Thursday: December 1, 2011
- Have you ever wanted to see what toys do after they have grown up?
This is a blog documenting new adventures of old childhood toys. It could be a commentary on how our own lives have changed as adults, plain good fun or both. You can also submit your own posts if you have a quick story to tell. Enjoy!
Tuesday: November 29, 2011
- Snag an enjoyable Mario Kart clone on the Xbox 360 for just $15.
I played the demo of this a while back and really enjoyed it. To me it was mario kart with real cars. I never did buy the full version though. Seeing at $15 has peaked my interest again.
Monday: November 21, 2011
- Apple's new store at Grand Central Station may be opening in the very near future.
9to5Mac has heard that Apple will officially announce the opening of the Grand Central Apple store this Tuesday and presumably pull the black boards to reveal the announcement. This store garners extra special attention because it will be Apple’s largest in the world by square footage and resides in a building where 750,000 people pass daily and over 1,000,000 people during the holidays.
- A couple of highlights from Arnold Schwarzenegger's commentary on the Total Recall DVD.
Normally I'm usually quite opposed to post anything from a Gawker-related media site (in this case the main Gawker.com site of all things) but this one was just too good to pass up. Watch the embedded video and you'll hear Arnold quip about some interesting points during the movie-making process that was Total Recall. Here is a great example: 'this scene is unbelievable because my frustration that this taxi cab does not understand where I want to go.'
Monday: November 14, 2011
- A video review of the next Legend of Zelda game due out on November 20th for the Nintendo Wii.
GameTrailers sums up everything you would need to know about The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword in under ten minutes for your viewing pleasure. I've always had a real soft spot for Zelda games. This title may force me to blow the dust off of the old Nintendo Wii and hook it up via nine-hundred multi-colored component cables once again. Also, as the review demonstrates, the Wii really shows it's age with the graphics and lack of voice acting here. In the end though, it still looks like it will be an utterly fantastic Zelda game.
- Everything you never knew about Google's top secret lab where they pursue future ideas.
According to the article, this magical place (dubbed 'Google X') is where Google may or may not be working on the following futuristic concepts: 1) an internet fridge that orders food when it's low, 2) driver-less cars, 3) space elevators, 4) personal assistant robots for your home, 5) networked coffee pots and gardening tools and finally 6) training monkeys to fly airplanes for special covert operations.
- Five future technologies for passenger air travel presented by National Geographic.
What does the future hold for passenger air travel? National Geographic takes a look at some future technologies being developed right now. You just might be commuting at twice the speed of sound in a dart-like airplane and then arriving at the airport of the future. Do all airplanes of the future all have free in-flight wi-fi? That would be totally cool.
- Apple pulls the curtain back on iTunes 10.5.1 with iTunes Match.
Unlike competing cloud storage music services from Amazon and Google, iTunes Match saves a lot of bandwidth and time in your initial synchronization, because Apple can identify which songs in your iTunes library are already available in the iTunes Store. If Apple can positively match a song in your library with any of the 20 million tracks for sale in the iTunes Store, it won’t bother uploading that song; only unmatched songs get uploaded to the cloud.
- Best Buy has the current generation Apple TV for $89 with free shipping.
Posting this here because I've grown to love this product in the few short weeks I've had it. It's a great implementation for getting your Internet media as close to your television as you would need it. My kids love watching clips on YouTube and Vimeo so having that readily available in the living room is a big plus. Also, having the entire media contents of your Mac is just great as well. Bonus: using the Apple Remote app for any of the iDevices may make you want to chuck the included remote.
- Wired would like you to know Amazon's Jeff Bezos owns more of the web than you think.
An interesting read for those of you who want to have a little more insight as to just what Amazon does these days on the Interwebs besides selling everything under the sun. There's an interesting chart about half-way down he page that discusses how some important companies rely on Amazon's web services to power their products. If AWS shut off today, well - it's best not to think about it.
- Engadget's thorough review of the brand new Kindle Fire tablet from Amazon.
Engadget covers everything here from the packaging to the performance of Amazon's first real entry into the tablet field. Engadget hails the device as quite an achievement at it's current price point ($200) but they do knock the device some by saying that it can't compete with 'normal' tablets that are currently on the market in some key factors.
Wednesday: November 9, 2011
- Bret Victor's not-so-brief rant on the future of interaction design.
If you haven't seen Microsoft's video entailing what they think the future of technology holds, you should watch it (readily available on source URL as an embedded clip). So watch that video and then read Victor's thoughts on the matter. That being said, I do have a minor point of contention. I did get some hands-on time with a Kinect-enabled Xbox 360 this past weekend and it was a fun, dare I say, semi-magical experience. I highly reccomend Double Fine's Once Upon a Monster (even the demo is fun).
- Nintendo hard at work to find way to use more than one tablet for their next console.
It seems that Nintendo had originally planned to have only one controller / tablet accessible to the Wii U at launch time (the other controller would have been your standard Wii-mote variety). Someone at Nintendo must have realized that this would probably be a bad idea so they have been hard at work at trying to make two tablets work for the console. The console's processor and RAM constraints may have played a part in pairing a singular tablet. However, Nintendo may have solved this so multi-tablet gaming may be coming to a living room near you.
- Adobe gives up on trying to get Flash to work on mobile devices.
Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations.
- You won't be seeing Siri on older iDevices anytime in the near future.
That's a shame but it makes sense given Apple's strategy and history of making certain features exclusive to particular iPhone models. Not clear on why devices other than iPhones have to miss out on this. The iPad 2 should have enough horsepower to run Siri without an issue (same for their notebook line as well).
Tuesday: November 8, 2011
- Daily Grind: Ebullient
Name: Anthony (aka Alpha to an Ant)
How Anthony feels today: Ebullient @ 3:31:44 PM
What Anthony really wants today: To go to sleep as its after 11pm where I am right now. Can I say what I want for tomorrow?Music Stuck in Head: Jeremy Enigk - Been Here Before
Its the lead singer of Sunny Day Real Estate doing solo work where he plays almost every instrument himself, composes everything... Its beautiful stuff. This guy is a hero of mineStuff to do today:
- play around with base64 encoded images
- prove that sprites are still more efficient than base64 from a page performnace perspective
- avoid meetings in NY office because I am 7 hours ahead
- Joke that i living in the future to my friends in NY
- Learn more about Microformats and create a plan to implement some updates to current ones on our websites
- Eat dinner with great friends in Romania
- Help my best friend Vin test the new GLM multi user system
- Post this as a test
- Go to sleep
- Base64 images... An alternative to sprites?
While I don't fully agree with the drawbacks that were mentioned for using sprites (most of my disagreement comes from how organized I keep my image files) I do think this article raises some very awesome points about what base64 can do. I would like to build a test to see how a sprite would compare in the charts presented so I am going to try to take that on this week. Either way its alwasy good to learn a new frontend approach from time to time - especially if it relates to performance
Monday: August 15, 2011
- Ten games that take minutes to learn and a lifetime to master.
While chess is often thought of as a mathematical game, experts say the real contest is often a psychological one, in which players scrutinize one another for subtle cues and tendencies that predict behavior and reveal weaknesses. As Soviet chess trainer Mark Dvoretsky once noted: 'The opponent makes an apparently innocent move, but for some reason or another, he rouses our vigilance and promptly we discover the cunning that is concealed.'
- Mozilla to do away with version numbers in Firefox with new non-numbered version update.
Google has taught us all that people are too busy to remember version numbers these days. It's better just to keep updating software and have to worry about pesky version number conventions. Mozilla thinks this is a good idea and has decided to adopt this release schedule for future non-version-numbered releases of Firefox. Good for them.
- MTA releases renderings of the new Apple Store coming to Grand Central Station.
The title of this article is a little misleading as there is really only one rendering to look at over on The Real Deal's website. AppleInsider has some of the other renderings, albiet in a less vibrant (and boring) form. Aside from the new Apple Store, Grand Central will also be home to a brand new Shake Shack.
Thursday: August 11, 2011
- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy app coming soon to an iPad near you.
Canadian indie developer Hothead Games is producing a Hitchhikers Guide app, aiming to replicate the titular guide itself (rather than the novels). When it arrives this fall, we can expect beautifully animated sequences describing the Babel Fish and Vogon Poetry -- but just a single word about planet Earth (the addition of the word 'Mostly' should come in a second, more sinister update).
- National Geographic has some stunning photos of New Zealand for your viewing pleasure.
Posting this here in case anyone needs some travel inspiration. Now I've never actually been to New Zealand but these pictures sure are pretty. Also, this destination would be a good trip for you die-hard Lord of the Rings fans out there (all of the movies were shot in New Zealand).
- A handy tutorial on how to make your very own toast stencils.
Nothing starts the day like a healthy breakfast consisting of one or more the basic food groups. Stencils are not one of those basic food groups unless you consider 'fun' a food group. Still, who wouldn't want to have Pac-man toast for breakfast?
- Ever wondered what the back of your favorite websites looks like?
There's a Tumblr account for that.
- Begone memory leaks! Firefox 7 will reportedly use up to fifty percent less memory.
If you leave Firefox running for any length of time its memory footprint seems to keep increasing. This can escalate to the point where it stops responding and there’s nothing to do but restart the browser. Personally, I’ve seen this problem have less of an impact during my daily usage since moving to Firefox 5, but it’s still there. Mozilla knows this problem exists and aims to fix it. By the time we see Firefox 7 available for download it will use as much as 50% less memory than any version that has gone before, as well as having those problematic memory leaks fixed.