May 17th, 2012 § § permalink
yet another crazy fellow slovenian!
Matevz Lenarcic, a Slovenian pilot, biologist and photographer, opens the door of his plane after landing from an around the world flight, at the Ljubljana Airport. -AFP Photo LJUBLJANA: Slovenian adventurer Matevz Lenarcic successfully concluded a 100-day eco-friendly trip around the world on Thursday in an ultra-light plane boasting super-low…
via: dawn.com
as I usually say, we have a long and proud history of eccentric mad scientists and extreme sportsmen. cheers to all!
May 11th, 2012 § Comments Off on tower of babel emerging – auto-translated gmails § permalink
finally! this is so incredibly important for the global society!
not only it is possible to read anything by auto-translating web pages, now anyone will be able to communicate to anyone else. next step – transparent translations of IM and phone call in real time!
Now, you would be able to comprehend emails you receive in other languages. Google has just announced that it would be rolling out the automatic translation feature in Gmail over the next few days. “Over the next few days, everyone who uses Gmail will be getting the convenience of translation added to their email,” Jeff Chin, Product Manager,…
via: www.buzzom.com
May 8th, 2012 § Comments Off on “I live by morals, I do… § permalink
“I live by morals, I don’t live by laws, laws are something made by assholes.”
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I find this quote incredibly telling of the revolution we are witnessing now. New generation of geeks is dumping everything the human race learned in the last 500 years and is going back to basics, figuring out new world order as we go.
Laws used to be codification of morals, then they were hijacked by assholes who can’t use the internet to control us anymore, which gives us a temproray upper hand.
It’s necessary, and it’s dangerous.
April 16th, 2012 § Comments Off on Weird Gadgets: 1958 “Cyclone” Bus Duster § permalink
We, the new kids, have no idea what America was like in the fifties:
The 1950’s were perhaps the peak of American Culture. The Post-War economy was booming and a future of flying cars driven by robot housemaids was all but guaranteed. On the West Coast, one local transit authority even had a bus for cleaning other busses.
via: gizmodo.com
the first time I realized this, was when I read that the 50s were the original golden age for 3D cinema (!).
April 13th, 2012 § Comments Off on Encyclopaedia Britanica is Back! § permalink
well, at least for a little while longer – there’s 800 of them left. go get them while they’re cold!
Back in March, it was announced that after centuries of being a print staple, the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica was moving- for better or worse- to the digital realm. It was certainly the end of an era for people old enough to remember when encyclopedias like Encyclopaedia Britannica were the be all and end all of research,…
via: www.inquisitr.com
I’m sure they will reprint them though, at least once per century.
April 5th, 2012 § § permalink
This project is the closest we’ll get to teleport for a while.
it’s also an amazing collection of bits and pieces of the world, that we would never see otherwise.
there’s something poetic about it.
Browsing Google Maps you can see lots of interesting landmarks and fun occurrences captured by the Streetview cameras. Finding all of those fun and interesting views can sometimes be tricky. That’s when the Google Sightseeing blog becomes handy.
via: www.freetech4teachers.com
April 4th, 2012 § § permalink
I’m reading Guttenberg the Geek, fantastic essay / biography by Jeff Jarvis, focusing on entrepreneurial aspects of famous inventor.
Several topics here are super interesting, like similarities between inventors, geeks, entrepreneurs, and what it means for the future of mankind.
Guttenberg Bible (Photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik)
However, one is not so obvious, but it might be inspiring for new generations of entrepreneurs around the web – Guttenberg spent a lot of time, energy and risk in building out the typeset and printing the first book.
The situation was much harder than anything today – he could not know if he will even survive the project, but let’s still compare this risk and emotional investment with today’s entrepreneurs – geeks between 20 and 30, who choose the uncertain but shiny path of building their business.
The project you are working on, should compensate for the conditions of extreme uncertainty. Compensate by reward and/or importance for yourself, human kind, the planet.
The product you will be judged upon should encapsulate the shiny core of the promise, of the better world. That’s why Guttenberg wouldn’t stop until he fulfilled his mission and printed the Bible – there were several smaller projects before it, to perfect the technique, but nobody really talks about them these days.
He was able to change the world because he endured on his journey until he could crown the disruptive technology, with a really memorable crown. Respect.
March 31st, 2012 § Comments Off on Just the Facts. Yes, All of Them. § permalink
Public speaking (Photo credit: brainpop_uk)
I really like this attitude:
If all data was clear, a lot fewer people would subtract value from the world, he says. A lot more people would add value.
… eventually, everything will be made transparent, and we will demonstrate that people are inherently good. And politics will go back to be what it was supposed to be – the art of the argument and debate, rather than manipulation.
March 30th, 2012 § § permalink
What a great example of cyber-anthropology!
More and more of us are spending more and more of our time staring at screens; And it’s amazing how emotional we’ve started to get about pixels. I’m pretty sure the last thing I see before I die will be one of those blasted spinning rainbow cursor balls. And I’m not alone (good call on the Morrissey, guys).
via: techcrunch.com
March 14th, 2012 § Comments Off on Creative is in Detail § permalink
Image via Wikipedia
I spent some time last weekend creating my first e-book. I’ve done hardcopy books before, but e-pub is a new thing for me.
Converting couple thousand pages of text into a book that I can read on my iPhone was fun, and it remembered me just how much work goes into getting all the details just right. If you don’t do them, it’s not a book anymore – table of contents, named index, both cross-linked to correct pages, cover design, font sizes, headers and footers,… as a reader, i really appreciate these ‘features’, and I miss them when they are not in.
As I was programming these features (because doing it manually in some Adobe software would be just too long give the size of the book), I realized that it’s not much different than programming a web site – getting core content online is easy, but these days to actually call it a website, it has to have so many more features working hand in hand with the content, that it takes 5x longer to do it than it did 10 years ago.
and I realized it’s the same with any creative industry / work – there’s so many details in every good picture or motion picture, that a random viewer can’t really grasp, but she will nevertheless recognize ‘good’ from ‘bad’ based on them. Print is just the oldest ‘industrialized’ creative industry, and web the youngest.
This is why this is sad news – there will never be as much effort put into making such large volume so useful, as EB was for over 200 years.
Encyclopaedia Britannica will stop publishing print editions and go digital-only – a huge step for the encyclopedia which has been in print since 1768. The sales of Britannica print editions has been on the decline since 1990, when 120,000 32-volume sets were sold.
via: mashable.com
