Vince Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, has announced the introduction of a new service on the Google Blog. The Measurement Lab will give end users and researchers remote access to a number of advanced network diagnostic tools to simplify the task of network analysis. Many of the individual programs are also available as downloads to be installed (so far only on Linux).
Read MoreIf you’re like me, the only exercise you often get on a Saturday afternoon is when you take a break from playing video games to walk into the next room where your computer lives and check out some videos on the Interwebz. Now, if you have either a PS3 or a Wii, YouTube has effectively robbed you of that 15 seconds of pure raw cardio by quietly offering up Youtube for Television, currently in Beta and advertised as only available for the aforementioned systems. Technically, the phrase “only available for…
Read MoreIn response to the recent unceremonious shuttering of tens of thousands of AOL blogs, Jason Scott — ASCII text files archivist, documentary filmmaker of the CC-licensed BBS Documentary, and writer of recent counter-technocultural foul-mouthed gems like Datapocalypso! and FUCK THE CLOUD — is striking up a kind of internet viligante, do-gooders league called Archive Team, which will cooperate, wiki-style, to save the sum total of cultural data on commonly used public blog servers and website shingles. Scott himself has already started the ball rolling, by personally saving (and making available…
Read MoreScientific American has posted an article about the day when Diana Reiss discovered that a dolphin had learned to use her own disciplinary tactics in reverse, against her, giving her a very human-like ‘timeout’. Even more interesting was the information that dolphins shape and play with bubble rings, in a process that very much resembles, let’s just say it: making art. Embedded from here is the 2007 video of a dolphin doing just that. With accompanying text from the article: Notoriously playful, dolphins have also caught scientists’ attention by creating…
Read MoreFor all you zombie fans out there comes this message from Thea Munster of Toronto Zombie Walk fame… Have you been lying in your casket for far too long? Have you felt you’d rather lay in trance than face the dredges of winter? Are you scared of being covered by freezer burnt flesh on your beautifully rotting corpse?! Well, you may just want to re-consider digging yourself out of the frozen earth for THIS February, for it promises many delights for those of the UNDEAD…… Here’s just a few……
Read MoreI can’t imagine what Jack Kerouac’s classic would have been like if he had a 3G connection and a netbook. Would “On The Road” have been a hit blog, or would he have been too busy watching Youtube videos of some dope jazz beats? Anyways… A buddy of mine wanted to go on a road trip not long ago and called me to see if I wanted to tag along. I figured, what the hell. It would give me a chance to put my new Acer Aspire One to the…
Read MoreAs the title suggests, Raindance Canada has a new series of course for the film maker in you. Our own Dave Lei has attended many Raindance events in the past, and can’t speak highly enough of them. Short, Sharp Essential Classes for Filmmakers – a great way to start your filmmaking year! Raindance Canada is offering a unique series of Wednesday evening classes beginning January 28th – February 25th as part of the Filmmakers Foundation Certificate Series, an investment of only $39.99 + GST in your film future!
Read MoreI can’t actually vouch for this tutorial (courtesy of TUAW). Maybe RebelScum or King-Pin can pop in and evaluate it, since as we discussed while cable-sorting at our recent group tidy-up of the increasingly Gigeresque floor of the podcast studio, I don’t intend to get into Windows 7 until I am forced. Hell, I would still be installing Windows 98, if XP weren’t required for the whole concept of me trying out PC games. A concept sadly, heretofore unexecuted, mostly due to lack of drive space on my Windows partition…
Read MoreEver watch a movie on your 16:9 LCD or Plasma TV only to be disappointed to see the black bars above and below the picture? That’s because the movie you’re watching was shot in glorious 2.35:1 aspect ratio, so the picture has to fit in the vertical centre of the screen. “But rye”, you say. “That’s why I bought a widescreen TV in the first place; to avoid those annoying bars!” Well, apparently Philips feels your pain, and now proudly presents the Philips Cinema, a 56″ superwide screen that does…
Read MoreThe TED conference has just posted a dynamic slideshow talk from 2005 by comics artist/theorist Scott McCloud, wherein he delves into his own biography and how his artistic vision was informed growing up by science. Which is interesting enough, but in the final half, he gives a crisp rundown of the analytical territory which he is famous for populating with graphic Aristotelian orgies, beginning with his 1993 treatise, Understanding Comics. The final third is the most interesting to me. McCloud is bearish on hypertext, or any form of interactivity which…
Read MoreA physicist known as Craig Hogan, at a particle physics labratory in Illinois, has unearthed new evidence that all of the information in the cosmos — including you and me — might be encoded on a farflung surface or ‘event horizon’, that encloses Life, the Universe, and Everything. The theory that the universe is ‘encoded’ is meant to address a conundrum that has puzzled quantum theorists for decades: the amount of information a three-dimensional space can mathematically contain appears not to be dependent on its volume, but rather unexpectedly…
Read MoreAre you a creative struggling to stay afloat in harsh economic times? The guys over at Fanboy have posted a very interesting article that might appeal to you. In it, Ralph Bakshi, director of (what is potentially my favourite animated film of all time) Fritz the Cat and the grossly underrated Cool World, talks Lee Adama-style about seeing this situation as not a tragedy but an opportunity to seek out strange, new worlds. (Yes, I’m mixing my metaphors.) Essentially, his core message is, “If the industry isn’t working for you,…
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