We work on the Internet. As such, we are constantly consuming information. Believe me, there is a lot of it out there. Sometimes we even forget things unless we write them down. Our blog covers everything from web standards to the muppets, php to comic books, music and everything else that we find interesting. Leave us a note when you drop by.
Contributed by Julian Moffatt over the course of April 30th…
Download demos of the latest Adobe CS5 release. Kicking the tires on Fireworks CS5 now.
Contributed by Ross McDowall, Wil Alambre, and Julian Moffatt over the course of April 29th…
If you have a Mac and a Starcraft II beta key, this is what you've been waiting for!
These fonts might be pushing the limits of traditional type design, but the results are stunning.
A letter from Steve Jobs, summing up his point of view on the whole Apple Adobe Flash thing.
As more email clients join the fray, CSS3's applications in email will certainly become wider-reaching than pretty shadows and rounded corners.
Pretty awesome to think that homo sapiens are only a evolutionary anomaly at this point.
In response to Apple CEO Steve Jobs' explanation on why his company refuses to let Adobe Systems' Flash Player on his company's iPhone, Adobe's chief technology officer sounded an upbeat tone and said the company was moving on without Apple.
Contributed by Ross McDowall, Julian Moffatt, and Wil Alambre over the course of April 28th…
The World
Sparklines are my favourite
I might have to actually try my hand at making these, they look delish!
Sometimes the internet is unspeakably awesome. Thanks ZeFrank
Contributed by Julian Moffatt and Ross McDowall over the course of April 27th…
Best FTP app on OS X gets even better.
Awesome industrial design.
Apple product vs how much Apple stock would be worth instead. Silly but interesting.
Drink a Slushie Before Hot-Weather Workouts - going to get slurpees for the girls before soccer this summer.
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
Director: Terry Gilliam
Screenwriter: Terry Gilliam, Charles McKeown
Starring: Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Tom Waits, Lily Cole, Andrew Garfield, Verne Troyer, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, Jude Law
Genre: Drama, Fantasy
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (for violent images, some sensuality, language and smoking)
Official Website: SonyClassics.com/TheImaginariumofDoctorParnassus
Review: Not Available
DVD Review: Not Available
DVD: Not Available
Movie Poster: One-Sheet | UK Poster
Production Stills: View here
Plot Summary: "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" is a fantastical morality tale, set in the present day. It tells the story of Dr Parnassus and his extraordinary ’Imaginarium’, a traveling show where members of the audience get an irresistible opportunity to choose between light and joy or darkness and gloom. Blessed with the extraordinary gift of guiding the imaginations of others, Dr Parnassus is cursed with a dark secret. Long ago he made a bet with the devil, Mr Nick, in which he won immortality. Many centuries later, on meeting his one true love, Dr Parnassus made another deal with the devil, trading his immortality for youth, on condition that when his first-born reached its 16th birthday he or she would become the property of Mr Nick.
Valentina is now rapidly approaching this ’coming of age’ milestone and Dr Parnassus is desperate to protect her from her impending fate. Mr Nick arrives to collect but, always keen to make a bet, renegotiates the wager. Now the winner of Valentina will be determined by whoever seduces the first five souls. Enlisting a series of wild, comical and compelling characters in his journey, Dr Parnassus promises his daughter’s hand in marriage to the man that helps him win. In this captivating, explosive and wonderfully imaginative race against time, Dr Parnassus must fight to save his daughter in a never-ending landscape of surreal obstacles - and undo the mistakes of his past once and for all.
Contributed by Ross McDowall and Julian Moffatt over the course of April 26th…
Work on adding WOFF support to Chromium is already underway, though theres no timetable for when the new features will make it into a shipping version of Google Chrome.
Michael Geist sez,
The copyright bill may still be several weeks away, but reintroducing Bill C-61 with only minor tweaks - a bit more flexibility for recording television shows or transferring content from one format to another - would leave in place the core provisions of the bill that generated widespread discontent.
Sony, one of just a few companies that still produce the archaic computer storage media, has announced plans to end production of floppies in March 2011.
Yup. This is awesome. We will be digging into this in very short order.
Contributed by Ross McDowall over the course of April 25th…
Because who doesn't like a visual?
Contributed by Ross McDowall over the course of April 24th…
This next instalment of the CakePHP line brings a myriad of enhancements, fixes and structural changes to the framework designed to ease your development experience and extend the capabilities of CakePHP.
Contributed by Ross McDowall and Wil Alambre over the course of April 23rd…
As users let their humanity show online, frontiers of communication are opening for web designers.
Photo credit: NASA
Kyleigh woke me up this morning with "Happy EARTH DAY!" and a song about earth. It was pretty cool actually, even though it was 6am. So to honour that childhood enthusiasm, we are going to assemble the Visual Lizard BEST of Earthday right here.
Head on over to http://www.earthday.org/ and jump in. They have several initiatives going on right now. Post your Act of Green on their homepage, sign the responsible climate declaration, and check out the Earth Day 2010 campaign.
We eat a bit of sushi around here. This is a supper handy guide we use to try and keep our sushi habit as green as possible. Thanks Earth Defense Fund!
This site is an awesome idea that is starting to happen. While not directly an Earth Day initiative, the site is attempting to map every tree in San Francisco. Every single tree! The best part about the site is that it is user driven and leans heavily on Google Maps to do handle the heavy lifting. Hopefully their beta opens to the public soon and we can start mapping our awesome urban forest here in Winnipeg.
What a great look back in time. Awesome.
Do your part for the planet. It is the only one we have.
Contributed by Ross McDowall and Julian Moffatt over the course of April 22nd…
Apple has filed for a patent on an idea to help those whose bread and butter still involves printing: make the monitor display CMYK.
Very handy~!
Not only is the Obama White House using plenty of open-source software, its technology team is contributing back to the community.
A little bit like Layer Tennis, but with personal consequences: Two designers face off, each redesigning part or all of the others site.
If you are a 1Password user who also works with Windows have I got some good news for you!
In addition to all the excitement with CakePHP 1.3's release candidate run and upcoming release, the development team has been working on minor updates to CakePHP 1.2.
Watch it at Vimeo. Pretty cool.
Plot Summary: "Avatar," a live action film with a new generation of special effects, takes us to a spectacular world beyond imagination, where a reluctant hero embarks on a journey of redemption and discovery as he leads an epic battle to save a civilization. James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of "Titanic," first conceived the film years ago, when the means to realize his vision did not yet exist. Now, after four years of actual production work, "Avatar" delivers a fully immersive cinematic experience of a new kind, where the revolutionary technology invented to make the film disappears into the emotion of the characters and the sweep of the story.
The story’s hero is Jake Sully, a former Marine confined to a wheelchair. Bitter and disillusioned, he’s still a warrior at heart. All Jake ever wanted was something worth fighting for, and he finds it in the place he least expected: on a distant world. Jake has been recruited to join an expedition to the moon Pandora, which corporate interests are strip-mining for a mineral worth $20 million per kilogram on Earth. To facilitate their work, the humans use a link system that projects a person’s consciousness into a hybrid of humans and Pandora’s indigenous humanoids, the Na’vi. This human-Na’vi hybrid – a fully living, breathing body that resembles the Na’vi but possesses the individual human’s thoughts, feelings and personality – is known as an "avatar."
In his new avatar form, Jake can once again walk. His mission is to interact with and infiltrate the Na’vi with the hope of enlisting their help – or at least their acquiescence – in mining the ore. A beautiful Na’vi female, Neytiri, saves Jake’s life, albeit reluctantly, because even in his avatar body, Jake represents to her the human encroachment on the Na’vi’s unspoiled world.
As Jake’s relationship with Neytiri deepens, along with his respect for the Na’vi, he faces the ultimate test as he leads an epic conflict that will decide nothing less than the fate of an entire world.
Contributed by Ross McDowall, Julian Moffatt, and Wil Alambre over the course of April 21st…
Following the success of the Steam UI beta, Valve has announced that all users will officially get the new-look game service next week. The official update will roll out on Monday, April 26.
Awesome design on this simple piece of cloth.
This game cartridge soap packs 8-bit power in every shower! (And is twice the size & weight of the other GEEKSOAP bars.)
How to use CSS @font-face - must read!
Awesome!
HTML 5 Arcade. Bring a webkit browser.
McAfee pushed out a virus definition update, 5958, at 06:00 PDT that causes false positive identification of the critical Windows system file svchost.exe.
Every year the city recovers hundreds of stolen and lost bicycles that are never claimed this is what happens to them.
Starting May 1, 2010, there will be 29 e-waste depots around the province. Ten of them will offer year-round services.
Basically, Facebook is offering up a set of widgets that you can drop into any web page to make that page more Facebooky.
Easily one of the meanest Tetris clone you've ever played.
Contributed by Ross McDowall and Julian Moffatt over the course of April 20th…
If youre a developer, you know what a joy working with jQuery can be, especially the convenience of plugins.
Looks like it's going to have the same 3D look that Street Fighter IV has. I wasn't that interested in SF4, but Marvel super heroes? Count me in :)
Winnipeg transit riders can now bike to their bus stops, then rack their bikes on the bus to join them for the ride. Sportsworks bike racks are installed on all Route 60 Pembina buses.
Written in HTML5 no less. Make sure you have a modern browser for this link!
Incase anyone has forgotten.
Patrick Sung has developed a cardboard box that he claims fit over just about any object. Its called the Universal Packaging System and folds along triangular sections.
Awh, he's cutting his teddy bear's head off.
I freely admit that I have an unhealthy addiction to FieldNotes notebooks. Something about them makes me feel smarter when I use them. Maybe it is the fact that I fill up pages so quickly because of the small size? At any rate, I now have a rather large collection of filled notebooks. The problem with taking notes on paper, is that I have found it really hard to search via Spotlight and find anything I have written down. Damn analog vs digital.
Additionally, I’ve been hot and cold on Evernote for a couple of years now. The entire concept of dumping everything into one bucket and then searching over it seemed so alien to me after 12 years of keeping thousands of folders, with nested files, all neatly organized.
It was only with QuickSilver, and then later Spotlight in OS X 10.6, that I realized how much time I was spending organizing stuff on my computer. I was wasting time just filing things. Spotlight’s running indexes work well enough to let me forget about my need to file things.
However, I still have the problem of not being able to search paper. All those thoughts written down and immediately forgotten. Then a few days or weeks later someone calls and you know you had some information written down someplace, but where? A little googling turned up a few posts about sending notes to Evernote and leaning on the OCR abilities there.
Here are the steps I followed:
That is it. Evernote’s OCR is working on indexing several notebooks as you read this. Results have been hit and miss with my hand writing, but if you remember to print really important bits, the OCR works well.
Of note: handwriting is important; printing works better than cursive; pen ink wins over pencil grey; images are being captured as high quality JPGs with 150dpi resolution; I’m on the free Evernote account for now; having the Evernote iPhone app means my FieldNotes are always with me.
Posted dug up by Google that helped with the writing of this post:
With partial support of HTML5 in modern browsers more and more web developers are introducing it in their projects. To experience some of the ’tasty’ features of HTML5 open interactive HTML5 presentation in your browser. The presentation is best viewed in Chrome.
Contributed by Ross McDowall and Julian Moffatt over the course of April 19th…
This does look pretty neat. I'm already looking to replace some really long select pulldowns with it.
How well does your browser support HTML5?
"Yes, we're proud practitioners of checkbook journalism. Anything for the story!"
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of April 18th…
Contributed by Ross McDowall and Julian Moffatt over the course of April 16th…
The comics will also include playable scenarios and characters for the games and there will also be titles based on the Dark Sun and Forgotten Realms properties.
Where by prison, i mean cubicle.
After more than a year of sustained pressure, the countries negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) have decided that the time is right to release the draft text of their work.
How is Apple's change of terms is affecting another app-development platform?
Contributed by Ross McDowall over the course of April 15th…
Glenn Pilley, the director of the Canadian Numbering Administrator (CNA) said that the area code committee should finalize the plan within weeks.
Parallels, a leading provider of control panel software for hosting companies, has integrated Google Services for Websites into Parallels Plesk Panel, used by millions of website owners globally to manage their sites.
Contributed by Ross McDowall and Julian Moffatt over the course of April 14th…
Oh my god, the ten-year-old in me just had his mind blown! Do want!
Due to high demand and popularity in the U.S., the international release of the iPad (including Canada) has been delayed from the end of April to the end of May.
The Library of Congress is archiving for posterity every public tweet made since the service went live back in 2006. Every. Single. Tweet.
Carsonified with a some handy reminders.
Contributed by Wil Alambre and Ross McDowall over the course of April 13th…
Apple on Tuesday unveiled new MacBook Pro models with faster processors, new graphics chips and other changes.
Companies and people will be able to purchase tweets that will show up first in certain search results or right in people's tweet streams.
Get out your light sabers "Star Wars: In Concert" is coming to MTS Centre on Tuesday, June 29, 2010.
FlexibleRules is a set of software tools and framework intended to simplify programming board games.
Ars Technica discussed the graphics switching technology at length with Apple this afternoon, and though Apple's implementation is similar in concept, it differs in a few key areas from Optimus.
Contributed by Ross McDowall, Julian Moffatt, and Wil Alambre over the course of April 12th…
Already, I'm queuing up "La Grange" on my iTunes.
Why has the record held so long? Because Safran's game took three continuous days to play with minimal breaks.
A flier that exists for no apparent reason, and which you can take a piece of with you to remind you that it was there.
Nice entry into the mobile phone space. Solar panel, pedometer, phone, and more. Wonder if it will come to Canada?
Yup.
The front wheel is a whopping 36 inches, while the rear wheel comes in at a slightly more reasonable 12 inches, giving you that classic elevated position associated with this most barmy of bikes.
Opera today announced its popular mobile browser, Opera Mini has been approved for iPhone and iPod touch on the App Store.
Contributed by Ross McDowall and Julian Moffatt over the course of April 9th…
A clean and minimal design gets out of the way and lets the content do the talking, and its a great way to give your site an elegant and sophisticated feel.
Confirmation comes from an ad that was seen on Xbox LIVE... the ad pegs Gears of War 3's release for April 2011.
Dave Devries takes childrens sketches of monsters from their imagination and renders them in paint, while keeping the scary details.
Due to the above average temperatures weve been having, the city has started spring cleaning of streets and sidewalks a bit early this year.
Comic Book Cartography is a blog devoted to scans of the wonderful maps and diagrams of classic comics. The kind of thing I could stare at all day.
Time to start working on my superhero custom for real!
Tweetie will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and made free (currently $2.99) in the iTunes AppStore in the coming weeks.
Contributed by Ross McDowall and Julian Moffatt over the course of April 8th…
The product came about as the company was trying to figure out how it might use its technology to help solve the challenges associated with moving to Windows 7, according to Parallels product manager Mary Starman.
On October 1, 2010, the minimum wage in Manitoba will go up 50 cents from $9.00 to $9.50.
Chrissie Brodigan caught up with Jeff Veen (Co-founder of Small Batch Inc, the company behind Typekit) to take inventory of some Typekits greatest effects.
With matchmaking, game invites, leaderboards and achievements, this is pretty much a carbon copy of Xbox Live, but on your phone.
German publisher Hans im Glück describes the game as including both a solitaire version as well as the normal game for multiple players, with players being able to play either locally or online.
WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process.
Contributed by Julian Moffatt, Ross McDowall, and Wil Alambre over the course of April 7th…
Forgot to bring this over in my migration. Very handy tool for checking your site.
Finally, a reputable supplier of superhero goods!
Artist Steve Bialik represents legendary Star Wars characters as samurai from traditional Japanese art.
Contributed by Ross McDowall and Julian Moffatt over the course of April 6th…
Some are government buildings, some were built to attract tourists, and some are private creations by some of Canadas wealthiest citizens. Best of all, some are open to the public, so you can go see them for yourself!
Since Dropbox currently doesn't offer an API this component will login to Dropbox and parse their HTML using cURL.
Fritz Lang's complete Metropolis, with an additional 25 minutes of lost footage and the original score is coming to US theaters in major markets this spring.
Nice set of folder icons for OS X.
Today, Microsoft released a new dashboard update that will allow your 360 to accept any USB Flash Drive as a storage device.
User submitted drawings compose a moving tribute to Johnny Cash. Awesome.
Contributed by Ross McDowall and Julian Moffatt over the course of April 5th…
Manitoba Camp sites will start taking reservations for the 2010 spring and summer season today at 7:30am (April 5, 2010)
This was the weekend those of us with high standards lost their remaining residue of patience for ideologues who hyperbolize about open systems without actually creating something people want to use.
The concept was simple, embracing the brevity and utility of Twitter and adding to it visuals: Share a snippet of what youre currently designing, but only a snippet. Let others reply.
Apple plans to take the wraps off iPhone OS 4.0 this Thursday, April 8 during a special media event in Cupertino. The event will take place at 10am Pacific Time on Apple's campus, giving a "sneak peek" into the future of the iPhone OS.
Founder and chief architect Kevin Rose, who's been a far more visible face of the company over the years, will be taking over as interim CEO.
1835: Sir Albert Pembleton accidentially discovers low temperature fusion. His invention changes history. A nuclear hotbox is installed in an early aeroplane. Super heated steam, the technology of the age, drives all the systems.
Only about a third of the world has it. That is all.
Want to see what your website looks like on the iPad? Get a load of iPad Peek, a new web-based emulator that shows you how any site renders on the new Apple device.
An interpretation of "Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog" as a theoretical Nintendo game. Hilarious.
Contributed by Julian Moffatt over the course of April 2nd…
Contributed by Ross McDowall over the course of April 1st…
