Windows Live Essentials 2011 has been released.
Well, not only google earth, other apps as well. Check out the new release from Google, it's called Liquid Galaxy and it lets you create your own version of the awesome Google "google earth on 8 monitors" thing (video below).
All I have to say is "wow". Check out this from Paris 2010, the Lamborghini Sesto Elemento Concept car in detail.
Wow.
Well, the RC for the latest version of the Ubuntu Linux distro is available! You can get Ubuntu 10.10 RC (Maverick Meerkat) now. You may want to check out the known issues first though. They do consider this a stable RC ready for all though.
[...] we formally announce Ubuntu 10.10 Release Candidate. Codenamed "Maverick Meerkat", 10.10 continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.We consider this release candidate to be complete, stable, and suitable
for testing by any user.
Here's the announcement email.
A new twist on old pictures.... 3D Van Gogh, using tilt-shift to give a bit of an update to the old master.
There is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly. That title doesn't instill confidence, and the article does a good job of going into the why.
I have to say the video is very cool, this is a iPod Nano-like device, powered by Android, which does some pretty cool things. I'm not sure if this is "what the nano should have been", but if you go by the feature tick list, it definitely wins. We'll see what happens when it actually hits the market though.
Another link from Scott over at My Extra Life - Star Wars vs Star Trek: Most Epic Fake Movie Ever. I'd totally pay to see this on the big screen.
Awesome machinema video of Team Fortress 2, called Dance Fortress 2. Great stuff, you almost have to watch it several times to see what each of the characters are done.
When the original trilogy was re-released in the late 90's with updated graphics I resented the old farts saying "I already saw them when they were first released", but now after seeing that the Star Wars saga will return to theatres in 3D in 2012, I'm feeling the same way.
"There are few movies that lend themselves more perfectly to 3D; from the Death Star trench run to the Tatooine Podrace, the Star Wars Saga has always delivered an entertainment experience that is completely immersive," the studio said in a statement issued Tuesday evening.
First of all, 3D up-conversions suck, I thought we figured out with The Last Airbender and Clash of the Titans that slapping 3D on after was a Bad Idea. Secondly, doesn't Lucas have enough money yet? This'll be the 3rd or 10th re-re-re-re-re-release of the movies. I mean, come on... Question is will I end up having to go see it if for nothing more than to see Star Wars on the big screen one last time.
Via Daring Fireball is a Smartphone "Super" LCD-OLED Display Technology Shoot-Out comparing the iPhone and various Android versions in terms of screen.
I was wondering why a post from a new redditor was so high on the main page when I was reading a different thread and finally grokked the name. Masuka is the other blood splatter analyst in the TV show Dexter that is the crass, perverse, and overall awesome guy (who gets way too little screentime IMHO). Anyway, it's his AMA that hit the main page.
BTW, if you don't watch Dexter, you must start now. Don't start with Season 5 though, go first watch season 4. Actually season 3. Maybe 2. Actually just start with season 1 and work you way up, it's well worth it.
I thought the 1:1 STTNG Enterprise I blogged about yesterday was impressive, but today my buddy H sent me this video of a fully implemented and working 16-bit ALU built in minecraft. My first reaction was "OMGWTFBBQ". The second was "this guy is going to have a lineup of girls from building this thing." Seriously though, he has room for RAM expansion and plans for a compiler for it.
I really have to check out this game....
http://erkie.github.com is hard to describe, but I thank @dkubb for pointing me to it. Basically it's a bookmarklet that lets you destroy ads on a webpage by playing asteroids. I didn't get it at first either, but now that I do, I'm using it on every page :)
Thanks Aryk for the link to this Gizmodo Ultimate Tablet Showdown, comparing the specs of iPad vs. PlayBook vs. Galaxy Tab vs. Slate.
Two points:
The latter point will go away (in theory) in time, but the former is fairly normal for Apple... the iPod's list of features is going to come in pretty much last compared to any other mp3 player, yet it dominates, even without expandable memory, an FM tuner, OGG playback, etc. I don't think the iPad will "lose" because of this though. On that note, Apple, you guys still haven't contacted me to send me a review unit.... time to get on that mmmkay? :)
If you're into TDD and use Autotest with graphical notifications (through growl or the like), you'll be interested in this autotest-growl icon set put up on github. Thanks to the reddit post.
Sad news, the excellent bookmark sync and bookmark tagging service XMarks (formerly the Firefox bookmark sync plugin foxmarks) is shutting down in Jan. There are alternatives of course, primarily being Firefox Sync, however XMarks stood out by not being just a syncing service, but also suggesting tags for bookmarks and did cross browser syncing to every other browser on earth. I wasn't particularly fond of their "content surfacing" (read: pushing other peoples stuff on me), but that was pretty easy to turn off. Sadly the blog is down so y You'll have to gleam what you can from the reddit discussions. Ah, blog is back up. Long story short, it's about money, or lack of it.
From the post:
The past four years have been a wild ride for us: growing something from nothing to substantial scale, providing a simple service that people love because it simplifies their lives. We've learned tons along the way, often by making big mistakes. We're really sorry that this last lesson means that you'll have to find an alternative to Xmarks, but the alternatives exist and you'll have no problem finding them.
So I've heard a bit about Minecraft here and there, but when I saw someone had made a 1:1 scale model of the Starship Enterprise from TNG I'm starting to pay attention.
Aside: Wooooooooooooow
Check out this amazing Blizzard-meets-300 Demo Reel from 2008 by Nareg Kalenderian.
Just pointed to this from PeeJay, seems that RIM has introduced a BlackBerry tablet. Looks interesting for sure....
Image of the day has a great set of images of sculptures created from old car parts.
Interesting move, with Microsoft to kill off Spaces and will be apparently moving everyone to Wordpress. Probably a good idea, spaces always seemed to me to be very walled-garden and not very "bloggy". The fact that most of the blogs that showed up on the main page were either non-english or spammy didn't help either. Hopefully their users will have better luck with Wordpress.
Microsoft has released two new Windows Phone 7 commercials | 9 to 5 Mac Microsoft releases two new Windows Phone 7 commercials, both aimed at the "save yourself from your phone" PoV. Fairly good, and they're hitting on the high points of the Windows 7 Phone, the fact that the start screen is good. Honestly that's the one point that I would love to have on the iPhone, the whole "live updating start screen with actual useful information" thing is pretty sweet.
Bernie's Better Beginner's Guide to Photography looks like an excellent resource for beginning photographers looking for a solid understanding of the basics.
I'm not sure what sort of failover you need to support it by getting hit with more than one client at a time, but the fact that a webserver written in postscript exists is pretty damn cool!
YouTube - Sesame Street: True Mud is a great True Blood parody. Thanks to K at work for pointing me to this.
Very simple concept, and awesome for the nostalgics out there. Pick a year, click refresh, and TRAVEL THROUGH TIME. Great for re-living the news for the year you graduated high school for example.
Cool news for the stalker and voyeur in you Canadian brethren... Facebook Places Now Live in Canada.
Marco.org warns of The Asian domain-name extortion scam. Pretty similar to a bunch of similar scams, and now you've been warned (assuming the email doesn't get caught up in your spam filter of course :)
Video from pocketnow.com of the iPhone versus Windows Phone 7.
A cool look through the Security Lessons Learned From The Diaspora Launch, as well as lots of good general Ruby on Rails security practices to follow.
This news bums me out, going to have to find a new idea for a Christmas present for my wife....
Ok, so they're a bit biased, but the link from 9-5 mac on how HP's forthcoming Windows 7 tablet video speaks for itself seems pretty accurate. I'm not sure how even the most hardcore windows fanboy can say that the browsing and UI is "fast" or "easy to use" compared to the browser on the iPad. I'm not sure if it's the fault of the OS or the touchscreen or the computer hardware, but it really looks like you have to be pretty "purposeful" in your screen touches and swipes, instead of the more easy going screen touching on iOS devices.
Marco.org has some notes about some stand out parts of the video.
Some pretty amazing photoshop work in this Photoshop Extreme Makeover video. Thanks forgetfoo.
Cool, PostgreSQL 9.0 Final Release Available Now! From the release notes:
9.0 includes more major features than any release before it, including:* Hot standby
* Streaming replication
* In-place upgrades
* 64-bit Windows builds
* Easy mass permissions management
* Anonymous blocks and named parameter calls for stored procedures
* New windowing functions and ordered aggregates
Some pretty high end features in there for a free program methinks.
Netflix has finally launched in Canada, and the iPhone in Canada guys have a review.
Personally I'm more interested in the streaming capabilities to the PS3 (seem to be there) and an increased selection (right now the .ca selection is pretty limited). With the new TV season upon us, having all the new shows available in HD, streaming instantly for a mere $7.99 a month (well worth the torrent searching and hard drive space my current methods use) is a big appeal. Sadly right now none of the good new TV shows (or hell, old TV shows) are available up here in the great white north :(
I'm not sure exactly how, but apparently Direct3D 10/11 Is Now Natively Implemented On Linux! Big news as this will let Linux drive forward games through WINE (which has limited DirectX support now).
Prost to Gallium3D and the open-source Mesa developers for making this milestone possible! Hopefully soon we can finally see an OpenGL 3.x/4.0 state tracker too. Implementing Direct3D 10/11 on Linux required around 26,000 lines of code to be added to Mesa.
Thanks for Aryk to sending me the link.
iPhoneInCanada has news of redsn0w, a mac tool for iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2G 4.1 Jailbreak.
You heard them. Don't jump to 4.1 thinking you can unlock again once you jailbreak, that's NOT the case. If you use ultrasn0w for your unlock, stick with 4.0 and wait it out. Make sure to follow the instructions on the blog and wiki before doing anything. Windows version needed a little more testing but it's confirmed to be coming soon.
Press release for the release of Adobe Elements and Premier 9 from the good folks at Adobe.
yes, it's only a fan-trailer, but watching it it almost makes me want to watch a real Pokémon Apokélypse movie.
In a follow up to last weeks post, here's a video of Newton OS running on iPhone.
Aryk pointed me to an interesting Lady Gaga / Ghostbusters mashup.
Cute trailer for a new book from Michael Lopp, Being Geek: The Software Developer's Career Handbook. Looks like some good tips for geeks managing people around you, including bosses, etc. Would love a review copy of this one *hint*hint*.
I know it's not one of the big two, but Pentax is my camera maker of choice and I figured I'd throw up their two announcements here. First is the K-5, a new pro level body with a 16.3 mp sensor, ISO 80-12800 (@6-7FPS) and 1080p video at 25FPS. Second is a nice addition to their lens lineup the 18-135 F3.5/5.6 zoom, what appears to be a nice walkaround lens, and other than being a bit slower, could be a great replacement for my 16-45 f/4.
Canon and Nikon people, you may continue about your business (though with the vague feeling that maybe, just maybe, in-body shake-reduction that allows you to have 50 year old lenses with 2-3 stops of shake-reduction is a good thing and something you're really like to try out.... Just sayin' :)
Update: DPreview has the news and a short hands on the K-5.
Sure it's all for an ad / viral marketing for a pillow store, but the Backwards Music Video Featuring 2 Guys & 600 Pillows is pretty cool, especially when you grok the "backwards" part. Also make sure you watch the forwards "making of" version as well.
If this Transformers Inspired Short Film does offer some proof that we're in the midst of an independant filmmaker revolution I'm not sure what is. Off the shelf software, off the shelf hardware, and a pretty awesome film, created by a guy in Russia, seen by (as of now) 905,000 people. Great quality and a cool concept as well.
Apparently the thing people needed in Little Big Planet 2 was an Vietnam FPS conversion. Seriously, check out the insanity.
Title says it all really.... Quake Live Premium Features Available for Free Until Sep. 26 so that the non-paying users can see what the cool premium features and maps are.
Cool light painting technique using the iPad. Not what you expect.
Here's a Civilization 5 Review for those of you interested in it.
The guys at Panic have been working on helping out on a project called Einstein, the Newton OS emulator for iPhone and iPad. Looking forward to the release :)
Darren sent me DarkPatterns.org, a nifty list of design patterns to get people to do things they wouldn't normally do.
The luckiest bastards alive is a video of a bunch of very close calls involving people in/on/around cars, trains, and automobiles. More than a few pucker moments in there.
The Flash guys at Adobe have given us A Sneak Peek into Flash Player "Square" which:
This preview includes support for two new areas, namely enhanced support for Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 Beta and native 64-bit support for all major desktop operating systems including Linux, Mac, and Windows.
Assuming it doesn't completely explode, woo!
The source code for Facebook Competitor Diaspora is out, pre-alpha state, but out and available. Thing is I'm not sure how much this is still needed. Facebook solved (well, in theory) a lot of the security issues that had this project starting in the first place, and while I 100% agree that an alternative is needed, FB no longer being (as) evil means that it's going to be that much harder for Diaspora (which needs a better name) to gain traction.
Here's the developer blog post on the Diaspora site.
Look for a full review from me tomorrow, but if you're an IE sort of person, you might be interested to know that Windows Internet Explorer released their beta of version 9. If you click on the download link on the page you get a warning from bit.ly about the link (I think 4chan has been having some fun) but head over to the real site beautyoftheweb.com to see some demos and download.
My quick initial review:
Anyone else have any thoughts?
Everything Is a Remix is a cool look at how everything is derivative, and there's nothing new anymore (well, maybe not quite that extreme....).
Very cool video of how a watch works, laid out in intricate detail.
Darren pointed me to Biolab Disaster, a cool little sidescroller game, it's difference being it's done in HTML5 and Javascript, not flash, which is the standard for this fare of browser game.
Some interesting mythbusting on the (now completely boring and who-cares) Mac vs. PC debate.
I disagree with the /film guys, I think the Tangled Double Rainbow parody is pretty funny.
The most awesome stop action lego movie you'll see this morning.
In case you were looking for an excuse to buy a second DSLR that does video, you can check out this HDR video accomplished using dual 5D Mark IIs. I'm not a fan of overdone HDR, and overdone HDR in video is just as bad. This isn't overdone per-se, but it could be easily abused. That said, if trends go as trends go, I see this being a built in feature to DSLRs in 5 years....
Jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch users who are worried about upgrading their version of iOS, fear not! SOunds like an iOS 4.1 Jailbreak Tool is Coming Soon.
This took me by surprise, and I actually LOL'd for real - Penny Arcade! - The Wager. Though I'd still say I'll believe it when I hold the game in my hand.
If you hit the google main page (or go to google.com/ncr if it's not in your area) you will be presented with the new Google Instant when you start typing.
"Feelings of euphoria and weightlessness are normal. Do not be alarmed."
Basically it's making google searches, well, instant, or almost. It also will auto-search when you scroll through suggested searches, and you also get tab completion. Very sexy.
Great video on the making of the Blade Runner Hades Landscape, from Douglas Trumbull's Immersive Media and Visual Effects site. Via Daring Fireball.
Pretty amazing when you consider they did this in the days before you could just throw it to your 12 year old neighbor with the fast computer to whip up in a couple of hours in Maya or whatever is the go-to app for 3D modelling these days. Still, doing it the old way with miniatures has more "soul" than these new fangled CG effects...
Wow, I didn't hear this... I knew that The Stig (from the awesome BBC car show Top Gear) revealed his identity in a tell-all book, but I hadn't heard that he had been sacked. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to read the book, and think that Stig's story would be awesome, but I don't like how he went about it.
Two quick comics to start your day. First is a Virtual Shackles one looking at Duke Nukem' (via reddit), and the second is this hand and penis washing logic from SMBC-comics.
OSNews - Internet Explorer 9 UI Video Leaked. Looks pretty similar to the screenshot linked earlier. Fairly boring, but still a hell of a lot better than the overdone IE678 UI.
A good illustration of "the curse of open" in the Samsung Fascinate Lightning Review at Gizmodo.
The Fascinate is a sad emblem of what happens when a carrier's worst instincts and moneylust run unchecked (those big branding deals are worth millions). Piled on top of the occasionally horrific aesthetic liberties Samsung's taken with Android, it's an abomination. And yet, these things are totally acceptable because of Android's openness. It just sucks that in this case, it's working against users, not for them.
Sad, as Android (for all my iPhone fan-boyism) is a great OS and it's sad to hear about a phone being bastardized so much on a platform that should be open and awesome.
Hows this for crazy? John Chiara's Photographic Process is to use a large format camera. Large as in "size of a desk" large.
Some twitter accounts are just awesome... for example, rabble's tweet points to @English50Cent which is a translation of @50cent's tweets into the queen's English. Thanks to @dkubb for the pointer.
Interesting tactic that they're taking in my home town of Vancouver... using 3D optical illusion to scare motorists into safer driving. I wonder if this is one of those cool 3D paintings or if it's some high tech hologram. Are we living in the world of tomorrow?
Not sure what to expect from Google at their Search event on September 8th, but I'm sure that it'll be interesting. A "search" event indicates that it'll be, well, search related... I didn't realize that there was anything left in that bubble though... Guess we'll see tomorrow!
Aside: Go me for not posting an Apple story as the first one of the morning!
Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier - from Slashdot.
A 32bit download of µTorrent for linux is available. Basically it's a remote controlable server that you can add downloads to from somewhere else. Not a client sadly, but no doubt using the uTorrent core under the hood.
Well, Microsoft has never been known for it's eye catching and mindshare-grabbing advertising right? I can't dispute what 9-5 Mac says about the first Windows 7 phone ad. Seriously, you'd think that they'd want to grab the viewer with something of either technical wizardry (look, multiple exchange accounts! for example) or "feeling" (look! you can escape those silly iphone people and be good at business and fun! for example)... instead you get something that one would almost mistake as an empty screen if you were to see it on TV.
However, I'm sure that they planned it this way, wanting to create "buzz" on the internet as people talked about how horrible the "ad" was, because at least then we'd be talking about the ad. Still, I'm not convinced thanks....
Cool little thread over at reddit got someone to create a Calvin and Hobbes + NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day script that combines an image of Calvin and Hobbes looking at the sky with the APOTD. Very neat stuff. Check out the rest of the reddit thread for other images and scripts to do similar things.
No, the "DOS" in DOS on Dope isn't funny or ironic :) I'm not saying that this is useful or practical in any way, but it is pretty cool.
If you're looking forward to this upcoming Wednesday's iOS 4.1 release, you might be interested in the Complete iOS 4.1 Walkthrough from 9 to 5 Mac.
Good write up on the Mozilla blog about updating the compose window and some of the things changing and being experimented with (and why).
We're currently exploring ways to relieve the pressure, and move on to a saner design for us. I've been working on an experiment that aims at tackling these pain points. It basically consists in replacing the standard XUL compose window with a tab written in XHTML that integrates CKEditor, and doing all the composition process in JS, upto the actual send that takes places in C++.
Sorry, but I will believe it when I see it on the shelves. Another year, another "Duke Nuke Forever is real!" report.
Wake me up when I can buy it and play it.
Nice gallery at IO9 of Websites for scifi's most famous evil corporations, based on real-life corporate websites.
Looks like Hemisphere games is giving away Free Osmos iPhone codes on Facebook. Osmos, if you don't know is a very sweet iPhone game that I've blogged about before (and enjoy). Looks awesome on the iPhone 4, but also plays very well on the iPhone 3G.
Great wrap up of the Greatest geek moments from the 2010 Emmys, which I managed to miss completely.
FAQ), so it's not really that cheap, but still, a $4 iPhone case where they normally go for the $20-30 range? Hard to beat. Cases don't seem too bad either.
No shipping to Canada sadly, would love to get a review unit up here to see what they're like (hint hint) :)
Macrumors has a good list of Requirements and Workarounds for the live Apple event that's happening today at 10. As you (as an apple fanboy) probably already know, this is the first time in ages that Apple has provided a live stream of a keynote, potentially putting an end to a fair chunk of the "live blogging" done by such sites as Engadget, GDGT, Gizmodo, etc. This isn't (yet) a crushing blow for it though because a) you can't scroll back a video to see what you've missed (well, you can, but not as easily as scrolling up a webpage to catch the highlights) and b) currently it's only streaming to apple devices (safari on OS/X and iOS devices).
Short story is there's not a simple hack like changing your browser ID string because the stream is using a technology called "live http streaming", which is a "standard" in that it's a standard, but only implemented so far in OS/X and iOS devices. So the live bloggers have another keynote at least.
Update: The workaround of using VLC seems to work nicely, just 'open network location' and paste in the URL. Right now the test URL is
http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbop/gear1/prog_index.m3u8
You'll have to find the "real" URL for the keynote is though, probably on MacRumors or similar. I'll update here with the real URL when I find it.
Update: Here's a rebroadcast on ustream as well as a possible stream (doesn't work for me in VLC though). Best of luck to you guys though...