In his post-Oscar show, Jimmy Kimmel bemoans how at the Oscars most of the movies only represent one genre at a time, so if you want more you need to watch a bunch of movies. He then goes on to say how he has realized his dreams of creating the most epic motion picture ever … and introduces us to ‘Movie: The Movie’. Take a look!
While Judie and I were attending the Create.Work.Inspire event sponsored by Dell and Intel last week we had the chance to sit down with Mindy Abovitz, the founder and editor in chief of Tom Tom magazine. (As an aside, we both really love the magazine and highly recommend you check it out.) While the conversation was ostensibly about the Create.Work.Inspire project, Mindy was the driving force behind it, we couldn’t resist using the time with her to ask a few other questions. One that we had been dying to ask had to do with the recent uptick in vinyl record sales. As…
Yesterday we brought word of HTC’s new line of Android smartphones, the HTC One. There are three phones in the line and each has its own unique screen size and feel. What is particularly unique however is the fact that the phones are NOT UNIQUE. No, the enhanced camera, sound and build-quality is the SAME across the line. As one of the HTC reps put it, “The great thing this time out is that you only need to make the choice with regard to the size and feel you want, the camera, sound etc is the same across the line…
There are a number things that really sum up the evening, some that require a bit of explanation and others we can list out. Oh, and I am not going to a full award-winner run-down … you can get that here. Let’s do the bullet points first: They could have subtitled the show ‘We give out more awards in the first half-hour than the Grammys do all night!’. And it would be accurate. The Grammys are about showing you why you should buy the crap the labels are pushing … the Oscars are about rewarding accomplishments. The awards were pretty…
Nokia had a number of announcements from their huge MWC press conference. Here are a few of the highlights with links to the Nokia site covering each of the items: Nokia advances on its new strategic direction, rolls out range of new mobile devices and services Nokia has extended the range of products with Windows Phone by introducing the Nokia Lumia 610, the most affordable Lumia yet, as well as targeting availability of the widely acclaimed Lumia 900 to additional markets beyond the U.S. Nokia also today ushered in a new era in high-end smartphone imaging. The Nokia 808 PureView…
Judie is at the ASUS Press Conference in Barcelona. Right now she is listening to the CEO of ASUS. The big news here? The Asus Transformer Pad Prime and the PadFone.
We have a bit more news on HTC’s new HTC One line coming out of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It seems T-Mobile will be the premier launch partner in the U.S. for the HTC One S. The HTC One S will be T-Mobile’s next smartphone to take advantage of the company’s speedy 4G (HSPA+42) network. Measuring just 7.95 mm thick, the phone has a unibody aluminum design and will be T-Mobile’s first device to ship with Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Here’s a quick rundown on some of the features that make this device stand out.
We’re back with the next episode of Gear Chat. In today’s podcast we’ll talk about the Dell/Intel event Judie and I attended last week, Carly will talk eBooks, Mike talks gaming and music, and Thomas and I discuss a variety of topics including Android and iOS apps of the week.
Now here’s a slightly unusual, and extra sticky, case of censorship. Smashwords sells all sorts of self-published works, from regular old fiction to instructional works, to erotica. It’s that last category that has Paypal’s metaphorical undies in a bunch, and in a really upsetting turn, they’re using their position as a payment processor to force Smashwords to pull titles. (Warning: Some of the links below are NSFW) According to The Digital Reader, Smashwords made this announcement over the weekend:
UPDATED with Judie’s pictures from MWC ViewSonic not only announced some great new tablets at MWC but they are also announcing a host of new smartphones. Among them is the first Ice Cream Sandwich Dual-SIM Smartphone. Why dual-SIM? Dual-SIM phones are expected to see an 80% growth rate in the next two years and, according to market research group Strategy Analytics, 206 million dual-SIM handsets will be sold worldwide in 2014. That compares to compared with 41 million in 2010. As the ViewSonic Press Release notes, Dual-SIM phones are expected to grow as users prefer to carry one handset for…
UPDATED with pictures from MWC ViewSonic just announced new 7″ and 10″ ViewPad tablets during Mobile World Congress. The ViewSonic tablets are “designed to fit into today’s mobile lifestyle. They are the perfect options for consumers to surf the web and interact with friends or for the mobile worker to enhance productivity whilst on the go.”
I spend much of my time browsing for iOS applications. Finding new apps on blogs or finding reduced price and free apps is kind of a hobby of mine. Often, I will download apps with no intent of using them, but to collect them in my iTunes just in case. A few of my friends like to make the, “there’s an app for that” joke almost anytime I talk about my phone. Some of my students were recently discussing the show about hoarders. You know the program where people stack random items in their houses until it is basically not…
For as long as I can recall something about music has been dying – I remember hearing ‘Long Live Rock’ as a kid on the radio when rock was more vibrant than ever; lived through the death of disco and the crash & burn of punk, new wave, new age, retro-50’s, retro-60’s, retro-70’s and now retro-80’s, grunge, glam-rock, hair-metal, screamo, and on and on and on. Yet music never really dies – listening to Skrillex I hear so many of the traditions of techno and dance music from well before Sonny Moore was born reflected through his creations. The same…
I make my living as a statistician and also have a background in optical physics, so I have been on both sides of the experimental design and analysis table. I have also been on both sides of debates about the quality and reliability of data from an experiment. So where am I going with this? Do you remember last fall when we heard about the discovery and subsequent ‘proof’ of faster-than-light neutrinos? Here are some details: New high-precision tests carried out by the OPERA collaboration in Italy broadly confirm its claim, made in September, to have detected neutrinos travelling at…
The NIH estimates that as many as 15 – 20% of Americans have some degree of dyslexia, which can make reading and comprehension difficult. It often results in sufferers transposing or rotating letters or numbers, as well as having difficulty differentiating similar looking letters such as i and j. They might also see the letters and numbers floating and moving as they try to read … which can cause issues with reading speed and comprehension. When I was young kids with these sorts of issues were simply labeled ‘slow’ (or worse), but now the condition can be recognized and diagnosed,…
We have all flung birds at enemy pigs and used our tiny wings to navigate the hills of an unknown world but how many of us actually get to fly on our iOS device? Do not ask me to explain it, but bird games seem to be fun. As I was scouring the Appstore trying to bring you the best of the bargain apps, Fly With Me jumped at me. I knew being from EA and having a bird as the main character I could not go wrong. The app is actually free as of this writing, on sale…
Image courtesy of Multi-touch Research Because of my work, I have to toggle back and forth between a Windows laptop and a MacBook Pro during the day. I am not going to add to the Apple/PC wars, nor to the Windows/Mac OS X discussion; instead what I’ve noticed most, every day, day after day, is the huge productivity difference I get out of . . . the Apple Magic Mouse
If you are a child of the 70’s like me, you fondly remember your collection of 45s and the mysteriously vanishing spindle adapters used to allow the discs with large holes to play on 33-1/3 RPM turntables. But as the 70s gave way to the 80s and the AOR (‘album oriented rock’ or ‘always on radio’ depending on who you ask) of Styx, Foreigner, The Police and more dominated the airwaves the ‘single’ slowly became less and less popular. Then CDs arrived in the mid-80s without a real equivalent to the 45. Sure there were CD singles, but the record…
Had you heard that George Harrison had an iPad app launching this week? I have been anticipating it for a while, knowing that aside from music there would be loads of context and history about his guitars and what he used for which song and so on. Cool info for a music geek, in other words. But today when it launched, the $10 price made me pause for a bit before buying. Recently we have seen apps from Jimi Hendrix and Sting, both of which were free, as well as Rock and Jazz histories which are ~$5 each. The Sting…
I was a vegetarian for 7 years, so I have eaten my fair share of veggie burgers and fake bacon (actually, fake bacon is why I stopped being a vegetarian, but that’s a whole other story). So the idea of “fake” meat doesn’t bother me most of the time, but this latest news is truly creepy-scientists are working on making “meat” using stem cells and Petri dishes. According to the BBC: Scientists in the Netherlands hoping to create a more efficient alternative to rearing animals have grown small pieces of beef muscle in a laboratory. These strips will be mixed…
Next Monday PBS is airing a concert event from the White House on February 21st that has already gotten considerable coverage due to President Obama singing a chorus of ‘Sweet Home Chicago’. But there was much more in the event hosted by the First Lady, and some of the stars playing are true musical legends including Jeff Beck, B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Booker T. Jones, Mick Jagger, Gary Clark Jr., Warren Haynes, Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks and more. I wanted to highlight a couple of clips from the PBS YouTube channel and other YouTube users. Here is the classic ‘Five…