Sunday, April 30, 2017

Friday, April 28, 2017

A freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Vivaldi Technologies, a company founded by Opera Software...

A freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Vivaldi Technologies, a company founded by Opera Software co-founder and former CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Tatsuki Tomita.

Essentially it uses the Blink rendering engine like Chrome and Opera. I like Opera, especially the rebuilt version, and use it as a "backup" browser (first choice is Firefox). Not sure I like this, yet, but it has lots of extra features built in.
https://vivaldi.com/?lang=en

I never heard of WebOS, but I don't use my Smartphone that way.

I never heard of WebOS, but I don't use my Smartphone that way. Mind you, I just noticed that the article is from 2011!
http://www.popsci.com.au/gadgets/mobile/rip-webos-the-best-smartphone-platform-nobody-used,376282

Holy shit!

Holy shit!

Originally shared by Dave Hill

Poopular Science

Apparently there is Poop SCIENCE. And pooping can be defined by MATH. Sounds like a bunch of crap to me, but ...
http://www.popsci.com/everyone-poops

ha ha ha


ha ha ha

Originally shared by nixCraft

Lmao.

You’re already a different creature.

You’re already a different creature. You can see this when they do surveys of like, “how long do you want to be away from your phone?” and—particularly if you’re a teenager or in your 20s—even a day hurts.

Fuck no, it doesn't. I don't have social media on my smartphone, nor do I use my thumbs a lot with one. I can and do go for days without using my phone. The best apps I have on it are a timetable app for buses, and the clock. What he's saying may be true for a certain percent, but that doesn't mean that the smart way to be.

Originally shared by Ed S

Already, moving our world from the desktop to the smartphone has reduced our creativity and increased our stress, increased our disconnection from one another. So: "Why do we think moving the device inside our brain will make things any better?" - and other good thoughts in here too. Like, conversations are not about information transfer, they are part of a negotiation of a shared understanding.
Here's Elon's optimistic position:
"The thing that people, I think, don’t appreciate right now is that they are already a cyborg. You’re already a different creature than you would have been twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. You’re already a different creature. You can see this when they do surveys of like, “how long do you want to be away from your phone?” and—particularly if you’re a teenager or in your 20s—even a day hurts. If you leave your phone behind, it’s like missing limb syndrome. I think people—they’re already kind of merged with their phone and their laptop and their applications and everything."
and
"We already have a digital tertiary layer in a sense, in that you have your computer or your phone or your applications. You can ask a question via Google and get an answer instantly. You can access any book or any music. With a spreadsheet, you can do incredible calculations. If you had an Empire State building filled with people—even if they had calculators, let alone if they had to do it with a pencil and paper—one person with a laptop could outdo the Empire State Building filled with people with calculators. You can video chat with someone in freaking Timbuktu for free. This would’ve gotten you burnt for witchcraft in the old days. You can record as much video with sound as you want, take a zillion pictures, have them tagged with who they are and when it took place. You can broadcast communications through social media to millions of people simultaneously for free. These are incredible superpowers that the President of the United States didn’t have twenty years ago."
via Tim Urban's very long piece on waitbuywhy.com
https://medium.com/the-eccentric-sage/my-biggest-question-about-elon-musks-neuralink-63540f5d31ba

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

I've heard this claim, that "native Americans being unable to see Columbus's ships because they were outside their...

I've heard this claim, that "native Americans being unable to see Columbus's ships because they were outside their experience", several times, but there's never a source, and you can't really reconstruct this without accurate sources, and this, if correct means that it's a misinterpretation of Australian Aboriginals ignoring the Endeavour. and Banks' disappointment about that.

Also, check http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=36;t=000822;p=0 out.
https://www.northcoastjournal.com/humboldt/myth-of-the-invisible-ships/Content?oid=2129921

Saw this film ages ago.

Saw this film ages ago. Plenty of wild ideas in this film, mostly based on a misinterpretation of Quantum Mechanics. You know it's bullshit when they refer to Quantum Mechanics as Quantum Physics.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2005/06/30/2839498.htm

Download 200+ Modern Art Books from the Guggenheim Museum. Expensive art books, now free!

Originally shared by Open Culture

Download 200+ Modern Art Books from the Guggenheim Museum. Expensive art books, now free!

Thanks go to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Internet Archive.
http://www.openculture.com/2017/04/download-200-modern-art-books-from-the-guggenheim-museum.html

Free: Watch 92 Episodes of the Surrealist Cartoon, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Featuring Björk, Thom Yorke & More

Originally shared by Open Culture

Free: Watch 92 Episodes of the Surrealist Cartoon, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Featuring Björk, Thom Yorke & More
http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/pace-ghost-coast-to-coast-free-online.html

'.

Originally shared by Rob Jongschaap

'... There’s one major caveat for this approach: Adding six degrees of freedom to a flat 360-degree video only works if the camera does actually move. “We assume the camera moves to infer the depth,” explained Miller. “If the camera rotates but does not move side to side we cannot compute depth but can stabilize the rotation.”

Still, the approach goes to show that building complex cameras isn’t the only solution for advances in VR video. Computer vision algorithms are just as important, with Miller even arguing that expensive camera hardware may not be necessary at all to generate full immersive VR video. “If it’s there it’s nice — if it’s not there it’s not the end of the world,” he said....'
http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/adobe-6dof-vr-video-algorithms-1202394491/

A mixed-reality world is exciting for society and for Facebook shareholders.

A mixed-reality world is exciting for society and for Facebook shareholders. But it also opens the door to some crazy future scenarios, where Facebook, or some other tech company, intermediates everything you see, hear, and, maybe even, think. And as we ponder the implications of that kind of future, consider how fast we've already progressed on Zuckerberg's timeline.

Don't find this appealing at all.

Originally shared by Rob Jongschaap

A world without screens

For science-fiction lovers, the world Facebook is starting to build is very cool and insanely ambitious. Instead of smartphones, tablets, TVs, or anything else with a screen, all our computing is projected straight into our eyes as we type with our brains.
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-f8-mark-zuckerberg-augmented-reality-2026-2017-4?international=true&r=US&IR=T

Never heard of this before, but now it's FREE

Never heard of this before, but now it's FREE

Originally shared by Open Culture

Google Makes Its $149 Photo Editing Software Now Completely Free to Download.

Just a quick mention in case you missed the original announcement.
http://www.openculture.com/2016/03/google-makes-its-149-photo-editing-software-now-completely-free-to-download.html

Thursday, April 20, 2017

And this always seemed like an "also ran" type of program.

And this always seemed like an "also ran" type of program. It does stuff that Fireworks used to do, but you can seem to import/export to other handy formats like Photoshop or Illustrator. Pity.
http://mediachance.com/realdraw/index.html

I found this when I was checking out REAL DRAW V (see http://mediachance.com/realdraw/index.html) to see if it'd...

I found this when I was checking out REAL DRAW V (see http://mediachance.com/realdraw/index.html) to see if it'd improved (sort of). Anyway I've downloaded the trial and will check it out.
http://mediachance.com/patternstudio/index.html

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Do tell.

Do tell.

Originally shared by Danie van der Merwe

Did North Korea Linux ripoff Apple’s macOS?

Actually for me that is not the issue, and neither is the censorship they built into their Linux. The issue is why they went Linux? Maybe because of the freedom to be used by anyone and to adapt it to do what is required, and to inspect the code and self-compile it to be sure that no foreign government is spying on them?

It's rumoured that the US NSA also use Linux for a similar reason....

See http://www.cio.com/article/3190591/software/did-north-korea-linux-ripoff-apple-s-macos.html
http://www.cio.com/article/3190591/software/did-north-korea-linux-ripoff-apple-s-macos.html

What a good idea!

What a good idea!

Originally shared by Open Culture

New, Interactive Web Site Puts Online 1000s of International Folk Songs Recorded by the Great Folklorist Alan Lomax.

Another gift from the internet!

http://www.openculture.com/2017/04/web-site-puts-online-thousands-of-international-folk-songs-recorded-by-the-great-folklorist-alan-lomax.html

So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.

So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.

I figured this out over 10 years ago, when I was doing the QUEER STUFF comic for ACON Newcastle. That's out of print, but maybe I can redo it (again) as a webcomic.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000063

Sunday, April 16, 2017

Um, not sure what to make of this. I think it uses the Cloud, which I've avoided so far.

Um, not sure what to make of this. I think it uses the Cloud, which I've avoided so far.
https://www.mixamo.com/

Saturday, April 15, 2017

Have been using this to play music on the RecRoom computer. Windows only.

Have been using this to play music on the RecRoom computer. Windows only.
http://www.aimp.ru/

For governments, this imposes a pressing need to step in and ensure the rise of the robots is not accompanied by a...

For governments, this imposes a pressing need to step in and ensure the rise of the robots is not accompanied by a further rise in inequality. As tempting as it may be to pour money into boosting automation in return for the long-awaited boost to productivity and headline economic growth, doing so without having a clear plan for retraining displaced workers would cause untold harm to millions of individuals.

Good luck with that.

Originally shared by Rob Jongschaap
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/15/beware-the-unintended-consequences-of-a-robot-revolution

Damn I've been so tempted by this.

Damn I've been so tempted by this. My first graphics editor was Paintshop Pro 7, and I later bought X3 and used it to make comics, until the year after when I bought Adobe CS 5, which included Photoshop and Illustrator.

At that time both of those apps were terminals at my university and it made sense to use programs that I could also use at my uni. Paintshop Pro had many features in common with Photoshop and could load and save in that format. It also had one or two advantages. The interface was ultra configurable. You could modify all the menus and tool bars, create macros in Python, and set up workspaces to order. It had a version of art brushes so you couple paint if you wanted, and nozzle to spray image with. Also gradients were in vector format and could be modified dynamically, and it supported vector text. and was very easy to make and edit vector lines and simple shapes But the system of vector graphics was incomplete (X9 has included shapes and vector text filling up shapes, see http://help.corel.com/paintshop-pro/v19/main/en/user-guide/paintshop-pro-x9.pdf), but it still doesn't have a CMYK colour mode. Rather, you can export to a TIFF in that mode for printing.

So I was tempted, but I have Photoshop and Illustrator. I still have a number of files that are still in PSP format, but the discount price translates to $A 80, and if it's something I might only use sometimes, why not use X3 instead?


http://marketing.smithmicro.com/50-off-paintshop-pro-x9-ultimate-imagine-your-best-photo-ever?ecid=ACsprvs8m_ETKK9LfWbw6lXESwvEWdegyrtOkhIUmi3hrcBe3hOfGGMncx0gidCepPi9CK-OqPOZ&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--bCyj9WvwvdbBzxNJ-rPrRbBPbBVoXbc6-hQYl5e20KJxojazACOHrL4HYuLGlqUsl0WVvYUjVrUpHnlzdIG_FBqK5BQ&_hsmi=50531444

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Who'd think that brushes that make cracks would be so handy.

Who'd think that brushes that make cracks would be so handy. Finding this using Google had some unintended results when it thought I wanted "cracked software", or were interested in certain drugs. D'Oh!

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Monday, April 10, 2017

Objective tests would be incredibly useful, helping provide an early diagnosis that could lead to therapy in the...

Objective tests would be incredibly useful, helping provide an early diagnosis that could lead to therapy in the first year of life, when the brain is the most malleable. A reliable biomarker might also help distinguish various types of autism, divisions that could reveal who would benefit from certain therapies. And some biomarkers may reveal a deeper understanding of how the brain normally develops.

No mention of what those therapies might be. Mmmm, this begs certain moral issues here, akin to those with deaf and intersex folk.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scientists-seek-early-signs-autism

Sunday, April 9, 2017

Friday, April 7, 2017

A panel plugin for photoshop (from CS4 up). Makes making consistant guides a LOT easier.

A panel plugin for photoshop (from CS4 up). Makes making consistant guides a LOT easier.
http://guideguide.me/versions/

Wednesday, April 5, 2017

A FREE online/stand-alone cross platform vector editor?!

A FREE online/stand-alone cross platform vector editor?!
https://designer.io/

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Looks like a lot of effort.