located all around Sweden all the way to the north.
• One of many R&D departments in Microsoft is actually doing amazing stuff - last week they broke the (hacker)news by coming out with the technology for stabilizing and speeding up video footage made during various sport activities - such as riding a bike. The result is something called hyperlapse - video, which is speed up, but still remains watchable. My speculation is that engineers at Microsoft improved on the tech used in Photosynth app, by analyzing all the frames from video and recreating the 3D environment, together with the virtual camera in it. Fascinating stuff.
• More of a news than a proper story - fresh rumor of the Babylon 5 being brought as a fully featured movie. JMS is still fully enthusiastic about having a properly budgeted project, which is said to be more of a reboot to the original story.

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• Story of a man who wanted to make a web based game called Game Neverending, but ended up (accidentally) creating Flickr and Slack. The latter is a sort of corporate chat client, which we at Red Badger loved from the first day. If you ever used IRC, Slack is the modern evolution of IRC client. IRC commands actually still work in Slack.

In April 2004 Stewart was scheduled to give a talk at an O’Reilly conference called Etech in San Diego on some pretty technical things found in Game Neverending—APIs, REST, RSS. It so happened that these were all features of Flickr. He decided to use it as a venue to announce and launch his new thing instead. Surprise! Flickr wasn’t even finished. The team pulled an all-nighter to get the presentation ready. At around five in the morning, Cal added the last touch: a way to upload images via email, so you could share pix from a mobile phone. The demo blew everyone’s mind. By the time they walked out of the room at ETech, Flickr was famous.

• In addition to the recent news from Russia banning import of food from other countries, there is another (absurd) law recently passed, which requires people to provide true identification when connecting to the public wifi spots. The whole thing being largely discussed, disproved and confirmed few times over the course of the week. It seems like in the end people will indeed have to provide passport details to use public wifi spots. This opens lots of interesting scenarios, one of which is banning certain citizens from accessing the internet altogether.
• Flappy Bird is coming back, now with multiplayer mode and slightly updated graphics. The catch - it is exclusive to the Amazon Fire TV. Interesting move by Amazon to get some popularity for their platform.
• VIM clutch - an open hardware project by Aleksandr Levchuk to enable users of Vim editor easy access to the text editing mode. Confess, you always wanted a clutch in addition to a normal keyboard.

• Story of the Graphing Calculator app for Macintosh. Two consultants worked for Apple. Their project got cancelled. They decided to push forward and finish their app despite the circumstances. With no pay, and at some point with revoked access to the building, they kept sneaking in and working (with no pay, of course).

At 1:00 a.m., we trekked to an office that had a PowerPC prototype. We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and launched the application. The monitor burst into flames. We calmly carried it outside to avoid setting off smoke detectors, plugged in another monitor, and tried again. The software hadn't caused the fire; the monitor had just chosen that moment to malfunction. The software ran over fifty times faster than it had run on the old microprocessor. We played with it for a while and agreed, "This doesn't suck" (high praise in Apple lingo). We had an impressive demo, but it would take months of hard work to turn it into a product.

• China is actively building high speed railways and is dreaming about trains from Shanghai to Helsinki, Paris and London. Current trains are travelling at 300 km/h, and they already built over 12000 km of high speed railroads.
• Perfect cup of tea as instructed by George Orwell. By the way, his opinion is definitely tea first, milk last.
• Nice read by Om Malik on Microsoft, announced cuts, Steven Elop and Nokia.

• Gameplay video of the upcoming game No Man's Sky. Small company based in London currently busy creating a small universe in the best traditions of Spore. Everything is generated. You can freely wonder around, exploring the world. When it gets boring, you hop on the starship and fly to another planet (taking a part in the starship battle on your way). Creators are also talking about storyline, so this game have solid chance not to end up being another sandbox.
• What's it's like to work with Elon Musk? Great thread of videos and posts from colleagues on Quora.
• Human JavaScript - free book from @HenrikJoreteg
• Another worthy book - Learn LISP the Hard Way
• Timelapse video of thunder and lightnings, striking skyscrapers of Chicago