April 2012
22 posts
Warner Bros launch film scripts as e-books →
Interesting idea, though I’ll wait to see what they look like before I get too excited.
How Technicolor created ruby slippers without... →
Some things I didn’t know about the technicolor process. And the reason for ruby slippers rather than silver? They’s look better on screen and in colour!
“Being a geek is all about your own personal level of enthusiasm, not how your...”
– What It Means To Be A Geek
The whole post is well worth a read, geek or non (and I think a lot of people will find they’re actually geeks).
via Binary Bonsai
“I’m not as interested in the stated goal of mining asteroids as what the...”
– The investment we all have in asteroid mining
Yep, I agree, we need to start forming some colonies as a backup to a planet level event.
Me and My Spectrum, 1980s on Retronaut →
Pictures of people (typically kids) with their Spectrums.
“While sifting through Von Schönwerth’s work, Eichenseer found 500...”
– Five hundred new fairytales discovered in Germany
You can read one of them, The Turnip Princess, here.
“Early retirement” sounds wonderful. It certainly did that cold night in...”
– Jets’ Trevor Pryce Is Retired, and Getting Tired of It
via Kottke
“But tech projects represent just one portion of Kickstarter’s funding base. Back...”
– Kickstarter funding explodes, on pace to triple this year to around $300M
I am loving the Kickstarter stories in yet another way the web joins producers and consumers directly.
Microsoft aims to make iPad an underdog with... →
I was going to write a big rant about this, backing it up with some stats, but I can’t be bothered, so here’s my view instead:
The iPad only have 62% market share? I’m not sure how they’re measuring that, but it’s blatantly wrong, how many people have you ever seen with something other than an iPad? Me: none.
Anyway, then we move on to Windows tablets. I like the...
Bulk-buying razor blades in the UK
Reading about the Dollar Shave Club (I’m not keen on the monthly ongoings) and Dorco to enable you to buy razor blades in bulk so you pay a lower cost per unit I wonder why we don’t have similar services in the UK? The most I can see you can buy here is a pack of 12 blades.
Come on netpreneurs, get on it (although with postage costs rising, maybe it’s not viable). 3D printers...
Is James Cameron's next big venture... →
Okay, so I may have said this should happen to help pay for our ventures into space, I also think it’s inevitable asteroid mining will happen, otherwise we’re looking at wars being fought over dwindling resources, but if that’s what they announce it’ll be freaking awesome.
More comment from The Verge.
Official announcement is set for next Tuesday.
“The spider— according to Hadleigh — is “about the size of your hand.”
– This photo of a spider eating a 1.5-foot-long snake will burn into your brain
There’s a video too! I am officially never going to Australia.
This insanely sinister infographic illustrates the... →
When you think Little Boy (15 kilotons) and Fat Man (21 kilotons) destroyed entire cities, why have something as immensely powerful as the Tzar Bomba (50,000 kilotons)?
Smartwatch breaks record for Kickstarter funding →
Having been looking at watches recently I was wondering why the tech hadn’t really moved on, it’s a bit like what I’ve been saying about alarm clocks. Maybe this signals a change.
Atari illustrations predicted Wikipedia in 1982 →
I’m not sure they 100% show Wikipedia, but it’s an impressive display of the modern world of computing when you consider these were drawn 30 years ago when consumer laptops didn’t exist.
Coding Horror: Speed Hashing →
After a lot of interesting analysis on how face passwords can now be broken, Jeff states we should all be using passwords of 12 characters or more.
That’s unrealistic to start with, never mind the fact that as technology moves on, those will be breakable too. I’ve argued for a while that we need to get rid of passwords and find another method.
Can computers have true artificial intelligence? →
Interesting article and nice to see it belittles Deep Blue and Watson as the party tricks they are. Don’t get me wrong, they’re impressive, but Watson is basically just a natural language processor attached to a search engine and Wikipedia. It succeeded at Jeopardy because it could breakdown a question and look up an answer. If they’d asked it what its favourite colour was, it...
Kickstarter crowdsourced cash empowers US... →
Kickstarter is a little bit like epublishing. It allows you to bypass the gatekeepers with the money and connects producers directly to consumers. To a certain extent it’s also micro-patronage. I’m expecting we’re going to see a lot more funding done this way, not just for individual products or ideas, but perhaps for entire careers.
Who should small businesses choose to run their... →
Aside from the issues with moving to the cloud, one they haven’t mentioned is your dependence on your internet connection. Experience has shown that ADSL can be very flaky, and the next step up in terms of reliability is only really leased line. So make sure you have redundant internet access (and I don’t mean another ADSL line, I mean alternative routes: 3G, satellite, cable).
