Please enjoy courtesy the team at the Information:
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| | Dining With Apes: A Visit to the World’s First NFT-Themed Restaurant | By Brandon R. Reynolds | In Southern California, it is requisite to compare any food item remotely resembling a hamburger to an In-N-Out burger. So when I visited Bored & Hungry, the world’s first NFT-branded hamburger joint, on Tuesday afternoon, I had In-N-Out on my mind. The new place, formerly a Louisiana Fried Chicken, is at a busy intersection of Long Beach, Calif., next to a neighborhood of bungalows and across from some auto-repair places. It is not where you’d expect a great experiment in cryptocurrency to take place. The motif of Bored & Hungry is apes—from both Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club, the two biggest NFT collections currently in circulation, stare from decals and murals, to-go cups and french fry containers. When the restaurant opened on April 9, the line of curious diners stretched around the block. On the day I arrived, it was a more subdued post-lunch-rush crowd that included a trio of hospital workers wearing scrubs and a couple of ape owners from Washington, D.C., who’d heard about the place on the Ape Discord channel. The menu offered beef burgers and plant-based Beleaf patties served in a flat, Smashburger style, plus fries and drinks. (They had sold out of ape-related T-shirts and hats on opening day.) I ordered a Bored OG Burger Combo ($15) and this is just one man’s opinion, but here goes...Bored & Hungry produces a better hamburger than In-N-Out: two patties, perfectly cooked and disappearing under melty cheese, with pickles and no onions (by request), served with not-too-salty fries. It’s no-frills, or rather, the frills are all found in those bored monkey stares. | |
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| | What’s Inside Those Beats Headphones? A Startup Gives Product Manufacturers X-Ray Vision | By Stephen Nellis | Modern running shoes are marvels of technology. In the case of Waltham, Mass.-based footwear company Saucony, that means inserting a carbon fiber plate inside the footbed to provide springiness, implanting advanced foams in the midsoles to give back 90% of the energy a runner puts in, and minutely altering the curvature of a shoe’s sole depending on whether it will be used on rocky trails or smooth pavement. “It’s almost like pogo sticks on your feet,” said Saucony director of product engineering Luca Ciccone. But when it comes time to examine the innards of Saucony’s shoes to see whether manufacturing partners in Asia are implementing all those innovations, the company’s engineers have long resorted to a less illustrious technology: a bandsaw. For years, Ciccone has had to take shoes fresh off the assembly line and literally saw them in half to see what’s going on inside, destroying them in the process. That has changed with help from Lumafield, a startup just out of stealth mode in Cambridge, Mass., that has built a compact computed tomography scanner for use by engineers who develop consumer products. Ciccone can now press a button to create a colorful 3D X-ray of the shoes and pop open the file in a web browser. “A picture might tell you 1,000 words, but a 3D model will answer a million questions,” Ciccone said. To test out the scanner ourselves, The Information Weekend grabbed a few products from home, including a Theragun mini massage gun and a pair of Beats Solo headphones, and took them to get scanned at the Lumafield software development hub in San Francisco’s Mission District. In less than a day, the images came back: They showed an intricate cam system driving the Theragun and wireless Beats headphones that are actually full of wires on the inside. To drum up interest before its public debut, Lumafield has been covertly operating a site called Scan of the Month where it probes everyday objects to reveal the engineering within, such as a surprisingly complex Heinz ketchup squeeze bottle. |
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