Arts Featured Film Mobile Photography 

Splitscreen: A Love Story shot on Nokia N8

Winner of the recent Nokia Shorts 2011 filmmaking competition, Splitscreen: A Love Story is a short film shot entirely with Nokia’s N8 mobile phone (in 720P @ 25fps). The surprisingly watchable footage uses dual frames to represent two ‘days in the life’ — one set in Paris and one in New York — with the shots arranged to show the two lives proceeding in harmony, half a world apart. (They don’t stay apart, though. Watch and see.)

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Computing Featured Hardware 

Will we see a Commodore 64 in the NHL? Let’s hope so…

The venerable Commodore 64 has seen a bit of a revival of late, with the release of a new Intel based computer shoved into the shell of the 1980’s 8-bit dream machine. Its reach is extending beyond the computing realm to the world of hockey (only the best sport in the world).

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Computing Featured Hardware Science 

Mind-Probing HUD Glasses Finally Invented: Cyborgs Rejoice

He’s walking in the thoroughfare when a woman stops him and asks him for the time. As he check his psi-spectacle readout, a red alert pops up over her head — she’s anxious. What about?

Scene from a futuristic cyberpunk novel? No, apparently this is now a modern day scenario that has resulted from the research of one Rosalind Picard and others from MIT.

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Arts Gaming 

Rock and videogames this weekend

Sure, the Canada Day long weekend is right around the corner, which means patios, barbeques and fireworks for most, but that doesn’t mean the fun starts (or stops) there. There’s a couple of great events coming up over the next few days worth taking note of…

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Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Android 3.1 Tablet coming July 22nd

As Cersei said to Ned, “When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.” You can apply this quote to the Tablet Wars, and if King Robert Baratheon was the iPad, and Joffrey Baratheon the iPad 2, then is the Galaxy Tab 10.1 Robb Stark? Perhaps that doesn’t work because Joffrey isn’t actually Robert’s son and…okay, as you can see I have been watching too much of HBO’s brilliant Game of Thrones TV series. Trying to find suitable analogies in a fantasy…

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Arts Featured Film Photography Science 

Lytro lets users focus on capturing the moment, not fiddling with auto focus.

The company Lytro uses a new light field sensor that allows digital cameras to record all the light that is moving in all directions in its field of view. The most obvious benefit is that there would be no need to focus before the pictures are shot. Once the image is captured, the user can select the focal point.

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Featured Science 

Saturday Morning Science 15

Arsenic and Old Life– I grew up reading science fiction and was introduced at a young age to the idea that life might have a different chemical basis than the standard  arrangement based on carbon. Silicon based  life was already a cliché long before I saw the old classic Star Trek episode The Devil in the Dark wherein a Federation mining colony is terrorised by a life-form that could ingest  rock and move through solid matter as if it were swimming in water.  I remember asking my father, a chemical…

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Featured Mobile 

Samsung Galaxy S II photo preview

Over the past few days, Alex has had his hands on the latest and greatest Android phone from Samsung, the Galaxy S II. There’s some things we can’t say about it at the moment, but by all metrics, it certainly appears to be ushering in the next generation of powerhouse smartphones. At a 3rd of an inch thick, the SGS II is both thin and light, while sporting a 4.3″ Super AMOLED+ screen and a lot of power under the hood, driven by a 1.2Ghz dual core processor.

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Arts Featured Gaming 

Child of Eden review: Fleeting Genius

If I had to categorize Child of Eden, it would be a “first person J-pop electronica visualizer science fiction dance rail shooter”. While that sounds like a disjointed mouthful, everything flows together seamlessly. Taking place in the same universe as Q Entertainment’s earlier Rez, Child of Eden ups the ante in all respects, making it a singular experience, that all but achieves designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s goal of inducing synesthesia in the player, delightfully crossing the wires between sound and vision.

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HP TouchPad tablet coming to Canada on July 15th

While the iPad and its successor, the iPad 2, are still the gold-standard for tablets, 2011 has already seen the release of a number of challengers for its throne. Both the recently released Motorola XOOM and RIM Playbook have some features that are better than the iPad, but neither of them has managed to recreate the “magic” that Apple infuses the iPad with. While most of the tablets still to come this year are going to Android Honeycomb based – Samsung, Toshiba, Dell, HTC, Lenovo, LG all have new models…

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