Author: Brian

The Giraffe Facebook riddle is spreading like wildfire. It typically goes like this:

RIDDLE: 3:00am, the doorbell rings and you wake up, unexpected visitors, it’s your parents and they are there for breakfast. You have strawberry jam, honey, wine, bread and cheese. What is the first thing you open? Remember, message me only! If you get it right I’ll post your name on my status, if you get it wrong you change your profile picture!

Obviously you came here for the answer to the giraffe riddle, so here it is!

ANSWER: You open your eyes first! One good answer I heard was the door, but since you just woke up, you need to open your eyes before you get to the door!

I hope this saved some people from having to change their profile pictures to a giraffe!

By Brian Roizen

The latest US News Rankings are out for 2013-2014, and UCLA and USC are both tied for #23! UCLA is still listed before USC, but most likely due to alphabetical order. Which school do you think is better?

You can see the full rankings here

When you look at the cost of each college (even out of state tuition!), UCLA clearly comes out on top and beats every single higher rated university.

By Brian Roizen

Right next to Hollywood, UCLA is known for being the perfect filming location for any University scenes. Most movies pretending to be at Princeton, Harvard, or Yale are actually filmed at UCLA! Here are the top 10 movies and TV shows filmed at UCLA!

Jobs (2013) – movie about Steve Jobs that stars Ashton Kutcher. Even though the college where Jobs dropped out of was supposed to be Reed College, the Jobs movie was filmed at UCLA in front of Royce and Powell library!

Angels & Demons (2009) – Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon solves a Vatican mystery

The House Bunny (2008) – A playboy bunny (Anna Faris) joins a sorority at UCLA

Californication (TV series) – Hank Moody teaches at UCLA!


Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde (2003) – Elle Woods is back in pink to ban animal testing.

Old School (2003) – A few friends (with Will Ferrell!) start up a fraternity near their college.

Legally Blonde (2001) – Elle Woods goes to Harvard (actually filmed at UCLA!) to become a lawyer

Erin Brockovich (2000) – A mother takes on a water company that pollutes the water supply and kills people.

House M.D. (TV series) – Outdoor scenes usually filmed at UCLA!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series) – also filmed at UCLA

The Nutty Professor (1996) – filmed at UCLA!

Any other good movies that were filmed at UCLA? Leave them in the comments!

By Brian Roizen

Anyone who has a Sonicare knows that toothbrush heads aren’t cheap. I used to pay $9/brush before I found that you can get them for about $6-8 on Amazon.

I have a Sonicare ProResults toothbrush, and I recently test drove the generic toothbrush heads. Considering they cost only $2 each, that’s more than 3 times cheaper than the ones made by Philips!

The ones I tried are made by Paz Generix:

I was tempted to get them because of how cheap they are, but I wasn’t very happy with the results. They aren’t made well. The bristles fall out after just a few times brushing, and the brush head itself doesn’t fit well. This essentially means that the vibrational brushing power is far weaker than the non-generic tooth sonicare tooth brush head. Paz tried to copy the toothbrush head with their generic one, but they did a very poor job, and I’m very disappointed. I don’t recommend it at all. I guess I’m going to be sticking with the official Philips Sonicare toothbrush heads until some company makes a perfect replica.

How to get sonicare toothbrush heads for cheap

Costco occasionally has discounts for sonicare toothbrush heads with 6 brush heads for $30. Also, I once bought a 7 pack off Amazon for $40. The price is currently $60, but it fluctuates often. You can use Alertification to get an email or text as soon as the price drops!

By Brian Roizen

I recently read about an idea to power rockets with solar energy, also known as “solar sails”. It made me wonder how practical this idea was given that solar thermal energy plants are in the experimental phase in Las Vegas. They basically use thousands of parabolic mirrors to focus sunlight on a central tower, which then runs a rankine power cycle.

Keplar originally proposed the idea of solar sails to navigate the solar system. In this idea, light from the sun basically propells a object without any need for external power. The math is somewhat theoretical, and with little practical data, but the sun can produce about 1.4 kW of power at a distance of 93 million miles away.

I recently ran into this problem, and an easy fix was found here! Basically, just use some nice CSS like class=’selected’. I thought there’d be a straight up PHP way to highlight the results, but CSS/HTML isn’t too hard to implement.

I just ran a Sunspider benchmark for an iPhone 5 with iOS 7 and the results are below for both Safari and Chrome.

As you can see, Safari on iOS 7 is about 5X faster than chrome for javascript, but this is mostly due to the fact that Apple cripples Chrome by forcing it to use a webview.

By Brian Roizen

Everything looks new and fresh in the iOS 7 beta. Here are some screenshots to show how the new UI and design looks!

Starting with the homescreen, the signal bars are replaced with circles. Also apparent is the more modern looking font and flat icons.Swipe up from the bottom of the screen and you have quick settings (something I had on my jailbroken iPhone 3GS in 2010) Finally!

The messages app for iOS 7 looks beautiful and modern with a fluid like interface for scrolling.

The weather app is just like Yahoo’s weather app for iOS, but with different backgrounds. This isn’t a bad thing as yahoo’s app is one of the best weather apps.

The new iOS 7 mail app looks great! Will it beat gmail?

Siri looks more useful than ever in iOS 7

The new multitasking pane shows all the apps you have open, and to close apps you can simply swipe up. This is a beautiful UI gem taken straight from Palm’s WebOS and more recently used by Chrome for iOS.

Want to install iOS 7 on your iPhone 5 or 4S? Read this quick guide.

By <a href=”https://plus.google.com/116162036529120103602?rel=author”>Brian Roizen</a>

Want the latest and greatest iOS that won’t make it into the hands of the masses for a few more months? You’ve come to the right place! First, you must be a member of the iOS developer program ($99/year) to download the beta SDK.

1. First download the iOS 7 beta https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/index.action (make sure you get the right version for your phone depending on if you have ATT or Verizon)

2. Make sure you backup your iPhone files by going to iTunes (just click Backup now)

3. After downloading the ios_7_beta__iphone_5_model_a1428__11a4372q.dmg file, double click on it and extract the .ipsw file to your desktop

4. In iTunes, hold down the option and click on “Restore iPhone…”

5. iTunes will now take care of the rest of the iOS beta installation process! The last thing you should do is click “Restore from this backup” when prompted to keep all your old apps

Troubleshooting

If you get the error “This device is not registered as part of the iphone developer program”, don’t fret, you just have to go to the iOS provisioning portal and add your UDID.

By Brian Roizen