Canadians will be happy to know that (finally) there's been an announcement about iPhone 4 Activation/Upgrade Pricing, and the 6G data plan has returned (which I have, but only seem to use about 50-300mb a month on).
Still, good news that some info has finally escaped.
Awesome video of a Big Fan Asks Joss Whedon Who His Favorite Actor Is. From my buddy @jtstrocel.
Microsoft has taken a new take on street map imagery with the Microsoft's 'Street Slide', and is taking aim at Google's Street View.
I have to say, this looks pretty damn interesting, especially when you combine it with their other seamless integration of video/imagery/etc into the new Bing Maps stuff (though none of this stuff has been released to the wild yet IIRC).
There's the Thor Comic Con Trailer out online. Looks interesting for sure....
Two days to go now, and iphone in canada has their iPhone 4 Launch in Canada FAQ. Sounds like he's going to be at the Pacific Center Apple store in Vancouver, a bit far for me. Anyone else around Abbotsford going to be going early morning to one of the various Rogers/Telus/Bell/Apple outlets in town?
Humorous and amusing post about the deconstruction of an In-N-Out Double-Double.
Nice little video on how to Speed up your iOS 4 iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2G. Corresponds nicely with the reports that Apple is looking into the issues with iOS4 on a 3G iPhone.
As a spoiler the tip is "disable spotlight search for anything that you don't use". Will see how it works soon. As an Apple fanboy I have to say that the fact they allowed iOS4 on the 3G was a big mistake, even disabling multi-tasking and wallpapers. Right now my phone is painfully slow, and if I was a non-fanboy/normal user/unsuspecting moggle, it's an experience I wouldn't be happy with, and I'd be bitching about Apple selling crappy hardware (2 generations old or not).
Note: The comments seem to indicate this isn't going to do anything at all, though maybe a short term benefit could be from the act of the reboot clearing out the OS and memory.
Fantastic shot and description over on flickr called View From a Car Carrier. Read the description to see what it's like steering one of those huge cargo ships. I also encourage you to go through the rest of the My Office Window set of images showing the varied life of a cargo ship driver who does nothing but ferry these boats in and out of the harbor. This was featured on the flickr blog today.
Nice collection of 211 free Wine-compatible Games in one download found by OMG Ubuntu, so you can play them on your Linux system (speaking of Linux and Gaming). The list of games in the download can be found here. See the OMG Ubuntu article for details and direct download and torrent links.
I won't lie and say I didn't see this coming, but according to the official page, GNOME 3.0 is Rescheduled for March 2011 Release.
GNOME is driven by its goals to provide a quality free software desktop, and we feel that our users and downstream community are better served by holding the GNOME 3.0 release until March 2011. This gives adequate time not only for feature development, but user feedback and testing.
Having 3.0 ready for the "next" GNOME release was a pretty aggressive goal, especially with no "real" alphas or test releases out, and the only real evidence that the great "3.0" milestone being a hodgepodge of software released. Still, I'd rather 3.0 come out fully baked and ready for the world than a thrown together mix of software, paradigms and APIs. Still, it is a bit of sad news for those of us who were looking forward to 3.0 to come out this year.
The awesome guys over at CodeWeavers have released Crossover 9.1 and Crossover Games 9.1. The official announcement is here. Both have lots of fixes, work with WINE 1.2, and Games now official supports Starcraft 2 (yay!), Modern Warfare 2, and a bunch of others.
So apparently some new RTS Star.... something was released recently. For those people into that, you'll probably enjoy the video Lego Starcraft: Brick Rush.
Awesome bhangra inspired video of the folks from The Guild. Game On is awesome. Maybe not as good as the Date My Avatar video, but still, pretty damn awesome!
Awesome robots.txt from Last.fm. Hat tip reddit.
I know nothing about the content, but I ahve to say that the Trailer for Zack Snyder's 'Sucker Punch' looks amazing, like a legion of special effects teams all puked on film at the same time. Anyone know the origins of this at all? Based on a comic book or novel or LSD induced dream?
Update: Better trailer link. Thanks Aryk.
The good news from the Ruby on Rails world today is that the Rails 3.0 Release candidate has been released. No major changes, but some serious performance improvements. Link has the full details.
It's been a long time coming, but maybe now the "Apple doesn't care about the desktop" criers can quiet down. On the menu today:
If this is even remotely real, this bike is the most awesome thing ever!
I'm going to guess I'm not alone in identifying with this Geek and Poke comic....
It's been floating around today for a bit today, and seeing as the iPhone 4 is due in Canada this Friday, you might be interested in the Unlocked iPhone 4 Prices as reported by CBC and others. A bit high, but not out of line with previous phones, and remember that these costs are for a) a non-subsidized phone, and b) an carrier unlocked phone, so if you want to pay the big bucks, you can get an iPhone that will work on any carrier just by swapping the SIM out. Personally, I'll be getting a carrier locked phone, for the cheaper, subsidized price of $299/399.
This article on the Daily WTF called The 0th Month is a picture perfect of a) programmer rage and b) a case study on refactoring :)
Kevin S. works on websites for a living.Well, actually, "work" might not be an adequate description considering that part of Kevin's job requires that he is half clarvoyant and half mountain sherpa when it comes to digging through the several huge codebases globbed together abominations of open source, third-party components that he is expected to support.
Also possibly the greatest intro paragraph ever :)
Not sure how "new" this is, but the F.Lux app that I use on Windows and Mac now works in Ubuntu. F.Lux automatically adjusts the lighting of your screen to be more natural which (in theory) will help your body go to sleep more easily after using the computer late into the night.
Cool list from Odee on 10 Movie Characters That Turned Out To Be Real People.
A unique look at the new movie with Jack Sparrow's Comic-Con Announcement. Sadly nothing "real", but still worth a watch.
DPReview had their Adobe Lightroom 3 Review. Good stuff, and complete as only DPReview can do :)
Great image over at The Celler of a Cow Wash. Pretty much the happiest cow picture you're going to see all day today.
Also, happy Friday! TGIF :)
The best advert for Ubuntu you probably never saw via OMG Ubuntu.
There's a second Trailer for Tron Legacy. Woo! Can't wait for this one to show up in the theater! :)
Great shots over at io9 of the comic-con "God Hates Fags" counterprotest with awesome geek oriented signs. Seriously, can't we pack these Westboro Baptist Church assholes off to a mining colony somewhere where there isn't enough air? Just sayin....
I tried to make a table as awesome as this when I was about 15 with my dad, but it was supposed to be a full block of resin with the electronics embedded in it, but the thing was just going to be too heavy. This though, is very cool.
Outside of even the cover art, the Jedi Junkies Documentary looks pretty interesting. Also the video has a ton of Slave Leias in it, so it's automatically awesome :)
Nice College Humor video of Kid-Testing classic video games like Mario Brothers, Sonic, and others. Not the results I expected to be honest.
If you're participating in the Scott Kelby World Wide Photo Walk, you'll be getting a Free Live Online Lightroom 3 Workshop after the walk is over. If you're not, and are into photography, come on out and give it a shot. I'll be at the Abbotsford location if anyone wants to meet up.
I'm not sure where the LX4 went to, but Panasonic officially announces DMC-LX5 premium compact, successor to the very popular LX3. Improvements include a longer zoom (24-90mm), keeping the wide aperture (f/2.0-3.3), and various other UI and form changes to tweak things.
A wrapup of some recent Windows Phone 7 Reviews based on the tech preview. Some say awesome, some say sucky.
John Gruber has a nice round up on the Antennagate Bottom Line as he sees it. Puts some of the various conspiracy theories in question (ie: Bumper cases == Apple knew about the issue) on another tact that might be a pretty reasonable explanation.
And that's all I have to say about that.
TrueCrypt 7.0 has been released. Hardware acceleration, a new auto-mount type is added, and various other tweaks.
Great video of a LOLParrot doing 20 Parrot Tricks in 2 Minutes. My favorite is the "bang" playing dead trick about 1:00 in.
Physicists reveal how the universe guarantees paradox-free time travel. Yay!
Time travel isn't just science fiction: Albert Einstein's general relativity suggests it could exist. And now we might have solved the tricky matter of time paradoxes. It's all just a question of adjusting probabilities.
Via OSNews is a link to the 5 things to look forward to in Ubuntu 10.10 at techthrob.com. Biggest thing for me is #2, the use of UbuntuOne to sync configurations into the cloud, allowing you to (theoretically) boot up a new Ubuntu install and have it look like your previous install without having to copy your configuration files around.
Thought I'd mentioned it before, but I guess not. If you like free stuff, and are OK with Steam, you'll be happy to know that Alien Swarm is free on Steam starting yesterday. Haven't played it yet, but the video looks good! It's a Source Engine based game, top down view, four player co-op, and well, swarms of aliens :)
Whatever you wanted to know about The History of Lolcats is available in info graphic form.
If you're like me you're getting tired of hearing about iPhone 4 reception issues (or not). You're either going to get one regardless, not get one, or wait and see what other people say and then get or not get one. And you'll be either someone who talks about it and agonizes about it, talks down to your local apple fanboys about how Apple is deliberately putting out bad product, or be rational about it. I say that if you're in the latter camps or a fanboy, you'll be happy to hear that you can get a $5 Cute Antennaids Bandage Your iPhone 4 Reception Boo-Boo so you can show it to your android loving iPhone hating friends to show that's all that's needed to fix and make it all better.
Also iPhone 4 coming to Canada July 30th, yay finally! Hopefully the reception debacle will keep the lines at Rogers/Telus/Fido stores low so I can upgrade my phone in peace :)
I was sad to hear that Wesabe, a version of Mint.com that's not US only is going to be discontinuing its Accounts tab as of July 31st. The blog post has details on how to get your data off, and what will happen to it after they shut down (it's all being sold to a nice Nigerian man
Short story about why sounds like it's plain old money (ironically enough) and not enough resources to give the user experience that people deserve and need when dealing with money over the internet. Very sad to hear, hopefully something new will come up that's high quality like Wesabe.
Maybe soon Canadians will have one less thing to bitch about when they say "[service] is great, so I've heard, but of course it's not available up here". At least, if the rumors from the Globe and Mail are true and that Netflix will cross border to Canada this year. If so it'll be down to iTunes music not being the same, stupid Daily Show and Colbert links not working and the stupid site not redirecting you to the proper video on the Canadian site, Hulu, and others....
Course, who uses physical media to get their TV entertainment these days still?
For you Rubyists out there that love numbers, you'll be happy that the July 2010 version of The Great Ruby Shootout is available with 7 different versions of Ruby benchmarked here and back again.
So you know that "I'm on a horse" old spice commercial? It, plus the various levels of web 2.0 and social networky stuff has generated the Old Spice Voicemail Generator. Pretty damn awesome, and I have my new voice-mail message.
There's a trailer for The Social Network, all about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. Great use of music as well.
Get a Free Year of Amazon Prime with an .EDU Address via Lifehacker.
The evernote blog has information on the secret update that was revealed today, The Evernote Trunk.
The Trunk is a showcase of great apps and products that makes your Evernote experience more awesome.To access it, click on the new "Trunk" icon in today's update to Evernote for Windows and Evernote for Mac (Evernote Web later today, iPad next week). Clicking it opens a window full of amazing intergrations. Today, there are nearly 100 items listed across five categories: Mobile, Desktop & Web, Hardware, Gear, and Notebooks (this one is really cool, more on that later).
Personally I'm a bit disappointed, from what I can tell it's just a way to find hardware and software that interacts with Evernote, which is cool, but not something that you couldn't get in a simple webpage on the evernote site....
Awesome new Improv Everywhere with the Star Wars Subway Car.
Found TPB on Justin.tv via this reddit post via /r/trailerparkboys via this great post.
If you don't know Trailer Park Boys, do check it out, it's great TV with surprisingly deep characters, and not the stupid "handycam show about stupid people who do drugs and swear" that it appears on the surface. Now with the streaming link there's no need to hit up the torrent sites for the Season1-7+extras torrent (though watching them all in order is a ++.
Very cool look at the design process as someone redesigns the HTC 1.
Undercover Karaoke with Jewel from Jewel. Thanks to Darren for the link.
Jewel, disguised as a mild mannered businesswoman, drops by a local karaoke bar and performs some of her classic songs to a completely dumbfounded audience.
Good news, the iPhone 4 is unlocked. This means that Canadian fanboys can (in theory) get their iPhone 4's working up here. The evidence comes in the form of a screenshot of an iPhone 4 running on Bell. Course, you'll still need a micro-sim. I think I'll still wait for it to be released legitimately though.
Note that when the iPhone is available in Canada, it will be unlocked anyway, so I think I can wait another couple of weeks (at most I hope!).
Great news..... Guild Season 4 Premieres!
A few things. If you'll notice, the episode looks a bit different than usual. We shot this season on a different camera, the Canon Mark 5D, which I NEVER EVER WILL TRUST BECAUSE IT LOOKS LIKE A STILL CAMERA SO HOW IS IT TAKING VIDEO?!
uTorrent has created an API and started a Developer Challenge, allowing users to create embedded apps for the uTorrent torrent client in HTML and JavaScript. This sounds interesting, and the first app that jumps to mind is a "find this same torrent" that will search by name or hash for a torrent, perhaps to find a torrent you are downloading already to find new seeds.
A Fan-Made King's Quest Sequel has Launched for those wanting a return to the older, simpler days of PC gaming.
For those Linux users in a area that geographically supports Spotify, you'll be happy to see that there's an alpha of Spotify for Linux available. I understand the 'real' client works ok under WINE as well though.
Wil Wheaton has The Guild: Season 4 Teaser up on his site. If you had forgotten what happened in Season 3, there's a Auto-tuned recap of Season 3 for your enjoyment. Also huge props for the phrase "naughty monkey sex".
Google is making a play for the "easy to build mobile apps" market by releasing Google App Inventor for Android. The video shows a pretty interesting UI for dealing with events and actions on the phone. I haven't got any experience in developing apps for Apple, so I don't know how this compares to XCode, but it definitely looks like something worth checking out.
Not sure if this is the next big scandal, but I've seen a couple of stories on how Skype has blocked Fring. Fring is an iPhone app that's been around for a few years now and connects to a bunch of different messenger services, including skype. With the iPhone 4 they've recently shown off how they too can do video calling over skype (which, I believe, skype doesn't do yet).
From the Fring blog:
Needless to say, we are very disappointed that Skype, who once championed the cause of openness is now trying to muzzle competition, even at the expense of its own users.We're sorry for the inconvenience Skype has caused you.
Another story on this is here. Not sure if this is maybe some "oops" and it'll turn out to be a non issue, but I can see a lot of Fring users, and general internet rage about this.
OMG awesome, thanks Len for this video of Yoda Recording His Lines For The Star Wars TomTom Voices. I'll harken you back to the Darth Vader version. Wonder if you'll be able to download these into the iPhone version of the TomTom app?
So Apple is approving LED light flashlight apps for iPhone 4, which, after reading in the article about some of the app prices, "features" (ads, wtf?) and stupidity, shows me why for some cases, Apple needs a tighter app approval process. Seriously, there should be one "flashlight app", and only one. Having more than one is ridiculous. It'll be interesting to see if the Android store apps (when an android phone with an LED flash is released, if it hasn't been already) has better or worse results. If these iPhone apps were the approved ones, I can only imagine what would happen if there was no restriction....
Metafilter has a great one on Firefly: the '80s Edition where they link to a great 80's style intro video inspired by an io9 article.
The discussion thread on reddit on the Holga D is pretty awesome. Sadly it's just a concept imagery, but you have to admit, the idea of a digital camera with a crappy lens and no LCD is a pretty awesome concept. Honestly, if the price were right, it would sell. Some good links in the comments for things like a Diana lens for your DSLR (along with lots of snarky remarks).
Think you are a hardcore gamer? Check out the 300 actions a minute video where they talk to Korean gamers about what you need to do to get good at StarCraft.
Proving that you don't need a "pro" camera to shoot fantastic photos, and if you know what you're doing, you can do a iPhone-only pro-fashion photo shoot.
Of course, as cool as it is to see great shots coming from an iPhone, and as true as the "you don't need a $7000 camera to take great pictures" rule is, this video shows that if you have a bazillion dollars worth of lighting gear, a professional model and make up artist, you can get great shots as well, which maybe isn't what they were trying to do :) Still, it's cool. Love the moment in the video at 3:54ish when the phone rings :)
The google mobile blog points that YouTube Mobile got a bunch of nice updates over at m.youtube.com. Including a speed boost, and not just opening up the youtube app on your iphone, instead now all funky HTML5 and stuff. Nice work!
This Talk Show Guest FAIL also represents my reaction when I saw that Germany had lost their World Cup game.
Intresting demographic: iPhone: The Art of the Launch.
Great post from John Gruber on Microsoft's Kin Humiliation. Another post from him references mini-microsoft's post where he notes that the Kin is this generation's Microsoft Bob.
Firefox 4 Beta 1 has been released to the world. Check it out and give your feedback to Mozilla. My big question is where is the standalone / portable version so I don't have to worry about messing up my (required) work setup?
Sadly it seems on mac and linux the cooler UI changes aren't available. Still, I'm sure this will be coming in the next betas.
Update: Portable version link here.
Unless you're a Steam-hating commie, you'll be happy to know that NASA's Free Exploration Game "Moonbase Alpha" is Now Available on Steam.
(Just kidding about the commie bit!)
A cool project seen over at OMG Ubuntu to get people to Help Hunt down geeky app descriptions in the software centre to translate application descriptions into "human", to help with that whole "software for human beings" thing they are trying to do.
Power Laces- the Auto lacing shoe and full how to build instructions. Need I say more?
Great info over on the Opera Dev blog on the HTML5 , used to create a radio player.
Good look at how "multi-tasking" on the new iPhone works.
Story from a true food buying ninja: Eating Well On $1 A Day.
Another amazing New Wall-Painted Animation by BLU. You've seen the other one I'm sure, this one is just as good or better.
I'm OK with buying the Star Wars trilogy on VHS, re-buying the 'remastered' series, then re-re-buying it when the 'updates' was released, then again when they were released on DVD, and I'm even ok with it once more when it's coming out on BluRay. However, I refuse, refuse refuse to buy anything to do with another bad 3D Re-Release rumored to be "Still Coming".
Slashdot notes that the Compiz Project has Released C++ Based v0.9.0. The announcement has more details, including that it's had a complete rewrite for the API in C++, major architectural changes, etc.
Found via @peterc, who tweeted out about his quick look at the tmux terminal multiplexer (a better "screen"). The screencast is a quick look at the major features of this possible screen replacement. Being a die-hard screen user, I'm pretty intrigued by this.
Awesome music / video tribute in "I'm Bruce Willis".
Another good Hitler video, this one is Hitler Finds Out About Opera 10.60.
If everyone hasn't had enough of making fun of Twilight yet, Cracked.com had another go.
Stephanie Meyer's exemplary writing style is demonstrated in this conversation between Edward and our narrator Bella:"Aren't you hungry?" he asked, distracted.
"No." I didn't feel like mentioning that my stomach was already full - full of butterflies.
A nice take on iOS vs. Android vs. webOS, at least, if you ignore that webOS and Palm are all but DOA of course....
If you're into True Blood you probably will be interested in baby vamp Jessica's video blog.
The "I'm on a horse" guy Reveals Secrets Behind Old Spice Commercial.
Movie Review: The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. Not mine, I wouldn't watch it, but thanks to the Geeks of Doom for watching it so you don't have to.
Bella spent the first movie swooning over Edward. After he left in New Moon, she started to get close to Jacob. In Eclipse, she realizes she has feelings for both and is left to agonize over which one would be better for her in the long run.
Locate your stolen Linux laptop With Prey, a free, opensource tracking app that lets you do the standard tracking things, images from the webcam, geolocation, etc.
You know things have gotten to a fever pitch when you have to have a Letter from Apple Regarding iPhone 4. Also, because he's awesome, John Gruber has translated it from PR speak.