So if I see something online I want to watch, it gets saved somewhere so I can load it up on my TV. Or possibly my portable device.
That would be nice.
I use Plex, so a plugin for that would be great. But I’m flexible. The important part is, I’d mostly rather not sit at my computer to watch things – it’s best to watch things in the best place for watching things, my couch & TV. As instapaper is to reading…
This post is brought to you by the alternate reality where the internet is standing by to take my stupid ideas and make them happen.
When I was small I hid books under the covers. I read them furtively from the light that reached into my bedroom from the hallway. So I’ve always been a voracious reader.
The past decade has seen me self-inflict great guilt for not reading like I used to. By which I mean I stopped reading as many books. Gradually I realized that I wasn’t actually reading less, I was simply reading differently. Instead of books, I had developed a bottomless hunger for the web, and later, news feeds. I was better informed about current events than I ever had been when I only read one newspaper, and also familiar with a decent stable of niche interests.
A few years later, the inevitable feed purge occurred. You can oversubscribe to news feeds quite easily, and the mail-inbox metaphor that almost all feed readers use transmits a sense that you have to read everything. Consequently you gradually build up an impractical amount of feeds, and an unnecessary feeling of obligation . One day I found myself spending an hour after work trying to get through everything, and realized the mental trap I had fallen into.
I also had come to realize that the weighting of web / news content to long form (books) had to be corrected.
Now, my reading ecosystem seems balanced, efficient and pleasant. It would seem so exotic to my younger self: the magic book that contains all books. The books transmuting into different forms. The instant access to so many sources. But it’s really just a series of tools.
Like you didn’t know, it’s iPad day in the US, and here I am posting about my new iMac. But it ties in, I swear!
Anyway. After 10 years of buying laptops I bought a 27” iMac a couple weeks ago. I’m still deciding whether this was the right decision, but I’m pretty sure it is.
Andy Ihnatko on the iPad – what that guy said. I had a post drafted about the iPad from a few weeks ago but it didn’t seem to add much to the talk at the time. Despite initially feeling underwhelmed, the product quickly made sense. Traditional computer interfaces don’t work on small screens (they barely work on 12” screens let alone 10”), and rather than start from scratch Apple is building upon the touch OS that when you think about it is already quite an achievement in usability, much more so than the Mac OS. There are a lot of super-non-nerds I know who recently got iPhones and they understand it in minutes. In a couple days they are showing off their new apps. This never happened with the Mac or Windows.
What did you think? I’m moderately impressed. During the keynote I felt underwhelmed, but once we learned the price was $500, I changed my tune. Apple was clever to leak the $1000 price point ahead of time.
Perhaps the disappointment is that this is a glorified iPhone with some extra eye candy and none of the revolutionary new interface hype we had been inhaling over the past little while.
The price reinforces my feeling that this is primarily Apple’s response to the growth of the netbook market. However, the netbook and the iPad both menace laptops in general. Since I got the netbook, my 15” MBP remains on my desk, and for the first time I am considering buying a desktop to replace it. Netbooks make two-computer life possible to those of us who aren’t among the richest princes in Europe. My dream portable remains something like the MacBook Air, but that thing seems dead in the water now, especially at three times the price of the iPad. I expect they may eliminate the Air altogether and perhaps introduce a new model that is essentially the iPad with a keyboard, with a laptop form factor. Or maybe that’s just me dreaming.
The clunky peripherals are a surprise, especially the keyboard dock. It seems very un-Apple. I also hear from Gizmodo that it can be used with Bluetooth keyboards. That’s awesome, and makes me think I could stand to have it instead of a netbook.
As an ebook reader? I imagine hardcore readers will stick with proper e-ink readers and/or actual books, but casual readers may well like the eye candy of Apple’s presentation and not worry too much about eye strain and the higher prices of books. But the Kindle and friends are going to have to come down in price, stat.
My biggest problems with it: the encroachment of the closed iPhone app ecosystem into general computing. Also, still no multitasking? Granted, if the apps launch super-fast and save their states, perhaps we don’t need it as much. But still.
Anyway, that was a fun day. I have a million little questions about specific implementations that I guess are going to have to wait a couple months. I think I can deal with that.
This is one of the facets of the ongoing Apple tablet megarumour that really intrigues me – an Apple 3D interface patent.
In “Systems and Methods for Adjusting a Display Based on the User’s Position,” Apple proposes a display that can automatically adjust the point of view and angle of 3D objects, or even 2D objects arranged in 3D space, based on the changing position of the viewer in relation to the display. Example: imagine you are viewing some 3D object on your monitor. A sensor could let the computer know when you move your head to the left, and the object would subtly change position and/or rotation so you could see the left side of the object. Alternatively, you could move your head up so you could see the top better.
Head tracking. Fuck yeah. There was another 3D-related patent filed in January, and while it didn’t have any head tracking, it does lend credence to the notion that, come Jan 27, shit be poppin’ – in 3D. (Well, hopefully without the glasses.)
For interest’s sake, here are a couple of old posts of mine in which I drool over 3D interfaces: onetwo.
It’s been a month since I got the Kindle 2 and I’ve now read a few hundred of what we used to call ‘pages’ on it – apparently now you call them ‘locations’. So I thought it would be worth reporting back in.
Again, I was thankful every day for the slim size of this thing compared to the monstrous hardcover it immediately replaced. The next bonus was that I was carrying essentially as many books as I wanted at the same time. I don’t often feel the need to reread part of King Lear, but I suppose now I can. It would be very nice for frequent travelers – if they let you bring it on the plane I guess.
The screen: beautiful and far superior to reading off a backlit screen OR from a cheap paperback, but not superior to a nicely-printed hardcover. Also, the fixed font still seems restrictive.
The wireless capabilities of the device are mostly liabilities in Canada. The coolest wireless features (email your kindle documents, surf the web, auto-grab news feeds) are not available here, so you’re really only using wireless if you want to buy books from the kindle, or if you’re syncing your last-read position with the iPhone app (which is now available outside the US, BTW, and is awesome). For that, you get a pretty substantial battery drain – at least two weeks with wireless off turns into only a few days with wireless on. So I’ve taken to only turning it on when needed.
I have found Calibre to be quite cool. OK, it needs an interfacelift – it has the rugged bad looks of a java app. Also, it’s pretty slow. But feature-wise it impresses. You can convert pretty much any source (rtf, lit, pdf, doc etc.) to kindle format. It has a bunch of free news feeds pre-set up, including many newspaper sites. On your kindle, these look remarkably like the official newspapers you would pay $15/month to receive automatic, battery-killing wireless delivery thereof.
The two cool things I have to mention: one is instapaper’s kindle export. The auto-email to kindle doesn’t work here, but you can manually export your instapaper articles all at once and drag them onto the Kindle USB-stylee. Talk about “read later”, and in style. The other thing is I came upon the link to Annabel Scheme the other day, a novella with a free ebook version. It’s PDF which works on the kindle reasonably well, and the story is GREAT. I honestly wouldn’t have read 128 pages of PDF from my computer screen. That makes me think of a glorious world where I’m grabbing juicy morsels of lesser-known yet tasty author-fruit from the low-hanging boughs of the intertree, and slurping them down in e-ink luxuriousness, and some of the promise of said intertree becomes a little more real as its fruit gets more pleasant to consume.
There’s something very retro futuristic about the Kindle right now. Any black & white e-reader, really – under the shadow of the almost assuredly upcoming Apple tablet, or even of near-future advances in e-ink screens (colour screens, touch screens, combo OLED & e-ink screens), the objects seem, despite the permanence of the ink on screen, even more fleeting than gadgets normally are.
That said, I’ve found I’ve read a lot more since getting the Kindle. This could be a passing fancy, and perhaps the reading will subside once a shiny new gadget comes along (or Mass Effect 2 comes out), but for now, I can’t complain.
Some questions about this tablet thing, that have made me doubt its existence. Questions that the excellent Daring Fireball article also addresses, but does not answer – no one has answers right now.
What is the screen like? If it’s LCD, is Apple really expecting to succeed in the ebook market? The single defining feature in a suddenly-cluttered, apparently reasonably successful market is the e-ink screen, notable for the absence of backlight and close resemblance to print, but also for many side effects that make them bad for other uses (low refresh rate, monochrome, poor contrast). Apple may well view readers with some condescension – “no one reads any more” – and if so, they may settle for an LCD, which is good for everything except reading. But if they have actually tried to solve the problem, they may have something cool up their sleeves. Perhaps two layered displays? Does the backlight turn off when a book is opened? I’m very curious.
How are you supposed to type on its presumed on-screen keyboard? Do you hold it in one hand and type with the other? Do you hold it with both hands and type with your thumbs? The latter is actually more than doable on a 7” screen, and would probably work on 10” as well. But that leads to the next thing-
Is it really going to be a grand? That’s laptop money even for Apple (and at the netbook price range, three laptop money). While that makes my heart sink because it means I wouldn’t buy it, it also makes me a little excited because it means that Apple may be trying to replace the laptop, not slide in alongside it in a rather crowded gadget matrix – phone / “smartbook” / netbook / laptop / desktop. That’s ballsy stuff, although I remain skeptical of the value of a keyboardless computer. I sure as hell head to a computer when I have to type anything more ambitious than “LOL” on my iPhone, despite being comparatively good at thumb-bashing.
I think Apple may well have arrived at the tablet form after experimenting with netbooks – one can imagine they are both trying to solve the same problem. I’m just concerned that throwing out the keyboard throws out more good than bad. Then again, the Nexus One’s lack of a hardware keyboard may indicate that smartphones are evolving away from such dangly bits, like the arms of a tyrannosaur. So will we learn to stop typing and love the screen?
Whatever, it’s exciting stuff for the gadget nerd. I’m almost as hyped as I am for the final season of Lost, and that’s saying something.
Because I have to get back in the blog posting habit.
First, about 10.6.2 breaking Atom-based Hackintoshes – lots of FUD like this article. Really, everyone? “Puts an end to the hackintosh”? Was 10.6.1 that bad? In my experience, your apps aren’t going to go incompatible with a x.x.x release. Nevermind that the mydellmini.com champs are surely on this shit right now and it will be sorted within weeks.
Second, because of this, and ‘cause ranking shit is fun:
1. The Wire
2. The Sopranos
3. Deadwood
4. Lost
5. Breaking Bad
6. Mad Men
7. Arrested Development
8. Tim & Eric
9. Battlestar Galactica
10. Firefly
With props to Dollhouse (sorry to hear you’re cancelled). It had massive problems, but on the strength of “Epitaph One” alone, deserves to enter the TV pantheon.
There is no question in my mind that cameras like this are the future for many of us.
By us I mean those interested in both still and motion picture photography. I’ve been into both fields for a while, both by hobby and trade, and it still blows my little mind to think I could afford a thing like this. It’s been a long, gradual and perhaps predictable time coming, but that doesn’t make it seem any less crazy. When I was in university we shot on VHS, and people were saying Hi-8 video was the future. Then it was the DV “revolution”. I split on a cheap DV handicam with some friends. But you still couldn’t get a nice image with these things – you could imitate video stuff, but never convincingly film. For that you needed to shoot film, which was a mulit-thousand-dollar proposition for camera rental & processing. Soon, we were lucky enough to be able to shoot on early pro HDCAMs like the Sony F900, but that was still a half-million dollar camera. A few short years later, the Red is here at $20,000, which is mind-blowing to anyone in the industry.
And now we have sub-$2,000 video SLRs like the GH1. Cameras with great optics, all-digital workflow, 1080p24, compact size, full manual control. Interchangeable lenses, decent low-light shooting. Total craziness.
These are amazing cameras, but they have kinks. I’m sure in a year or two this category will have stabilized, the feature set will be clear, and choices will be easier. The next iteration of the GH1 (might I guess GH2?) will solve a lot of the problems with this thing. Because yes, there are problems.
no video out – you can put HDMI or composite out when reviewing shots, but not while capturing. This makes it very hard to do a lot of things where the director and camera operator are not the same person.
poor audio support – the GH1 has a surprisingly decent built-in mic, and an optional mountable shotgun mic, but most of the time, I’d want to hook up a wireless lavalier mic. You can do that, but the audio in is a minijack that auto-levels the signal. For best sound, you need to record into a separate audio field recorder and then sync in post. That’s a couple hundred extra and a big pain in the ass.
low bitrate – the camera has great optics, but the files it saves are too low a bitrate. Sometimes this bites you, sometimes it doesn’t.
AVCHD – I find this to be a shitty codec, which causes headaches in post as it must be converted to something Final Cut can use (still haven’t figured out how to get it into the Avid). When you combine AVCHD’s interframe compression with the low bitrate, especially in 1080p24 mode you get compression mud in certain situations, like fast camera movement and/or complex detail (grass, especially). This sucks. There is an MJPEG mode that is mud-free, but it’s only 720p30 and is still low bitrate.
I don’t want to sound complainy here. The GH1 has a lot going for it. Mainly:
I found the still modes to be awesome. I may not be the best judge, not having used a lot of DSLRs, but I’ve gotten some great photos out of this thing.
The flip-out LCD is a lifesaver. Every camera should have this.
the kit lens is impressive. It’s the equivalent of a 28-280mm zoom, which gives you a lot of options. Its silent autofocus is another engineering marvel for an SLR. I really never thought I’d use autofocus, but it’s quite smart.
An advantage of the category in general: these cameras are really small compared to video cameras, and thus really stealth. You can get away with a lot. Except you’ll have to put up with people posing as they wait for the ‘click’.
This is another categorical feature, but one that compares favourably to most video cams, even much more expensive ones: interchangeable lenses. I’ve picked up a fast 50mm FD lens and the results have been really satisfying.All the cameras in this category, which right now includes the Canon 5DMkII and the new 7D, suffer from strange, idiosyncratic drawbacks.
Like I say, I’m figuring in a year or so the dust will have settled, each manufacturer will have figured out the featureset they need, and eliminated the needless problems. Red’s cheaper camera Scarlett will theoretically be on the market, too. No matter how you slice it, it’s a great time to be shooting, and it will continue this way for the forseeable future. Perhaps one day we will simply exhale a fine mist of microscopic flying camera bugs and then let our algorithms cut it together, but until then…
I love the feel of this camera in the hands. I love old school film cameras with all their manual doohickeys and I don’t like bad digital compacts with all the navigating poorly-laid-out on-screen menus. This thing has got old school buttons and levers, and where you need to go into menus, they are very well designed. The flip-out LCD is from heaven. Only thing I don’t like is the absence of focus marks on the lens. Still getting used to manual focusing with this bastard – the autofocus is good, so I’m not complaining too much.
It takes a bit to get used to the video. I got into the stills part right away. As I mentioned I have plenty of experience with shooting stills, and so I saw the improvements a camera like this makes possible right away.
On the video capture side I have few skills, other than general knowledge of photography (well, plus a wealth of skills in post, but that’s anoher matter). Also, this camera’s advantages in cinematography are tricky to unlock.
The post workflow is one thing. For me, it actually takes longer to get my tapeless footage off this camera than it did with tape. That’s because you have to convert at least once from AVCHD -> ProRes if you want Final Cut to be able to digest it (here’s one video task that may actually be better on windows systems). You need to convert again if you want to remove the 30i wrapper from your 24p footage. You can shoot slomo since the camera has a 60p mode, but that involves some trickery again.
Capture has its own challenges. I certainly saw the AVCHD ‘mud’ (compression junk as a result of the codec breaking down) that happens with fast pans. This is disappointing to say the least, and hopefully panasonic can address it in a firmware update, perhaps by upping the bit rate.
I personally needed to get a ND filter for daylight shooting; if you’re looking for ‘film look’ bokeh, you want some filters going. Once I had that I got better-looking footage.
Finally, camera shake is an issue in something this small. It’s okay if you’re shooting slomo. But if not, you either want to stay wide or get some means to stabilize this badboy. I had okay luck with the camera on my lap or otherwise propped against something, but i’m also looking into either a shoulder brace or steadicam-y type thing, and there are many options that I’m still shopping around for.
Once you figure out some of these things, you can get some excellent results. Here’s two vids of test footage. (You can’t watch them in HD through these embeds, so perhaps click through to the vimeo pages.) Here’s an early, not great one:
I’m happy with the footage on our back patio (the girls chatting), but little else. That footage looks great because the camera’s stabilized, I’m able to get some bokeh, in part because it’s not too bright. The footage on queen street in direct sunlight is pre-ND filter and so the aperture is closed down, meaning there’s too much DOF. A lot of it was too shaky to use, too.
Here’s a later vid, with footage from Pride last sunday:
As you can see, the slomo works great. It smooths out the camera jitter awesomely. Also, I had the ND filter by then, and it was cloudy, so backgrounds are all pretty n’ soft. I look at some of these shots, and think I shouldn’t be able to get them, the camera being so cheap, and me being nearly unskilled.
The other nice thing is how people deal with the camera. It’s small and has the body of an SLR. I think at the AlternaQueer tent people thought I was a news photographer. And out on the street there were so many cameras I was more or less invisible. Because of the massive proliferation of cameras these days, the incredible 280mm zoom this thing can do, and the appearance of the camera’s body, I found myself able to go pretty much anywhere and take pics of anything with no problems. That was a nice surprise.
Anyway, I hope to shoot a few more tests this week as there are still things to figure out and questions to answer. Dealing with sound is one of them.
Couple things. One was a discussion about GPS automated direction-giving, in-car and, in my case, on-phone. We talked about how everyone pretty much agree that GPS will get you there, it will just send you there in weird ways. It’s worth double-checking the directions, in other words. However, we concluded that in 10 years, it might be a different story. The ability to navigate will have become an obsolete skill.
The other thing was hearing on This Week in Photography that photographers are feeling pressure from computer generated images. That is to say, product shots that used to be done by whole teams of humans are now being made in CGI. Presumably the next step will be for human model shoots to be replaced as well – think of the poor unemployed models!
It’s tempting to argue that some areas will never be taken over by the machines. For example, we’ll always need photography for the news, right? Well, I saw a CGI re-enactment on US news recently, in a story about the arrest of the suspects in the recent domestic terror incident. It was horribly done (and lampooned on the Daily Show), but nonetheless it was there – the prospect of news without the footage.
Everything seems normal, but in the background that exponential evolution keeps on tickin’.
I was just doing some camera research and stumbled upon some interesting stuff.
I’m what you call prosumer when it comes to cameras, both video and still. I’ve set up my own darkroom and processed my own film, and used a film SLR for many years. On the motion side I’ve worked in film and TV for many years. However, in a still camera, I tend to prefer small and portable to an SLR, as I can’t take pictures if I don’t bring it with me. And on the video side, until extremely recently, it was impossible for an individual to own something close to pro quality, as pro film and HD cameras tend to cost half a million dollars. That has obviously changed, and now with the Red camera, HD camcorders, and video-enabled SLRs, it’s a different world.
Two things recently. #1 was EndWar, a console real-time strategy game by Ubisoft that allowed for voice control of your units. It worked near-perfectly, and made a hell of a lot of sense. There have always been issues getting RTSes working on consoles because they are complicated PC games that are mouse-and-keyboard centered, and they tend not to work well on console controllers. EndWar just routed the fuck around that. After all, RTSes are games about barking orders at soldiers, and a mouse is a pretty arbitrary substitute for actual barking.
The second thing is the Google Mobile app on the iPhone. Despite it being developed by Quicksilver master Alcor, the first version wasn’t all that thrilling. The next major revision added voice search – hold the phone up to your ear, wait for the beep, and speak. However, I put it aside after a few failed queries. I’ve tried it again, though, and I think they’ve improved things on the server side because it actually works. It even managed to get “CRTC” right, which surprised me. Like the Shazam audio recognition app, it’s one of those head-turner iPhone features, but unlike Shazam, I actually use it all the time.
Both of these things are examples of using voice instead of keyboards in contexts where a keyboard is pretty sucky. No one wants to have a keyboard lying on their lap when they’re sitting on the couch, and similarly why mash tiny fake buttons on your iPhone screen when you can use your face to say things. Obviously they are also hugely dependent on audio pattern recognition algorithms and AI having advanced to a sufficient state. But what they signal is that they have indeed advanced, and we can now talk to our computers, and more often than not, they will actually understand.
On the other side, computers have gotten better at talking to us. Take the new Shuffle, released yesterday, which will tell you the song you’re listening to. Or, the Kindle 2, which will read your book to you. Sure, text-to-speech has been around a while; ask any Mac owner. But the new voice in Leopard beats the hell out of all the old ones, and judging by how computer technology has been progressing, I’d wager the voices will only get better.
I’m convinced that this means big things. If something can easily be turned into text from voice, that means that it can easily be searched. The new Google Voice will allow transcription and then tagging and searching of voicemails. Now imagine recording everything you say, and everything anyone says to you, and being able to search it. It’s not so far off – borderline achievable today with an iPhone, a 3G connection and something like Jott (unfortunately, the way-cool Jott has gone pay-only).
I can’t help but think about the storytelling potential for such technology, namely games. It’s not just bossing units around. Imagine no more dialogue trees and menus and simply engaging in natural language coversations with AI characters. It wouldn’t just be for RPGs; suddenly a game could exist where the central ‘gameplay’ is just conversation. Conversation is obviously central to human life and is something film, TV, novels, every other sequential art form can render in a manner befitting its medium, which is not true of games right now.
Finally, the shift is ultimately about the disembodiment of computers, paralleling the rise of cloud computing. Sure, we interact with plenty of disembodied computers already, like when we get up in the internets. But we do that through our desktops and laptops. As our computers get smaller – phones, pens, etc. and more ubiquitous, it’s increasingly archaic to interact with them only through screens and keyboards. They will become magic ghost butlers, like HAL (except hopefully less killy).
One of the more interesting announcements from yesterday’s Stevenote was MobileMe, the .Mac replacement, now taglined as “Exchange for the rest of us”. That is, it features ‘push’ syncing between devices, eliminating the need to manually sync. The idea being, your data lives ‘in the cloud’ (man a lot of quotes going on here), and is accessed from whatever device you happen to be using at the time, any Mac or PC, iPhone or iPod Touch. The web app versions of mail, iCal, iPhoto etc. are particularly refined.
I use macs at home, will definitely get an iPhone in a month, and have to use a PC at work, so these sorts of cross-platform syncing tools are something I keep a keen eye on. I’m quite happy with Google’s suite, with a few exceptions (no to-dos, no cloud document storage other than office docs). There are a few holes in MobileMe too (no notes or to-dos?), and some big questions (can you use your own domain?), so it will be interesting to see how this shakes out. I like the direction things are going though.
Wow, note-taking has rocketed ahead a few decades while I was jotting down notes by actually typing like a sucka. I use an assorted hodegpodge of notetaking and organizational tools, because I’ve yet to find one that does everything, but mostly I use Backpack since it makes it easy to organize things by project. (However, I don’t necessarily recommend it since the $5/month plan I currently enjoy is no longer offered.)
Now I just became aware of a couple interesting, high tech note-taking tools. One is evernote. The big twist here is OCR, which I guess has advanced to ‘good enough’ status over the last few years. So with evernote, you can simply hold up a piece of paper to your computer’s iSight, or take a picture with your phone, and the image will be eaten by evernote and scanned for text. Then it will be searchable. I’ve tried it and it did okay with a page from Now Magazine, but I have a feeling it might choke on my handwriting, which is a cross between sanskrit and semaphore.
It has all the usual features, including tagging and emailing notes to yourself. It makes it easy to grab things off web pages. It also has a robust desktop version (both for PC and Mac) that syncs effortlessly with the cloud, something I wish backpack did without recourse to third party apps. Anyway if you want to give ‘er a shot, I have some invite codes I can send out.
The other, potentially more mind-blowing service is Jott. It’s all about voice recognition. So you sign up, register your phone number, and make note of the number you need to call (yes, it works in Canada). When you call and record a message, it converts it into text and emails it to you.
The beauty of the thing is that it will play nice with other services. You could set it up with your secret Evernote email address and turn your random blatherings into a searchable archive. It will deal with wordpress, blogger &c, but sadly not textpattern or I’d totally be dialing in some posts.
Or – SPECIALAWESOMEALERT, this works beautifully – you can set it up with your Google Calendar account, tell yourself “2pm tomorrow poutine-eating marathon”, and if you’ve got your SMS notifications all set up, google will text your hungry ass tomorrow and remind you. It’s like having a freaking secretary. Now I just need to get it to respond to the voice cue “Diane” and I’ll finally be living my fantasy of being Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks.
When robots get out on teh webs, we might not notice them right away, but eventually our angry sensors flash and we investigate. Witness:
Is that not hells awesome or what? The site at large is definitely worth checking out. For example, here’s a robot that can apparently be made for $40, and he’s a feisty little bastard.
9 Home Gaming Setups Better Than Yours. Indizzeed. I’ve got a pretty ok rig myself, but these homeboys blow my measly 42 inches out of the water. You know the deal, for the most part: enormous flatscreens, theatre seats, speakers multiplying like rabbits on cialis. But how about multiple plasmas? A row of arcade consoles? And the piece de resistance: Jerry Rice’s home snack counter, with popcorn machine, candy and chocolates, and neon signage. Classé.
Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway and the wheelchair that walks up stairs, has been developing a prosthetic arm and the results so far are spectacular (or as Ramanan puts it, this is some crazy terminator shit). The arm is called “the Luke arm” and is inspired by Luke Skywalker’s bionic arm, which proves that truism about scifi, that it predicts the future not because it has magical powers, but because it inspires nerds who go on to invent crazy things that they saw in scifi.
Rogers Communications Inc. has rolled out “blue” t-shirts, but critics are saying the company’s shirts are anything but.
Rogers spokeswoman Elizabeth Hamilton said the shirts reflect the changing state of the t-shirt marketplace.
“We’re in the business of offering high-value services to customers.”
Critics say the shirts are, in fact, red.
“What appears to be a good shirt on the surface comes with some serious caveats,” wrote Marc Lostracco, assistant editor of the Torontoist website. “Customers need to remember that a company calling something ‘blue’ doesn’t actually make it so.”
Hamilton disputed the criticism and said the shirts fit the uses that customers were asking for.
“It’s actually quite good value,” she said.
So yeah, that’s pretty much the gist of it, wouldn’t you say? I thought it was pretty clear what unlimited meant in the context of cellphone data plans, but Rogers sure doesn’t think so. Shit like this keeps us Canucks in the technological ghetto, as Steve notes.
Can’t you see it now? Apple, the purveyors of the Reality Distortion Field, starting their own Alternate Reality Game? Clues are seeded early on, and truth is revealed at a Macworld keynote. It would totally work, wouldn’t it?
Well, people are playing it already, as we do every year in the lead up to the Stevenote (which is tomorrow). But wouldn’t it benefit Apple to actually design that experience, instead of leaving it up to the players? Or maybe they do … (cue creepy music)
Yup, there’s nothing like direct brain control of videogames to get the top ten lists fired up, as we see at Popular Mechanic’s list of ‘need to know’ tech for 2008. I don’t buy it though. As if the sixaxis wasn’t causing enough control problems – what about when I think about cheese and it makes my character jump off a ledge? It’ll be used eventually, no doubt (and it’s part of the reason why I won’t mind being just a brain in a jar at some point in the future), but 2008? Hells no.
Until reading this Ars article, I had never heard of Wireless Nomad, a Toronto Co-op ISP. I don’t think I can use them because it doesn’t sound like they can deal with dry ducks or whatever they call it when you have DSL but no landline, but I wish I could. They’re cheaper than Bell, with no bit caps. And every router they give out provides free WiFi access to people in range, in such a way that doesn’t hurt the subscriber’s speeds. If you live in Toronto, you should consider them ahead of Bell and Rogers.
I stepped up and finally bought the HDTV I mentioned a while ago. I got the newer, 4ms refresh rate one. I also got a HD PVR and a fancy-ish universal remote. They are all handsome creatures, but my was it a shock to be thrown back into the sweaty, confusing land of the AV nerd for the past few days, what with all the setting up of things and cabling them together and the fussing over how to achieve maximum quality. Thought I might share some frustrations and possibly even pointers for those who may follow after.
Disclaimer: boring. Not really I suppose, but the following information won’t be that exciting to people who aren’t planning on going HD any time soon, or who did it long ago.
You get these articles now and then about people dropping out of the information culture and you’re like whatever, brah. It’s easy to dismiss them as luddites, but really, many of the points, although jumbled, are well-taken.
The issue of whether third-party developers would be allowed to write apps for the iPhone is a heated one. Steve Jobs threw some wood on the fire by announcing to Mac developers today: sure you can! Make web apps with AJAX!
Frankly, I consider that a better answer than many do, since I’ve been of late pleasantly surprised by Google’s excellent posse of apps. And hey, there are some nifty widgets out there, and those are just li’l web apps too (sorta). And we assume there is some work being done on getting web apps to work offline. Which is one of their huge disadvantages, and if it’s solved in some meaningful way, one would have even less reason to hate Jobs’ latest statement.
But isn’t it a bit odd for a maker of platforms (PC, iPhone, iPod) to argue in favour of web apps? Aren’t web apps the things that make platforms increasingly irrelevant? If you made an awesome web app for the iPhone, people could conceivably use it on their PCs or Windows Mobile phones. Wouldn’t Steve be better off advocating iPhone-only apps?
Yes he would, and he will. This is only a stopgap. But its presentation leaves something to be desired. Presumably the motivation for the AJAX announcement is to give developers something to work with now – having heard them clamouring to develop for the iPhone, he threw them a bone (kinda). But the way he announced it, without stating that a proper SDK is on the way, makes it sound like he lamed out on them.
Researchers in Osaka have just inventedTHECREEPIESTROBOTYET. Man-child that barks like a seal… take your hand away, researcher! Robot or no, that’s not appropriate.
Jokes aside, it’s pretty fascinating. Be sure to watch the videos.
Just finished getting Google Apps for your domain runing on the ol’ AR. Got to say, it’s a pretty compelling bunch of apps. We all know about gmail, and that’s all good – although probably the least important part for me. What is really appealing is hassle-free document sharing and collaboration, and the sheer excellence of Google Calendar. Not only is the web interface great, but it’s super-easy to share calendars with everyone on your domain.
Here in the NYT is another in a long series of articles heralding 3D filmmaking as a potential saviour for cinemas. CinemaTech mentions:
in 1953, the peak year of the original 3-D boom, there were 23 movies released in 3-D, including ‘House of Wax’ and ‘It Came from Outer Space.’ (I’d be surprised if we see a half-dozen 3-D releases this year from major studios.) By 1955, there was just one movie made in 3-D.
The question is, what’s to save the present recurrence of 3D film from the fate of the original, 50s incarnation? In the Times article, proponents argue that this time around, they have Cameron, Jackson and Spielberg on their side – the A-team of spectacle filmmaking. I’m not so sure that more spectacle is what Hollywood needs, or if it’s even possible. But at least they’re trying. In the 50s, in response to the rapid growth of TV, the film industry evolved many variants in an attempt to differentiate itself. Most failed. (Insert smell-O-vision joke here.) But eventually, film found its place in the ecosystem – albeit a smaller one than it had enjoyed pre-TV. Film will adapt again, but is it too late for the theatres, I wonder? Will TV (in the form of HDTV home theatres) finally eat film?
Interesting article from Saturday’s Globe about the movement to build a new internet infrastructure, now in the research stages. A couple key quotes:
The Internet was not designed for Second Life or “adult entertainment” videos either – high-volume, resource-consuming uses of the network. If just 1 per cent of the DVDs that NetFlicks [sic] sends to customers every day were downloaded, we would need a tenfold increase in the current core capacity of the Internet.
And:
In fact, he wonders if the only economically sustainable model for the Internet may be a nationally funded or regulated infrastructure – or some sort of government monopoly. (Though he adds that, “in the current economic and political climate” of the U.S., proposing this idea “is nearly suicide.”)
I’ve wondered the same thing before, but in the context of Rogers (a huge Canadian ISP) and their tendency to stifle innovation through things like bitshaping and extortionate wireless data plans. Let alone the paltry bandwidth of their “high speed” cable plans. I’m of the mind that real high-speed internet access should be made available to all, at reasonable rates; and if Rogers et al can’t do it, the govmint should make ‘em!
Male pattern baldness and convertible automobiles are correlated. I don’t know that baldness causes convertibles; it could be that convertibles cause baldness. Nor do I mean, “ha-ha, that balding dude is having a midlife crisis and therefore he bought a corvette. Look, he thinks he’s teens.” If anything, driving a roofless vehicle is an expression of the acceptance and celebration of one’s own cranial rooflessness. Why, after all, do we celebrate the cool rush of wind and sleek aerodynamics in cars, but not on male heads?
So what kind of computer does the balding man buy? Computers, like cars, are sold on speed and power. (I suppose there are some of each which are sold on safety and reliability, but that’s not our concern here.) Sports cars – and I know of no convertible minivans – are performance vehicles first and foremost. They are often ludicrously impractical (bad gas mileage, no space, thief magnet1). While they tell you they are this way for sports purposes, they are this way to attract attention – like the peacock, or the weightlifter. Their rooflessness, though, signifies a very real appreciation for the art of driving, a willingness to embrace rather than block out the whip of wind, the roar of the engine, to agree with Vanishing Point that “speed means freedom of the soul”.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 20-inchlaptop. In all its back-breaking, battery-eating glory.
1 Spoken from the point of view of someone who seriously considered purchasing a 1983 Pontiac Trans Am V8.
This article about a pillowfight event at Nathan Phillips Square notes the huge numbers of cameras present: “there were so many lenses that when, as the number of participants started dwindling after about an hour, those with cameras actually started to outnumber those with pillows.”
It would be remiss, when talking of technologies that spread like the zombie plague, to not mention photography. At a recent show at a small venue, we couldn’t help but notice just how often camera flashes were going off. Nothing spectacular was happening – it wasn’t anyone’s wedding and no-one was on the red carpet, it was just people taking pictures of their friends – but when ten out of forty are taking pictures at any given moment, it starts to seem like the inevitable future is upon us: people taking pictures of people taking pictures.
There are advantages to the outsourcing of memory. But the proliferation of image capture causes many problems, summed up by the Borges character who can remember everything and remarks, “my mind is like a garbage heap”. You know that feeling when you’ve taken a ton of pics on your digicam and you can’t be bothered to sort through them for hours finding the good ones? So you import them and then don’t even look at them? There are two paradoxes at play: in the pillowfight instance, the urge to capture the event destroys the actual event; and with the Borges example, the ability to remember everything prevents you from remembering any one thing.
When I think of possible solutions, I come up with the idea of a “crowdsourced” version of the roller-coaster picture setup where you purchase your photo on the ride afterwards. If I could easily grab someone else’s photo of a given event, perhaps I wouldn’t feel the need to take a photo myself. But despite the possibility this could happen what with geotagged photos and whatnot, I doubt it will take off, since we all view our memories as personal. We don’t want to admit that a collective memory-image of an event will do just fine. This memory/photo is my own. Despite the fact that it looks like everyone else’s.
Have I not mentioned this here before? I should, stat. A home 3D printer will be available later this year for $5,000, and in four years for under a grand. Many things will change when these (and 3D scanners) are in every home. Intellectual property issues will get even uglier.
What happens after HD? Is a question I was wondering about, and happened to catch a post-NAB blurb on the topic.
Ultra HD, or “Super Hi-Vision” (what a name!), is what Japan’s public broadcaster NHK proposes.
It’s 7,680 × 4,320 pixels of resolution, as opposed to SD’s 640 × 480 and 1080 HD’s 1920 × 1080 px. 16 times the res of HD. One minute of uncompressed footage would take up 200 gigs of space.
I’m not sure you would really want to be super high if you were watching that.
I used to constantly have the argument with my film pals about whether digital tech would replace film, and they used to tell me it would never happen. (One of them is now a manager of digital cameras at a big camera maker.) One of the big arguments in favour of digital over analog tech is: although suchand such digital technology may not at present surpass the analog equivalent – say, HD is not better than 35mm film – just give it time and eventually the digital option will be both cheaper and much higher quality than the analog. You can’t fight the robots.
Reading the Globe last week, I discovered that Toronto is the largest network on Facebook. Which is crazy since the cities of London and New York are obviously much larger in meatspace, but TO’s Facebook population dwarfs theirs. It’s crazy but it’s entirely believable to a Toronto resident: over the past couple months, Facebook has come up in conversation more often than even the weather. It’s spread quicker than a zombie plague. And in fact, to those who refuse to sign up (I’m on Facebook myself, but I know a few holdouts), it’s like your friends are one by one succumbing to the virus. Instead of asking for your brains, they ask if you’re on Facebook, and if not, why not?
That Torontonians would get all wrapped up in relentless, privacy-invading bulletins of friend-related minutiae flies in the face of our reputation as a quiet, withdrawn people. I suppose you could explain it by saying we are indeed withdrawn, and that Facebook appeals because it is the form of socializing that involves the least amount of actual socializing. Or, you could just call bullshit on the “quiet Toronto” myth. Either one works for me.
But then I remembered a past realization, that Toronto, city of SARS, filmic home of Resident Evil, Land of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead remake, is of course the capital of the zombie world. Which explains how infectious networking would especially catch hold here, but which also goes a little towards supporting another half-baked theory: that zombies in fiction symbolize P2P networked communications, and the fear of zombies reflects the fear that old, hierarchical, gatekeeper media have of a society that has no place for them.
That’s probably too cultural studies for a nice saturday afternoon, so let me clunkily segway into a mention of zombie-demon musical sensation Evil Dead: The Musical, which is back in Toronto. I saw it a couple of days ago for the first time, and it’s worth attending. It’s one of the only entertainment events that you can walk out of soaked in blood, and it contains some great writing such as one character’s dying words, “Death’s a bitch… a stupid bitch.”
The cable of my Shure E2Cs finally fell to pieces yesterday. I was prepared to post a rant about their low build quality, until a little bit of web research revealed that this is always the weak point of headphones. A competing product, the Ultimate Ears super.fi line, actually come with detachable cables – a thoughtful yet sad admission.
Via merlinmann comes a link to this impressive footage taken with a little HDV handicam, the Canon HV20 and an adapter called the Brevis which allows the mounting of 35mm lenses. Thing is, the camera is $1000 US, the adapter another grand. Which is to say CRAZYCHEAP for a full-on 24p bastard that makes images like that. In five years will we all be shooting Imax on our cellphones or what?
I’ve been speccing out HDTVs for a while now and thought it was time to share what I have so far. Long story short: Sharp Aquos 42in LCD 1080p. Reasons: good reviews, good stats (1200:1 contrast, 6ms response, 2xHDMI), 1080p. Compared to what you could get for $2300 CDN even a year ago, this is pretty sweet. However, there are new models coming out soon, and the main difference is that they operate at 120hz. What does this mean? These articles (1, 2) can tell you more than I can, but it has to do with the refresh rate and it sounds like:
120hz, since it divides equally by 24 and 30, will yield a ‘smoother’ image no matter whether it is video- or film-based
response time will be faster, around 4ms, which is of interest to gamers.
That said, I’m not sure whether these things will make any real-world difference. I haven’t exactly heard current HDTV owners crying out for smoother refresh rates; not a whine from HD gamers saying their TVs make them suck at games. Whenever I’m ready to buy (crosses fingers) I’ll see which way the wind blows. Maybe when they clear out the existing models there will be Hott Dealz.
It hasn’t escaped my attention that the thing that drives my home theatre upgrades lately is gaming, not film viewing. Having surround sound speakers for films is a nice touch, but for games it’s a performance advantage. HD will likely be the same. This is odd for a film-school grad.
Oh, while we’re on the subject: apparently Blu-Ray won.
From the would-love-it-to-be-true department, via matthowie, multitouch everywhere. The comments on that SBJ link are interesting, especially the anecdote about Jobs attempting a multitouch on a Cinema Display, and the one mentioning that Fingerworks had been bought by Apple. And yeah, it’s worth watching the video again.
I now have a Mac Mini cooking under the TV that I use for downloadin’ and viewin’ of videos. It’s also my main iTunes box, and functions as a server as well, both for the other computers in the house and via FTP for the outside world. Herewith, the details.
There was a lot of hype last console generation about living room convergence, about consoles becoming “computers in your living room”. To some extent this was true – on the inside, they are indeed computers, albeit specialized ones. But on the outside it was not. We did not use the machines in the way we use computers. We’d load in a game and play it. Full stop. End transmission.
With the 360, the feeling is different. The software is a lot more robust than I expected. But more on that in a second.
This is a generalist blog and linklog. Subjects include: film and film production, photography, tech, nerd culture, games, writing, shiny things, baubles. Oh, and poutine.
