Archive for 2009
2010 gears up for explosion of 3D 30 Dec 2009
Nope, I don’t see it happening. For standard TV programming and film 3D doesn’t add anything to the experience as far as I’m concerned, in fact, it detracts from it. On the other hand, for gaming it might open up some new possibilities. Check out Johnny Chung Lee’s example.
The Ariane rocket celebrates its 30th birthday 27 Dec 2009
Ariane grew out of the failed Europa rocket programme of the late 1960s. Europa, you will recall, was a UK-initiated project for which the British, the French and the Germans would each provide a stage. Only the British contribution – derived from its Blue Streak missile – worked on each of the four launches. Sounds [...]
Is Peter Jackson Secretly Preparing To Film Philip Reeve’s Traction Cities Epic? – Peter Jackson – io9 22 Dec 2009
Good God I hope so. The hush-hush project is understood to be in early development, with work on the first of the four books under way, industry sources say. Weta Workshops is also believed to be working on designs for the science fiction series, which features giant mobile cities. A spokesman for Jackson did not [...]
BBC News – Project Canvas given green light by BBC Trust 22 Dec 2009
What is Project Canvas? Project Canvas is a partnership between the BBC, ITV, BT, Five, Channel 4 and Talk Talk to develop a common interface for Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) in the UK. Flat screen TV Project Canvas aims to set a common standard for internet TV IPTV allows you to access programmes via the [...]
Rage Against the Machine beat X Factor winner in charts 20 Dec 2009
While I think it’s nice that the masses proved it’s us that rule the charts and not some exec at a music company or Simon Cowell, could they not have found a better song from a better artist to champion? Why not pick something Christmassy or the Children in Need song? And Simon won’t care, [...]
Dr Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, beaten and arrested at US border 12 Dec 2009
Quite scary.
Gallery searches for stolen brick 10 Dec 2009
Another fantastic put-down of the crap called modern art: A London gallery is looking for a £3,000 brick by artist Gavin Turk which went missing and was replaced with a worthless equivalent. Revolting Brick, signed by the artist, was substituted with one from a pile which exhibition-goers were invited to take from after their visit. [...]
Thunderbird 3 is out 9 Dec 2009
If, like me, you can’t stand webmail interfaces for reading and replying to emails you’ll be glad to know Mozilla finally got around to releasing a new version of Thunderbird, their email client, you can download it here. Some of the new features: Tabbed browsing of emails (why? not using it) Search (better search is [...]
Postcode data to be free in 2010 9 Dec 2009
About time, now if we can get a few more groups of data out there we can start building some really exciting apps.
Millennium Predictions That Got Things Right – and Those That Didn’t 3 Dec 2009
A good round-up of some predictions for the 21st Century, interesting to see which ones were right and which were way off (a lot of people seem to expect advancements much faster than they occur).