So, being the kill-joy that I am, when she pulled up the video I said, oh yeah, I’ve seen that before, way back in the Tech-TV days. And then went on to explain that the whole video is computer generated. [fail trombone]. She was so disappointed that she couldn’t be bothered to finish watching the whole three-minute 26-second video. In her mind, finding out that it was all CGI meant that it was all fake. I tried to explain that the original creators didn’t just create a pretty bouncing ball virtual machine and then just dropped in the soundtrack, but designed the virtual machine to “play” the notes, so they had to program the timing to literally play the tune one hears on the video. She wasn’t having any of it. The fun was destroyed.

So I went on Snopes.com to confirm that the video was in fact CGI and alas I was correct, all CGI. The detail of the hoax was amazing (seriously, this was all built using re-purposed John Deere farming gear?!). One cool thing, I did find that Intel had actually built a machine inspired by the CGI machine in the Pipe-Dream video. So, when I was watching the video of the Intel machine, I couldn’t help but wonder if the soundtrack on the video was being created by the machine or a remixed thing overlaid onto the video. What do you think, real music or pre-recorded fakery???

Sources:

• Pipe Dream, Snopes.com, http://www.snopes.com/photos/arts/musicmachine.asp retrieved on 2/3/2012.
• YouTube Video: 3d Ball Music Machine [Completed Version] [HQ], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmREjs6NYVY&feature=related retrieved on 2/3/2012.
• YouTube Video: The Robotic Musicians known as: Intel’s Industrial Control in Concert, http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JLdB0WEixjM retrieved on 2/3/2012.

Uploaded by Honda on Jan 26, 2012
To celebrate the launch of the all-new 2012 CR-V, Honda brought Ferris Bueller’s Day Off back in a big game commercial. We cast Matthew Broderick as himself, skipping out on a day of acting work and living it up in his all-new CR-V. Relive movie history with Honda’s fresh twist and wonderful homage to this ’80s classic.

Think you’re a true fan of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? We hid over two dozen references to the movie throughout the commercial. Some are obvious, some are VERY subtle. See how many you can find. #dayoff

In the meantime, one of the more interesting presentation that I attended was by Rachel Smith, called: Visual Note-Taking with the iPad. At first I was thinking that this was a giant step backward in terms of using the iPad to create notes that weren’t really searchable. Ack. But this also reminded me of the recent whiteboard videos where an artist takes a talk and creates a real-time info-graphic of the talk (a la Dan Pink’s video on Drive). This also reminded me of a friend who used poster-board graphics to improve student literacy (something called Project Glad, back in the day). Check out Smith’s video:

Newspapers on iPad examples by Joe Bustillos

So when we last left our hero, I was looking for the best way to consume my daily news via my iPad… I had discovered that the Amazon kindle edition of the Los Angeles Times was much improved from earlier versions. My guess is that earlier versions, because of limitations of the kindle itself, were black and white images only and attempted to mimic the look of the print edition in a single column fashion, which led to some navigation difficulties. I really don’t know because by the time I decided to subscribe to the LA Times they had switched to an Onswipe-like layout with side-scrolling and section navigation on the left. See A) Los Angeles Times – Amazon Kindle edition on the right.

Imagine my surprise when I checked out the free LA Times iPad app and it looked pretty like the Amazon Kindle version that I was paying $9.99 each for. In fact, the free version was a little more advanced in it’s usage of screen real-estate, giving the reader a bit more information and options on each single screen. See B) Los Angeles Times – iPad App Edition (free) to the right.

The free version had the better screen usage because the section menu was drop-down, so it was out of the way when not needed. See C) Los Angeles Times – iPad Edition – Sections Menu to the right. And the free version was not lite on content by any stretch of the imagination. Granted, the last time I saw the paper version of the daily I was shocked at how small the newspaper was. It was hardly a shadow of it’s former self. So my guess is that the free iPad version has all of the same content as the paper version.

Finally, one thing that was very frustrating with the Kindle version of the Los Angeles Times was that if I found an article that I wanted to share or clip there was no way to do that in the Kindle version. I couldn’t select the article to copy it or even select any text that I might want to share. Now that might have been a limitation of the iOS interface but it really made the Kindle version feel like it was just for reading and not for sharing or research. The free version had social-networking built-in. Yeah. I cancelled my Kindle-edition. See D) Los Angeles Times iPad Edition Social Networking Menu to the right.

As I continued to explore the free Los Angeles Times iPad app I couldn’t find anyway to “subscribe” or become a subscriber in the traditional sense. I’m guessing that the free iPad version is being supported by the few ads along the bottom of some of the screens. As much as I love getting the whole LA Times for free, I’m concerned about the sustainability of the free model. That said, I’m not happy at the confusing subscription model being promoted by the New York Times that favors paper-subscribers over iPad/online subscribers when there’s so much less waste in the iPad/online model. Note that when you look at the iPad version of the New York Times all of the sections are locked for non-subscribers – see E) New York Times – iPad Edition – PAID Sections.

So, do I enjoy a free-copy of the LA Times every morning on my iPad with my Wheaties? Not so much. It’s tough to settle into the sit-and-read-the-paper-with-breakfast model that I’ve aspired to. Also, I’ve gotten used to skimming dozens of news sources at a time via my iPad RSS reader of choice, NewsRack. There are dozens of more visual newsreaders that mimic the slider model, but my purpose is to skim and select what to read and if I have to wade through tons of images it’ll slow down the process. I guess I’ve chosen a method of going through dozens and dozens of news sources instead of trusting a couple, or as in my dad’s case, one source.

Actually, now that I think about it, part of my problem is that I’m used to skimming and get a lot of my research links via my Twitter-stream. I tend to skim my Twitter resources before skimming my RSS articles. So, there’s a definite disconnect from the traditional news/magazine publication cycle and how I consume my information. As beautiful as some of these news apps are (like the ABC News and BBC apps) I don’t want to go to dozens of iPad apps or virtual magazines. It’s the web2 model: I don’t want to have to go to the apps, I want the news to seamlessly come to me. Man, this is much more difficult than I expected. This is going to require more thought… to be continued…

Sources:
image: Man Reading Newspaper at Beach – Microsoft Office Clipart, http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/results.aspx?qu=newspapers&ctt=1#ai:MP900401660|mt:2| retrieved 1/14/2012.
image: Newspapers on iPad examples by Joe Bustillos, http://josephbustillos.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/newspapers-on-ipad.jpg retrieved 1/14/2012.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Tell Congress not to censor the internet NOW! – http://www.fightforthefuture.org/pipa

PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting “creativity”. The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites– they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”

Uploaded by imetthewalrus on Jun 17, 2008
In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced him to do an interview. 38 years later, Levitan, director Josh Raskin and illustrators James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina have collaborated to create an animated short film using the original interview recording as the soundtrack. A spellbinding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit and timeless message, I Met the Walrus was nominated for the 2008 Academy Award for Animated Short and won the 2009 Emmy for ‘New Approaches’ (making it the first film to win an Emmy on behalf of the internet).
Category: Documentary Animation & Cartoons The Screening Room
Starring:
Jerry Levitan John Lennon
Directed by:
Josh Raskin
Produced by:
Jerry Levitan
Written by:
Josh Raskin

Uploaded by 13640 on Apr 22, 2007
John Lennon and his wife Yoko

Whereas “Imagine” evokes nostalgia and some sadness at what the world lost when Lennon was murdered, this next version of Lennon’s “Merry Xmas” calls us to task at how little we’ve accomplished in fulfilling the message of Christmas, that the world should not be the playground of the powerful stomping on the weak. We have so much to fix and undo…

Uploaded by johnlennon on Aug 24, 2010
The Official video for John Lennon ‘Merry Xmas (War Is Over)’

Sources:
I Met The Walrus: Lennon’s Brain Animated by Maria Popova, http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2008/11/21/jerry-levitan-i-met-the-walrus/ retrieved 01-13-2012.

These past fifteen years or so, keeping up with tech trends has been my business, and back in the beginning the newspaper would have been of no use (except for the computer store ads in the Saturday Sports section). Local user groups (NOCCC was strong back then) were the first sources of news and computer magazines like Byte and PC World were essential links to information. Eventually TV shows like C/NET TV and the Computer Chronicles and eventually ZD-TV/TechTV filled in the gap as user groups began to fade and virtual communities began to grow through the Internet. TV shows were then replaced by audio and the video podcasts mostly done by full-time podcasters. But I still hadn’t found a consistent “news gathering” process.

When I got my first iPad I was hoping that I would find a much more Eco-friendly way to consume daily news and tech news. I was really looking forward to reading newspapers and magazines on my iPad. One of the first publications to make it’s debut, The Daily, was buggy and I wasn’t really impressed with the quality of the writing style, so I never subscribed beyond the one-month free trial. At the time there were newspaper apps but they were geared for the small iPhone screen and were hardly better than a crippled webpage. This was not the experience I was looking for. In fact the best magazine/newspaper translation to iPad that I’ve found has been the Zinio version of National Geographic. Zinio is an app or wrapper that previously appeared as a Mac and Windows desktop app, but in it’s iPad incarnation not only does it preserve the feel and layout of the magazine but it all offers photo galleries and videos not possible in the paper version of the magazine. The only draw-back is that I have to remember to launch the Zinio app to get to my magazine library, but everything else is pretty seamless. Now that Apple has it’s own “newsstand” version I wonder what the difference might be. Also NG has it’s own stand-alone version. As far as look and feel and multimedia options Zinio works.

Newspaper-wise, in the beginning there was nothing, except for the iPhone versions. Being from the West Coast I was hoping to get the LA Times, but the Times was a Flash-only subscription that wouldn’t work on my iPad. Amazon had a kindle version of several newspapers, but reviews were critical of the offering, mostly related to poor editing and poor image support. But then some time late in the summer I discovered that Amazon had improved their newspaper subscription service and signed up for the Los Angeles Times via Kindle. Ten bucks a month for the daily paper with all of the sections from the original in a semi-blog/onswipe kind of layout. Not too bad. Well, except for when I happened to find almost the exact same version available apparently directly from the LA Times (via an LA Times app), FOR FREE! Doh! To be continued…

Sources:

• image: Newspaper forest green by NS Newsflash/Jon S, http://www.flickr.com/photos/62693815@N03/6277389273/in/photostream/ retrieved 01-10-2012
• video: 2011-02-19 The Daily Before & After by Joe Bustillos, http://www.flickr.com/photos/joebustillos/5463229493/ retrieved 01-10-2012

As I recently posted on twitter, I wasn’t entirely successful posting a photo a day on flickr (mostly because I take way too many photos that need some level of editing and insist on posting them in chronological order, etc., etc., etc.). But thanks to an iPhone app called Everyday I’ve been capturing an image of yours truly almost everyday since buying the app in early 2011. I wasn’t as strict as I should have been framing the photos, so it’s a much more jittery video than it could have been. And except for my hair growing out (and being wonderfully styled) the passage of time isn’t as obvious and will probably require a much longer time span than just one year. Oh boy.

On a much more beautiful and celebratory note, Kathy Craven’s boyfriend, Mike Cardwell posted the following video highlighting how they celebrated the coming of the new year. Enjoy.

New Year’s Eve from Michael Cardwell on Vimeo.

This is how my family and I spent the last few hours of 2011. This is an in-camera effect using bokeh. No animation of any kind was used in this video.

Best viewed Full Screen.

Thanks to everyone who helped on this project!

Kathy Craven
The Craven Family
Ryan Nielson
Aidan Cardwell
Kellie Martin
Nick Loring from Digital Graphics Plus
Chris Altsman
Brett Brinkerhoff for letting me borrow his rig

Happy New Year!

Catch Mike’s work at Market Match Media and can be contacted at Michael@marketmatchmedia.com

brian tong and molly wood - image by CNET

Anchored by two very smart and funny tech-observers, Molly Wood and Brian Tong, the once daily podcast seems to have fallen victim to the talk-show radio syndrome where news stories have become launching points for venom and hyperbole. Back when Tom Merritt was part of the crew the balance between news reporting, analysis and rants was well managed, entertaining and worth listening to/watching. The revolving third seat, since Merritt’s departure, has been manned by good people, but all seem to be either too quick to go into rant mode or no one can be found who is strong enough a personality to maintain the news/analysis/rant balance. I’m sure that there are probably constructive reasons for the change, but the reduction of the podcast from daily to weekly isn’t a good sign. And for me, with the rant-a-thon, I can hardly make it through even the weekly sessions.

Case in point, news item: Apple’s Siri voice-service is under scrutiny over it’s apparent aversion to giving info when asked for assistance looking for birth-control. Siri doesn’t seem to have any problem giving assistance when asked for where one can score pot or how to dispose of a body. The latter example, obviously meant to be humorous while the former… well, have you read the Steve Jobs biography? Molly Wood goes into rant mode about Apple’s obvious nanny-mode control issues. Apple had previously responded that it wasn’t a political statement and that, after all, the service is still in Beta. One of Wood’s co-hosts offered that it could have also been a CYA thing, with Apple not wanting to be sued in the future when someone under-age uses Siri to get info and then gets an abortion. Wood wouldn’t have it and called Apple “Beta” explanation bull[shit], and continued the rant. I shut off the podcast and deleted the episode.

What it comes down to is that there’s no one there to pull back on the rants and maintain even the illusion of journalistic balance. It was a little understandable when they were under the pressure of doing a daily tech-news show that they would riff on the headlines and not spend too much time to dig deeper into the stories. And given the ongoing nature of most of the stories and the incomplete record of the events, one does need the analysis. Problem was and is, especially when dealing with anything Apple or Steve Jobs, Wood and Brian Tong always assumed the worst, most controlling, evil motives. To their credit they’ve earned their skepticism over Apple’s motives. Wood has seen how Apple marketing has been savage in their pandering and mistreatment of the press and Tong worked for Apple in the early years of the Apple Stores (which I guess qualifies one for … wounds). Alas, having been poorly treated by individuals or organizations… well, if one is going to be a journalist one needs to rise above it. Where’s the objectivity when one automatically goes for the “evil” reason. I’m not saying that one shouldn’t be skeptical and just buy the marketing fluff, but there is a middle ground that C/NET and Buzz Out Loud seem to have lost a long time ago.

Sources:

• Buzz Out Loud 1568: That’s just the Google Maps guy, ignore him. http://www.cnet.com/8301-19709_1-57334959-10/buzz-out-loud-1568-thats-just-the-google-maps-guy-ignore-him-podcast/ retrieved 12-30-2011.
• Petition To Correct Siri’s Apparent Anti-Abortion Bias Collects Nearly 30,000 Signatures by Laura Bassett/Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/01/siri-abortion-petition_n_1124281.html retrieved 12/30/2011.

Uploaded by JibJab on Dec 20, 2011
From Charlie Sheen’s #winning tweets to the debt ceiling crisis and global protests, it seems the whole world went nuts in 2011. Join us as we reminisce about the most notorious moments of the year in our 7th annual year in review… this time sung by a popsicle stick puppet choir!

Uploaded by Google on Dec 14, 2011
See how the World Searched with Google’s 2011 Zeitgeist:
http://googlezeitgeist.com

Music: “Sooner or Later” by Mat Kearney
Produced by Whirled Creative with Director Scott Chan

“Soldier surprises mom” clip courtesy of the National Geographic Channel, Siskell/Jacobs Productions and Joseph Desira.

Uploaded by techaudottv on Nov 24, 2011
Video comparison between Microsoftt’s Tellme and Apple’s Siri. The results speak for themselves.

More than 1 Million views!! more than 2,000 comments. You guys are certainly opinonated.

I wonder how many of you read the post wrapped around this video? http://www.techau.tv/blog/microsoft-tellme-is-not-the-same-as-siri-video/

The following two videos are from Whitacre’s intro to the project and a finished version:

Uploaded by youcefpreston1 on Apr 11, 2011
Follow me on Twitter. www.twitter.com/youcefpreston
Become a Fan! www.facebook.com/youcefpreston

19 Years old, Leeds, UK. Special Thanks to Nick Thompson and the crew from leStudio GUERILLA.
www.studioguerilla.com

Sound Recorded live by Dan Mizen. Active Audio.
www.activeaudiostudios.co.uk

Lighting- Andy Hardy
www.truesounds.co.uk

Another Adele Cover…

Uploaded by VazquezSounds on Nov 10, 2011
We are siblings doing what we love! enjoy!
LIKE US: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Vazquez-Sounds/103035296478481
FOLLOW US:http://twitter.com/#!/VazquezSounds
TUMBLR:http://abevazquez.tumblr.com/

When I first heard about iCloud’s photostreaming feature I was really hoping that I’d finally have a much better workflow for my photos than being tied to my iPhoto library that was getting much too big for my little macbook air’s little SSD. Sure enough, once I got my macbook air, 27-inch iMac, iPhone and iPad all on iCloud photos taken on my iPhone started magically showing up on all the other devices, just like Apple had promised. Yay! I started imagining that, with all devices being synced, I could just choose the best place to edit and organize my collection and the results would flow across to all the other devices. Well, the images flowed okay.

I started with an image of a restaurant menu from a favorite sushi place using my iPhone’s HD setting, which meant that the iPhone produced two images automatically. Then once I had the images on my iPad I decided to rotate it so that the words were in proper orientation. I did it to both versions of the image. Okay. Now out of the four images I wanted to keep one and toss the other three, but there was no delete option for any of the four images hosted on the photostream. Um… yeah, not good.

Getting images effortlessly flowing from camera (phone) to any connected device is good, not being able to toss any image posted in the photostream is completely flawed. I come from the school where one might easily take 300 images to come up with three decent ones. Granted I’ve been know to post 100 of the 300 images on my flickr photostream but even then I’m deciding what images to post and which ones to toss. It just seemed inconceivable that one is forced to keep any image that gets on one’s iCloud photostream and the only way to pull one down is the pull all of them down (AKA disable photostream) or to wait for the undesired image to be the 1001st image. What?

Then, when I was experimenting with the iCloud photostream I made an event folder in iPhoto and added some images off of the stream and now the name of my stream seems to be connected to this event folder. Ugh. I’m afraid to add any of my pre-stream images from my iphoto library to the stream. At the moment it seems to distinguish between photos saved in the photostream and photos saved locally (on the “camera roll” on the iDevice), but does that mean the same images in both places are being saved twice. And when I organize my photos on my macs in folders (by events), will that organization get lost in the stream if I drop the photos back into the stream. The lack of controls makes me wonder. I mean, I wonder if the only way to organize my photos and share the organization back to my iPad and iPhone is to hook the devices back to a host Mac. Ugh. This is definitely a version 1.0 product.

I was able to find several video tutorials on YouTube about how to “delete photos” from photostream (one example listed below), but they were all about temporarily disabling photostream on all devices, then deleting all photos on the photostream and resuming using photostream… Not the workflow that i’m looking for. Damn.

resources:

• photostream screen grab by joe bustillos, http://joebustillos.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/2011-10-27-photostream.jpg retrieved 10/29/2011.
• iCloud logo by Apple Inc., http://www.apple.com/icloud/ retrieved 10/29/2011.
• “Photostream Your Photos on All Your Devices” by Apple Inc., http://www.apple.com/icloud/ retrieved 10/29/2011.
• Delete Photos from Photo Stream in iCloud – iOS 5 [LONG VERSION] by docrock808, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MRhMtBeCkQ retrieved 10/29/2011.

TOKYO SLO-MODE from alex lee on Vimeo.

This is for my hometown, Japan caught in slow.

Music Credit: Flying Lotus ft. Thom Yorke- …And the World Laughs With You

Shot on the Canon T3i and starter lenses.

Follow me on twitter for updates on upcoming projects: http://twitter.com/#!/badassmusketeer

e-mail: alexyoukilee@gmail.com

Uploaded by neal campbell on Oct 18, 2011
When my ex-wife left in January 2010, my friend Geoff Smith said come to Nashville and hang out. I did. He was working on a new album. I was a lost zombi. I had my camera with me, and I asked if I could shoot some stuff about the production of the album.

I’ve always wanted to produce documentaries. Making Gravity is my first one. During the turmoil of the divorce process, I misplaced the footage and work I’d done. A few days ago, I found it backed up with Time Machine on a Drobo. I made some adjustments and here it is.

You can find out more about Geoff and buy his album at http://www.thegeoffsmith.com.

This is a Neal.TV Production.

Uploaded by jonaspfeil on Oct 5, 2011
Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ballcamera

We present the Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera which captures a full spherical panorama when thrown into the air. At the peak of its flight, which is determined using an accelerometer, a full panoramic image is captured by 36 mobile phone camera modules.

Patent pending. More info: http://jonaspfeil.de/ballcamera
Please check our Frequently Asked Questions: http://jonaspfeil.de/ballcamera/faq

A project of the Computer Graphics Group, TU Berlin.

To be presented as an Emerging Technologies demonstration at the SIGGRAPH Asia 2011: Jonas Pfeil, Kristian Hildebrand, Carsten Gremzow, Bernd Bickel, Marc Alexa

Diploma thesis ‘Throwable Camera Array for Capturing Spherical Panoramas’:
Jonas Pfeil. Advisors: Marc Alexa, Carsten Gremzow

Video: Jonas Pfeil, Junny Chen, Qian Qin, Björn Bollensdorff

Voice: Hugh Jeremy

Music: ADO and Wonderland by IZCY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPd_rJZmvLc

Video licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0

We would like to thank Axel Kretzschmann for helpful tips on high speed electronics, Analog Devices, Inc., for providing parts and STMicroelectronics for helpful information regarding the camera module.

Thanks to Hugh Jeremy for providing the voice-over. Check out his awesome channel on Natural Selection 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rkgztfuij2w

Patent pending, http://jonaspfeil.de/ballcamera
Category:
Science & Technology
Tags:
omnidirectional camera panorama panoramic ball throwable

Uploaded by HKtechnews on Oct 7, 2011
http://hktechnews.com/hong-kong-pays-tribute-to-steve-jobs-at-apple-store/