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Minecraft – A First Person Builder

Two weeks ago my sixteen year old son, Reid, was playing with it. Earlier this week Cory Doctorow was writing about it at Boing Boing. What is this thing called “Minecraft”? If you know about it then you’re probably playing it. If not…then…so you don’t feel out of the loop tonight when the people who hang out in the kitchen talking at parties weigh in on this one: here’s a crash course. Minecraft is an online game which uses the visual conventions of a first person shooter for constructive purposes, literally….

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Fan Expo 2010 – Bedlam Ink

The folks over at Bedlam Ink, who are charged with doing additional storytelling for the new Showcase series Lost Girl were at the Fan Expo booth this year.  This included both a printed comic, which is a standalone story, as well as a motion comic that works as a prequel to the TV series.  Jessie, Navid and Tigh from Bedlam Ink were kind enough to take some time to talk with us about how the comics tie into the series, and some of the process of developing the comics for…

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Fan Expo 2010 – Gravy Train

We first met April Mullen and Tim Doiron at 2009’s Fan Expo, they were promoting the DVD release their hilarious mockumentary Rock, Paper, Scissors: The Way of the Tosser.  Between then and now, they’ve gone on to make another feature film, Gravy Train, which premiered this past April, and has now launched on DVD, but you can find out about that, and more, in the video interview.

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Fan Expo 2010 – Nerd Girl Pinups interview

One of the stops we made during Fan Expo this year was the Nerd Girl Pinups booth.  For a couple of years now Nicole (friend of the show) and the gang there have hosted a Fan Expo after party a few blocks up from the convention floor.  Dave talks with Katherine Curtis and Kenickie Street about what’s new with nerdgirlpinups.com, and gets the lowdown on their new calendar, which you can check out here.

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Adobe Demos It’s Plenoptic Lens and Software

From the realm of cool news,  Adobe recently demoed a radical technology involving a Plenoptic Lens and a new software that will find it’s way into Photoshop eventually.  Basically, this new lens (with software help) allows still pictures to be focused and re-focussed AFTER the picture is taken.  That’s right!  AFTER the picture is taken, you can manipulate the depth of field to pretty much anywhere within the picture.  How does it do this?  The Plenoptic Lens is basically made up of a whole bunch of tiny little lenses.  The…

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Fan Expo 2010 – Interview with Anna Silk and Kris Holden-Ried

Showcase was on hand at Fan Expo promoting their new TV Series Lost Girl, and we managed to get some time to talk with stars Anna Silk (Bo) and Kris Holden-Ried (Dyson).  The show, about a succubus who’s only recently become aware of the larger supernatural fae world of which she’s a part, airs Sundays at 9pm. In this interview, Alex talks with Anna and Kris, who give us an idea of what it’s like working on the supernatural thriller, as well as some insights into their individual characters, and…

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Sony Ericsson X-10 Mini unboxing and short review

A couple of weeks ago, before the craziness of Fan Expo and TIFF, Sony Ericsson was kind enough to send us the new Xperia X10 Mini for us to review. In the video above you can see our un-boxing of the phone, and a short review, where I go over the main features of what they claim is the ‘The worlds smallest Android phone’. The X10 Mini was also recently awarded ‘European Mobile Phone 2010-2011’ by the European Imaging and Sound Association (EISA). Please note that while shooting the video…

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At X’10 – Halo: Reach sneak peak

One of the closed door events at X’10 this year was for the highly anticipated final chapter of Halo, at least from Bungie.  Unfortunately, once we were ushered behind the heavy curtains we weren’t allowed to actually record anything, but we did get to see the first single player missions, Noble Actual and Winter Contingency in action.  The single player gameplay was exactly what one would expect out of Halo, with even more polish put on the engine itself.  While Reach introduces squad play, there’s no real squad mechanic in…

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4th dimension surfing as video art

I actually came across the above video via Boing Boing a couple of days ago, but just haven’t stopped watching it, so that’s why it’s getting posted on a Sunday morning.  In the video, Don Whitaker has taken footage of the Oregon coast, and by putting it through a Processing script that re-creates the slitscan technique for the digital age, creates a haunting and sometimes eerie landscape that appears to be at point plucked straight out of one’s subconsciousness. Slitscan imaging techniques are used to create static images of time-based…

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I have a Double Rainbow moment with a Galaxy S phone and a Porsche 911 GT3 RS

UPDATE – The video above is in HD. My initial post of this had the incorrect SD feed. WOW! OMG Double Rainbow, a Porsche 911 GT3 RS parked near my office, shot in HD, with the Bell Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant super-phone. The footage above is raw unedited video from the Galaxy S, which is pretty good quality for a phone. You can also download the ORIGINAL HD 3gp clip here ~ 80MB, so you can see EXACTLY how the video looks direct from the phone. You can probably tell…

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Bell Galaxy S Vibrant super-phone unboxing video and pictures

Samsung and Bell were nice enough to send us a Galaxy S Vibrant a week early. Above is our unboxing of this new Android super-phone, and you can see a gallery of stills after the jump. We should be posting our full review sometime next week, but my initial impressions, after a week of use, are very very favourable – I love this phone! The Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant is available now from Bell for $149.95 on a 3-year term. As a bonus if you buy a Galaxy S from…

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Too Good to be True or too True to be Good? Brainwave computing

Courtesy of TED, Tan Le demonstrates her take on the old Mind/Machine Interface trope. The Emotiv Systems’ EPOC headset uses 16 sensors to scan the brain and some very fancy algorithms to identify neural activity and translate this into control signals. Here are ten questions to keep in mind to the degree that the mind can keep anything. 1. Funny how this one seems to be as advanced as it is when speech recognition is still pretty clumsy. Will we jump into full mind/machine connectivity and bypass language altogether? (Just…

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