Bookmark it – Texts From Superheroes
Sure, it’s Canada Day, and we all should be outside. In the meantime, if you haven’t added Texts From Superheroes to your regular list, you really should.
Read MoreCategory: Featured
Nokia impresses at MWC with 41 megapixel PureView 808
Nokia, which has long held the crown as ‘best camera on a phone’ with their 12 megapixel N8 today upped the ante with the announcement of their PureView 808 phone. The phone will ship with a custom 1/1.2″ sensor, much larger than most smartphone cameras. While this leads to a noticable hump on the back, the results make up for it, as it sports a 41 megapixel sensor, enabling it to capture images up to 38 megapixels in size.
Read More
Windows 8 and why the Zune brand needs to die
Microsoft has taken a lot of flak for their horrible naming conventions and overly long names, and deservedly so. When first announced, Windows Phone was called Windows Phone Series 7. They officially chopped of the “Series” by launch, and now just advertise it as Windows Phone. It just makes more sense.
Similarly, they last year rebranded their paid Office cloud service to Office 365. Office 365 makes sense. It’s Office, all the time. Do you know what they called it previously?
Business Productivity Online Suite.
Read More
Swiss satellite to clean our cosmic front lawn
Life imitates art, right? That doesn’t have to mean it’s good art to result in a good cause. In that vein, the Swiss Space Center yesterday announced that they’ll be launching the CleanSpace One project, with its first goal to build and deploy a “janitor satellite” named CleanSpace One, with the singular task of tracking down the detrius we’ve left stranded in our solar front yard. The space junk will then be carried back towards Earth, with the goal of burning up during re-entry.
Read More
Puddle game review
Back in 2010, six French students won the GDC Student Showcase award for the liquid physics puzzle game Puddle. Konami later picked up the title, and after development by Neko Entertainment, Puddle was released on both the Xbox Live Arcade and PSN a couple of weeks back. The premise of the game is straight forward. The player guides liquids through hazardous environments, while trying not to lose so much volume that you have to start over. In the early levels, this means navigating water through pipes filled with fire and heated…
Read More
Deus Ex – The Title Sequence
The always wonderful to read “Art of the Title”, which focuses on the craft of creating effective title sequences, generally using film and TV, has posted its first game sequence, with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Included is an extensive interview with both Paul Furminger from Goldtooth Creative (director of the sequence) and Jean-François Dugas from Eidos-Montreal (Game Director).
Read More
Mass Effect 3 with Kinect
YouTube video link Last week, a promotional video showing the Kinect integration in Mass Effect 3 was release. action. The Kinect integration actually appears pretty useful, especially in the issuing of commands to the non-player teammates. They do mention that while there is almost a second of lag while the Kinect interprets the command, it ultimately does pay off. Joystiq had some hands on time with it, and has some good things to say about it. For example, you can point to a location and issue a move command via…
Read More
Only Kinect
Media artist James George calls it “an old tourist movie from the future”. A walk down the summer streets of Barcelona recorded through a handheld 3D scanner. He was quite properly trying to avoid using a genericised trademark (like saying Xerox when you mean photocopy): he shot it using the output of a Kinect. Put to music by Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto the images become recognisable as much through their movement as their form. The two and a half minute piece “alley posts” has been posted on Vimeo. George’s…
Read More
Wikileaks launches Spy Files, Rockwell plans comeback
2011 is not turning out to be a good year for those with paranoid tendencies. With the Carrier IQ story gaining traction, it’s interesting timing that Wikileaks and friends have launched a new project called Spy Files. Compiling information from over 280 documents, Spy Files has created an interactive map that shows widespread montioring of just about every electronic form of communication, from the internet to GPS and speech analysis.
Read More
Carrier IQ and mobile (in)security
Back in October, a story ran on XDA Developers about software running on HTC Android phones called Carrier IQ (CIQ) that appeared to be collecting a fair amount of data about your device and not doing a good job of storing it securely. Beyond your device ID, it collected phone numbers, geo-location and account names. Since that initial discovery, there’ve been reports of it being even more invasive, leading Carrier IQ to issue a Cease and Desist letter and denying what it does.
Read More
Nokia vs deadmau5 live event video
On November 28th, Nokia ran a promotional event to launch their new phones. The event featured Canadian electro producer deadmau5 on stage, using a 400 foot tall building covered in projection screens as a backdrop.
Read More
Michael Biehn Interview at Fan Expo 2011
We caught up with Michael Biehn and his wife Jennifer Blanc at their Fan Expo signing table. We originally expected to only get a couple of minutes with them, but it turned out to be the longest interview of the show.
Read More