In case your brand new computer didn't feel old already, check out this Crysis 2 DirectX 11 video that shows off some of the graphical changes they made between DirectX 9 and DirectX 11. Amazing. Course, I don't have the ability to time travel 6 months in the future to get a system that'll be able to run this.... :)
Learn Python The Hard Way second edition has been release. Download in a variety of free or pay formats. Kudos to the great Zed Shaw for this.
In a day chock full of google updates, the "big" one seems to be Google+, a new social networking play for Google. The main blog has a introduction or you can hit plus.google.com for more info and a signup form (invite only right now.
High points are:
The GMail blog talks about some stuff they have added to Protect yourself from scams by knowing who really emailed you. Knowing is half the battle.
The Opera browser is now up to version 11.50, with far more downloads than the number of people who dislike the 'Friday' song.
Pretty cool use of timing and video in a nifty little video called A Guy, a Girl, and 3 iPhones.
Fascinating interview/video of Bruce Gilden a famous New York City street photographer that has a ... "unique" way of doing street photography. Watch the video for some great examples of what he does and how he works.
Short and sweet, Team Fortress 2 goes 'free to play'. Also news on Forever geek.
Apple's put out a New iCloud FAQ enumerating what will be in the new iCloud vs mobile me services and what won't. Short answer is almost everything that you want, and iDisk and iWeb won't be, but not many people will care about those (IMHO).
Disposable Camera Captures Its Own Trip Across the United States. Awesomely cool. A disposable camera was mailed in such a way it could be used while "packed" and postal workers were asked to take pictures with it as it went across the US. Easier to view the images in the link than explain it.
My twitter friend @awphotographs (Amy Willard) posted this great notebook cover with the simple title of "need". Damn straight.
Hilarious: Spoof Video Pokes Fun at DSLR Rigs. My video making friends will want to rush out and order this new rig.
If this doesn't get the nostalgia flowing I don't know what will.
Cool stuff, uTorrent 3.0 has been released. New features include built in ratings and chat, streaming, remote access, and others. Very cool stuff. Those of you with access to "better" torrent servers, keep an eye on their lists of allowed clients, as not all private trackers allow brand new torrent software to be used.
Marco on how The FBI stole an Instapaper server in an unrelated raid.
DigitalOne hasn't handled this well. Nobody from the company has contacted me at all since this began. The company's website is still down, suggesting that they might not have any backups (or at least don't care enough) to set up a temporary page elsewhere. I have no idea whether I'll ever see the server again, whether I'll be reimbursed for the remainder of the month that I'm not receiving the service I paid for, or whether I'll be billed on July 1 for the next month of nonexisting service.
Only 3 Images, but very cool to see that the Hobbit movie is going on.
Great gallery on Flickr: Cats Unimpressed by Bathing. Via Forgetfoo.
The Duke Nukem Forever demo is now on PC, 360. You can see if the reviews are accurate or not, and how good (or bad) it runs on your system.
Windows Phone Tattletale is a nice site for WP7 users to point out retailers that are either ignoring or downplaying WP as a viable alternative and directing people to Android or iPhones. Via DF.
Another great video in the series, Everything is a Remix Part 3 is out. The next time that someone complains that Apple copied the Android notification system, or that Windows copied the Linux virtual desktops, or that Ubuntu is trying to be both Apple and Microsoft (I've done all of these things BTW), watch this, and realize that pretty much everything is a copy of something, and it's more about how you put these copies together that makes things interesting.
WTH? The Mozilla Firefox Web Browser 5 is available for download. Wasn't it only a month or two ago that FF 4.0 was introduced?
Seems to me that they are feeling under the numbers-gun from Chome (currently at version 8 billion) and are adopting a more rolling release cycle, with less emphasis on the major version numbers. Funnily I went to check on my home desktop and found I already had Firefox 5 on it, and hadn't even noticed.
He does a great job too. Stephen Colbert Sings "Friday" If you're in the US the Hulu link is far easier to find. However, for us .ca folks, this one is good.
Wow, the second video of Scottish Comedian Frankie Boyle is freakin' hilarious. Must find more copies of this "Rush Hour" show.
Another great video: Simon's Cat in Hidden Treasure
All I can say is oh wow. Looks like the last of the movies is going to be one hell of a ride. Kudos geeks of doom.
My buddy Nigel has a nice post up on the Wall of Forgiveness in Vancouver in the post-riot days. Lots of messages from people asking forgiveness, etc.
Also here's good info from Darren on the story behind the kissing couple. Lastly a collage of the people helping clean up (FB album here for those FB-inclined).
I'm pretty sure that the user comments are more funny than the code commit itself. Definitely a brown-bag error for whatever this Bumblebee thing is.
I, and the rest of the guys at the office, had a good laugh at this craigslist post. Non-hockey/Vancouver people can ignore it. Text below in case it disappears:
Looking to Trade my Game 7 Tickets. - $1 (Surrey)Date: 2011-06-14, 2:25PM PDT
I'm look to trade my tickets for Game 7 with anyone who can bring me Tim Thomas Alive, preferably bound. Not looking to harm him in any way just looking to hold him captive during Game 7. Will release him once the Canucks evidently hold the Stanley Cup.
Tim Arrives in British Columbia today, theres many opportunities to subdue him, I am aware that he likes Japadogs and Archie Comics. Please do not mistake Tim Thomas for Drew Carrie, I have put a picture below to distinquish the two. I do not have any use for Drew Carrie, I don't think anyone does.
Will also include a free Canucks Jersey and Henrik Sedin Bobble Head.
Thank You.
Google has the skinny on how to Watch the lunar eclipse from anywhere, including notes about how the google homepage has an updating interactive google doodle on the eclipse.
Found via JWZ.... Myth busted! is a breakdown of what goes into an hour long show of Mythbusters. Turns out, not a lot of new content :\
Great book, and now you can Download Samuel L. Jackson's audiobook version of Go The Fuck To Sleep for free. All you need is a free audible account.
Great to see that OpenPhoto has gotten their project up as a kickstarter project. Cool video with the founder, Jaisen Mathai, describing exactly what the service will be as well.
OpenPhoto works similarly to Flickr, Smugmug and other photo sharing services with one major difference: you retain ownership and give OpenPhoto access to use them. All photos, tags and comments are stored in your personal cloud accounts with companies like Amazon, Rackspace or Google. This means you can easily switch between OpenPhoto services, use more than one at a time or stop using them altogether while retaining all of your photos, tags and comments.
Doubleextrabonus - download the code and help out. However there's a tight timeline for the money they need to build the project, so share out the kickstarter link http://kck.st/jJex0k and help out by backing the project.
Watching this 1950′s Instructional Film on How To Dial a Telephone it reminds me a bit of the "your TV will now be all digital" commercials of not that long ago. Cool to see how similar old and new tech problems can be.
Fans of the TWiT podcasts will have been hearing about the new TWiT studios for a while, and Leo today posted a walkthrough video and images for you to admire. Looks good!
A comparison of Apple iCloud vs Google vs Amazon Cloud Drive vs Dropbox vs Microsoft SkyDrive from Pocket-lint.
Duke Nukem Forever review @ Shacknews
Duke Nukem Forever is both a victim and a benefactor of its own notoriety. Stripped of its bawdy humor and fame, it's a bland, forgettable shooter, devoid of any outstanding qualities, and utterly unremarkable. By any other name, this game wouldn't even register as a blip on gamers' collective radar. While fourteen years of anticipation may force its mediocrity under a microscope, it's also the only reason anyone is talking about it.
Duke Nukem Forever review at the Guardian. Spoiler: it's not pretty.
I still don't believe that it'll come out on the 14th, but if it does, I'll be drinking the Duke Nukem Forever Cocktail. Via Forever geek.
awesome people hanging out together - Great tumbler to follow.
Interesting 1-year retrospective regarding Camera+ from taptaptap. If you remember, Camera+ is a premier iPhone camera app with the cool "multiple touch for focus/exposure" controls, the "volume button shutter" controversy, and the recent "clarity" awesomeness.
Rails people who enjoy the windows version via RailsInstaller will be happy to see that the RailsInstaller for Windows 2.0.0 Preview Release has goodies like 1.9.2 and 3.1.0 rc support.
I loved this Daily WTF so much that I shared it with some of my web designer friends. Twenty-Four Bits Per Intern.
Nice! Battlefield 3 trailer: 8 minutes of PC gameplay. Can't wait for this to be released so it'll obsolete my computer even more!
I haven't really gotten into the Hypercritial podcast, but after reading some of the gems at Siracusa said so, I think it's time to re-subscribe.
"I've written enough PHP in anger to know about the language" (ep. 17, min. 35)
That one, as a new PHP programmer, is my favorite.
Still catching up with the E3 news and trailers. Here's a pretty epic one for Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Awesome photography by Angus R Shamal.
Pretty awesome guide to Reverse Engineering Mac Defender for people interested in such things.
Sorry folks, busy day at work today, so not much posted. If you're not aware, Apple's big WWDC show was this morning, and Macenstein has a wrap up of WWDC 2011: The Good The Bad, and the Meh.
Duke Nukem Forever gets launch trailer. If you believe it's coming out on June 14th of course. Silly people never learn...
ForeverGeek put together 12 early trailers for games coming out this year at E3 (well, being shown anyway). Some very awesome stuff in there, I recommend starting with the Tomb Raider one.
Minimal Mac introduces Hopefully Sunny, a simple site that will mail you a weather forecast every day. Only zip codes though, so once again Canadians get left out. Eh.
Very cool idea though.
Full Trailer For 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes'. Looks way better than the last one, even with the really creepy CGI monkeys.
Watch the first 8 minutes of MTV's Teen Wolf!
Sadly not available to Canadians :( Screw you MTV. Eh.
This fan trailer of George Lucas Strikes Back is quite possibly the greatest thing I've ever seen.
Hat tip @samspratt.
Interesting look at the new touch-based (but still works great with mouse and keyboard apparently) UI on Windows 8: Previewing 'Windows 8.
The fundamental issue however is no one wants to use touch as the main input to a computer. Honestly, it's a great demo, but after spending 5 minutes installing some updates and changing the security software on a touch screen computer mounted on the wall my arm was sore and the experience was infuriating. Really, no one wants this, and the people who have are either a) dumb executives who see the iPhone and iPad and say "that's awesome, we want that on everything and b) people who have the need for cool demos or have one of the few apps that would be good on it (ie: Google Earth). Tweeting out "that's awesome" with a touch screen computer is fine, tweeting out lots of things from it, probably not so much.
Also changing the UI of windows to look and act more like an iPad is a great response to the iPad and other tablets, but your PC is not an iPad. Why do people not seem to understand that the two different environments are fundamentally different and don't need to be copied back and forth.
</rant>
Gruber has more as always, put far more elegantly than I :)
A bit off topic for normal fare, but both Vancouverites and Bostonians (Bostonions?) know that tonight game one of the Stanley Cup Playoff starts. Some great pics of Canucks Pride Around BC were collected on the Vancouver Blog Miss 604.
Go Canucks Go!
