Because of its many locations and logistical demands, the 160-day shoot was broken up into several stages. The production started in Sweden shooting all the winter exteriors and a few interior sets, and then went to Zurich for two weeks to shoot the banking scenes, as well as exteriors and interiors. The team then returned to the U.S. and shot all the remaining interiors on stage at the Paramount lot and the new RED Studios for some 10 weeks. Because the story also takes place over so many seasons, the filmmakers then returned to Sweden in mid-March, and also stopped off in London for two weeks to shoot scenes there, made a stop in Norway and then ended up in Sweden again.

Fascinating how this stuff gets made.

[via Coudal Partners]

Travis Bonfield is The Intel engineer behind Stephen Hawking’s computer.

Excellent image of Hawking by lwpkommunikacio.

Watch the video. Nilay Patel interviews Rishi Chandra on GoogleTV, Android’s future as an OS for televisions, cable boxes, DVRs, and other TV add-ons.

Not a single mention of AppleTV, iOS, or any of Apple’s work in this area except to say that they believe Android will dominate in the tablet area (toward the end of the interview).

If you listen to the interview, the complexity of the various things Google is doing sounds much like listening to Steve Balmer talk about how Windows will be integrated into everything. As many know, Microsoft is having difficulty in this area and while Android may be doing well as an OS, the universe of gadgets that run various flavors of it is a mess.

I love the simplicity of AppleTV, AirPlay and using my iPhone or iPad as a remote. Did you see those Google TV remotes? Ugh.

No doubt the internet is affecting the future of broadcast and cable TV and it may be a wide open market right now. I can tell you that the Bravia operating system Sony builds into its TVs is awful and I stay out of those menus on my TV as much as possible. I want to use my Sony TV as a dumb flat screen for some future Apple device (AppleTVX) that controls everything simply and easily. No doubt that’s coming soon.

The piece of Guy’s essay that appeals to me most is this:

So if you’re in an Apple based household the odds are good that your new Apple TV will be able to talk to one of your other devices and get the required network info from it. I’d bet heavily that this capability makes its way into AirPort devices and Macs. “Want to let this device on your network?”, is exactly the level of simplicity that Apple tends to aim for.

Setting up and using an AirPort network is much simpler than any of the other wifi routers I’ve played with over the years and my guess is that Apple is going to continue to make it simpler to add new devices to the network, including the AppleTV. It’s easy now and it will be even easier which is part of the puzzle of making a living room appliance that’s easy to use and integrate with other devices you already own.

I’m not entirely convinced that Apple will get into the flat panel TV business but I’m convinced that they’ll expand the capabilities of the current AppleTV, turning a Sony or Samsung flat panel TV set into a dumb HD screen, which is fine by me, I hate the menus on my Sony Bravia.

[via Steve Splonskowski]

This is great, less for the LED robot, more for the style of the instruction. Having a video like this makes building almost anything a heck of a lot easier. And, for those who like instructions in list form, here you go.

I think the “maker movement” and instructional videos like this are the missing link in American education.

[via The Kid Should See This]

Imagine an iPod Nano wristwatch that’s also a bluetooth-connected communicator. Makes perfect sense, the question isn’t if Apple will make this, more like when.

Not sure I want to have even a short phone conversation talking to my wrist but for some things I think it might work out quite well. Bring up a todo list, a shopping list, a music list (on the phone, not the iPod), and more with voice using Siri.

Amazing comment thread at MacRumors, a few are asking why one needs a wristwatch, assuming that if one has an iPhone one can always get the time from it. Man, am I old. Not only do I wear a wristwatch, I wear an analog wristwatch (and it’s not an iPod with an analog screen on it).

I don’t watch Monday Night Football but this behind the scenes slide show tour narrated by Mike Tirico is absolutely amazing. What a team. What a process.

[via Devour]

“We see the library as not being in the book business, but being in the learning business and the exploration business and the expand-your-mind business,” he says. “We feel this is really in that spirit, that we provide a resource to the community that individuals would not be able to have access to on their own.”

This is the spirit of a community computer user’s group, I love it.

When I did this yesterday it seemed to be helping, a single full charge lasted all day and while I wasn’t using Siri heavily (Siri was down yesterday) I did various things with the phone during the day.

Last night when I went to bed I noticed that the phone was at 78% charge and I left it unplugged to see if standby mode would wipe it out again. The phone was connected to our wifi network and to our AT&T macrocell so I assume that it’s nightly maintenance connections got made and it was active during the night.

The good news is that this morning it has a 76% charge on it, only losing 2% overnight.

No doubt the update to iOS 5 will improve battery life even more but there is now no doubt in my mind that completely resetting the phone helped a lot and people who have this problem should at least do this step, it can’t hurt.

I may eat these words in the next few days: I’ll be in New York tomorrow and I have a friend coming to visit who’s an iPhone user and who will want to mess with this new phone. My phone will get a good workout and we’ll see if Patrick’s “fix” is what I think it is. But I’m a lot happier today than I was yesterday, and this is a good thing. Of course, having electricity in the house (finally) doesn’t hurt.