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The Practical Dead

This post is both a shameless self-promotion and an explanation of sorts. Over the past while, the site has been quieter than usual. While there’s still more to come from Fan Expo, and we’ll still be writing other pieces, a lot of time has gone into another endeavour – The Practical Dead. It’s a new web comic written and drawn by myself and RGB’s own Rebel Scum. What is The Practical Dead you ask?

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Computing Hardware Mobile 

iPhone 5: 5 days in

So Friday Sept 21 finally arrived, and with it, the latest iteration of the venerable iPhone. Me being the new-toy-nerd that I am, and one that is beginning to come to grips with what may be a severe case of Fanboyism, I dutifully ran down to my local Rogers store and waited in line with the masses to get my hands on the shiny gadget I’d wanted all my life…since 9 days prior

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Computing Hardware Software 

Microsoft Surface: The lamentations of an iPad devotee.

Yesterday, Microsoft showed how grown up it’s become over the past 5 years by proving it still remembers what it’s like to be a kid. The venerable software giant held a special event at Los Angeles, but unlike any other Microsoft event, keynote, or trade show presentation that I can remember, this one was…well…cool. Like REALLY cool.

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Arts Computing Internet 

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s an interactive videobook

Interactive videos are hardly all the rage anymore, thanks to YouTube allowing anyone and everyone to clutter up the screen with a pastiche of semi-transparent boxes urging viewers to “CLICK TO SEE MORE VIDEOS”, whichh will in turn be cluttered with semi-transparent boxes. But every now and then, someone comes along and puts a new spin on the whole idea. BooneOakley, the little North Carolina ad agency you may have seen recently on AMC’s The Pitch, is the best example of doing it right I can think of without resorting…

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Arts Computing Film Hardware Production 

The death of DSLR revisited: Blackmagic Design’s new affordable digital motion picture camera

Amid all the shiny new toys announced and demoed at NAB 2012 by the usual suspects of companies such as RED, Arri and Canon, one company not even known for cameras at all lay the smackdown on all the camera manufacturers. Past the initial shock and gadget giddiness, I’ve had a chance to collect my thoughts on this exciting new development.

Blackmagic Design -best known for their high end video capture cards and cross converters- unveiled their new DIgital Cinema Camera to the shock of everybody at NAB2012. It is a 2.5K camera that shoots in Prores, AVID DNx, and RAW in the ADOBE CinemaDNG format in 23.976/24p/25p/29.97/30p fps. All for $2995 USD. This is big news. Seriously. The key lies in how it shoots and records

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Animation Arts Computing 

Computer graphics of a bygone era

Werner Randelshofer, a visual computing student at ETH Zurich, has taken it upon himself to archive digital artwork from early computer systems that are no longer with us, such as the Commodore Amiga, IBM clones, the Atari ST and many more.  The site does a great job of archiving systems by type, and artist.  Beside the abundance of game stills and animations, there are some classic demos on display, converted for modern viewing, including an old favourite of mine, Automated Light by James M. Robinson.  Randelshofer took the time to…

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Arts Computing Photography Production 

Canon 60D or Nikon D7000: A Filmmaker’s Decision Part 3

It’s been a while since I first embarked on this 3-part article. Since then, life happened as it always does and before I knew it, quite a bit of time has passed and the digital camera landscape has completely changed. But always for the better. Newer and more affordable video and cinema cameras have surfaced that surprised everybody. For the sake of completing this series, I will not discuss any of the new developments. That is best left for another article altogether.

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Computing Internet Mobile 

SkyDrive updates for PC and Mac / Google Drive launches

Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud storage has been around for a number of years now, providing users with up to 25 GB of free storage, with their Live ID login.  Yesterday, they updated the service by releasing an updated Skydrive application for both Windows (Vista, 7 and 8 ) and Mac OS X (Lion). Once installed and you provide the proper login, the SkyDrive folder simply appears as another folder in Windows Explorer and the Mac Finder, much like other cloud solutions such as DropBox.  The maximum filesize has also recently climbed…

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Computing 

Commodore founder Jack Tramiel passes away

Jack Tramiel, who founded Commodore International, passed away this past Sunday at the age of 83.  Born in 1928, Tramiel survived Auschwitz and a labour camp in during World War II, and later emigrated to the United States and started building typewriters.  He later set up Commodore Business Machines in Toronto for supply chain purposes, and branched into computers with the Commodore PET, which was a staple of computer classes in schools at the time. It was the Commodore PET that inspired me to get my first computer, the VIC-20. …

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Computing Internet Mobile 

The myth of the saturated smartphone market

Ever since the days of the original Palm Pre, worries about saturated market has permeated many reviews and reports about new entrants in the smartphone ‘race’. A lot of the tech press were raising flags, suggesting Palm was in a “too little, too late” position. Palm was certainly in the “too little” category, I’d argue they were far from “too late”.  There were a lot of problems with Palm’s WebOS reboot, few of which had to do with timing.  Unfortunately, because Palm (via HP) did crash and burn, it reinforces the idea that “market saturation” is…

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