Toronto Star / Google Map Mashup

The Toronto Star has just released their latest Google Maps mashup featuring traffic cams and GTA traffic info. A very useful resource!

Link via Google Map Mania (Waterloo)

Google Music

It was just a matter of time before Google entered the music market. Rumors (via Dave Winer) are that it's an "iTunes-clone, based on RSS 2.0, and fully podcast-capable".

Google is positioning this as a search partnership with the Big Music services but in my view this is just Step One: on their plan to Pump Up The Jam & Drop the Funk Bomb on the entire music business.

Link to C/Net News (via Om Malik)

Every Esquire Cover

Link via BoingBoing.

Let's play: "Spot The Hot Tub"!

Can you find the Hot Tub at Bill Gates' house?
(using Microsoft's new technology).

Check it out here (via digg).

King Kong

A review by John Shirley, via BoingBoing:

"Symbolism enwraps interlocked themes; male sexuality, female desire, hidden agendas, friendly faces hiding monsters, human indifference to suffering, the mindless savagery that is civilization—crueler than any giant ape could be, calling us to a need to redefine our relationship with wildness, with the animal world itself. At one point Jackson rather heavy handedly quotes Heart of Darkness to explain his subtext, telling us we all have to explore our own Skull Islands, come face to face with inner beast, see it as it is, and if not tame it, come to terms with it."

I'm going to need extra "Milk Duds" for this one...

Link.

Imagine -- the size of the file.

"UC Irvine historian Jon Wiener has been suing the government under the Freedom of Information Act since 1983 for complete access to the voluminous John Lennon FBI files. J. Edgar Hoover began surveillance of the ex-Beatle in 1971 when Lennon's protests of the Vietnam War made him a deportation target of President Nixon."

Link to LAObserved.

iPod does"hubba hubba" and "va-va-va-voom"?

Maybe Cardinal Keene of Baltimore was right after all because Playboy is now offering Bodcasts for the iPod (Link via Gizmodo).

Yeah Baby! ;-)

Learning the iPod

Apple has create a site here for first time buyers of the iPod and for those who are thinking about it. It's a pretty good primer for those who are interested.

I have many friends who've bought iPod's and subsequently asked me for advice (being the early adopter that I am :-) this is where I'm sending them now :-)

Bad Karma - over free WiFi

"Hours after New Orleans officials announced Tuesday that they would deploy a city-owned, wireless Internet network in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, regional phone giant BellSouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate one of its damaged buildings that would have housed new police headquarters, city officials said yesterday.

According to the officials, the head of BellSouth's Louisiana operations, Bill Oliver, angrily rescinded the offer of the building in a conversation with New Orleans homeland security director Terry Ebbert, who oversees the roughly 1,650-member police force."

Link via Xeni and Clay.

Now, if Bell South is having a hissy fit over a New Orleans Muni WiFi deal wait till the get a load of this. (via Om Malik)

TV becoming video

No shit Sherlock... Have you watched TV lately? I haven't. For the past year I've been using a PVR to record my desired programs (mostly CBC and PBS) and then watch them when I have time.

As Max Von Sydow's character says in Woody Allen's classic film "Hanah and Her Sisters":

"If Jesus ever came back, and saw what was on the TV, he'd never stop throwing up".

Link via Lost Remote.

Tim Horton's S-1 Breakaway!

Fun facts from the S-1 filing to take the company public
(quick calculation by PaulK):

"the company serves up around 563,396,800 doughnuts per year in Canada, which is roughly 35,000 tons, or around one 1970s vintage supertanker worth of glazed Timbits."

"Toujour Frais" indeed!

Link to Paul Kerodsky.

Killer Squirrels

"A pack of squirrels at a park in the Lazo village of Russia's Maritime Territory reportedly ganged up on a stray dog that was barking up at them in the trees. Witnesses say the squirrels jumped down, attacked the dog, and killed it."

I wonder if Rocky finally defected to the dark side and created an army of his own. Scary!

"Slurp, slurp, slurp.... nothin'"

Find out why Yukon Cornelius licks his axe! Via BoingBoing... and on a totally unrelated note, is Hermy gay? plus 15 other questions, Via MeFi.

Where Jesus shops?

"This is the day that the Lord has made! We shall rejoice and be glad in the new Wal-Mart that the Lord has made."
-Lester Packingham
Wal-Mart General Manager


Walmart is fighting back hard on all the truth and bad vibes being generated by Walmart: The High Cost of Low Prices. The tactic of promoting a spiritual tie to shopping at Walmart has Michael Deaver's name written all over it. He was Ronald Regan's press advisor and is now working for Walmart, as noted in a NY Times article about Walmart's "war room" -- reprinted here.

Hallelujah for Low Prices!

UPDATE: Link to a PBS Newshour piece.

Rubber-necking

Slowing traffic by setting up living rooms in the street...

Link via BoingBoing.

"Tonights First Star -- Le Premier Etoile"

Ladies and Gentlemen -- the Zamboni Hot Tub.
(available for rental from a London, Ontario firm)

Link via Engadget.

Mike Wallace on Tom Cruise's ass...

Go Mike! :-)

Link to Lost Remote.

SONY knew about DRM rootkit infections

A quick follow-up on this earlier post about SONY-BMG CD rootkits infecting users PC's:

Turns out SONY knew well in advance of the realease of their DRM enabled audio CD's (from 52 artists) that they would infect their customers personal computers. Via CoryD at BoingBoing and SlashDot.

I'm telling my friends to boycot SONY music -- not becasue what SONY did was stupid -- but becasue they've demonstrated that buying SONY Music products can be DANGEROUS TO THE HEALTH OF YOUR COMPUTER.

Now, if you bought one of these CD's and are in the mood to sue SONY you'd better hurry, the line is getting pretty long (so far; the Electronic Frontier Foundation, State of California, State of Texas have all launched class action suits... and State AG Elliot Spitzer of NY is taking a hard look right now).

Prof Michael Geist (University of Toronto) chimes in here with a great update.

Alpha Couch Potato

Enlarged Photo

"Man beams down 5000 channels from 12 satellite dishes on front porch!"

Al Jessup from Beckley, has more than 5000 TV & radio channels from the 12 dishes on his front porch.
... and I thought I had media consumption issues.

Link to article (via DIGG).

Sin City

According to Wired a leading Catholic cardinal is warning Catholic parents to be careful when buying iPods and other wireless devices as Christmas gifts because they could be used by minors to access pornography. Cardinal Keeler of Baltimore says iPods, PDAs and video cell phones can easily send and receive pornography, much of it unsolicited.

Guess he doesn't know that some folks in the Catholic Church are podcasting or that a quick search on term "Catholic" on Apple's iTunes Podcast Directory returns 88 results.

Amen to that!

Playboy Centerfolds Galore?

This makes stuffing them between the mattresses a lot easier...

"The first in a ongoing series begun in 1997, this photograph is the result of digitally averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the 10 years beginning Jan. 1988 through Dec. 1997. The shroud-like image is yielded by a simple, custom process: point-by-point mathematical averaging."

Link via MeFi.

Mount Aetna eruption

... from space.

Link to NASA's full resolution image page.

The Yoda of comedy

From his upcoming HBO special... text and audio available here.

Got Torture?

God bless Helen Thomas.

Link to a transcript of her exchange with White House press secretary Scott McLellan on the topic.

More on the subject via MetaFilter.

Pixar's Performance

Now that Eisner's toast there's been lots of talk of Disney buying Pixar for around 5 billion. I think the price may be going up:

"Steve Jobs is a money machine. His other company, Pixar, reported profits of $27.4 million on revenues of $45.8 million for the last three months -- double Wall Street estimates, according to Reuters."

Steve Job's: sandbagger extroirdinaire :-)

Link to Wired.

Verizon EVDO Restrictive Use Policy

So, high-speed wireless EVDO services costs $70 to $80 per month, but only for what they'll let you do with it...

Link to BoingBoing.

How the mighty have fallen...

I've been following this story for a week now. The bottom line is: SONY's DRM protected cd's install code on your machine, yeah just like a virus that's hard to detect (that reports information on usage of the content), they get caught, they issue issue a patch that removes the code, then basically say: "this was not malicious code, no worries, everything is OK".
Wow. Do they ever NOT get it.

I was thinking just a few weeks ago that SONY used to (circa 1988) almost completely encircle me in the living room
(TV, DVD, CD, A/V Receiver etc.) Now they are nowhere to be found. Apple has almost completely replaced them on both the Hardware and Software front... then I read this from Molly Wood at CNET News (via EFF):

"So, let's make this a bit more explicit. You buy a CD. You put the CD into your PC in order to enjoy your music. Sony grabs this opportunity to sneak into your house like a virus and set up camp, and it leaves the backdoor open so that Sony or any other enterprising intruder can follow and have the run of the place. If you try to kick Sony out, it trashes the place. And what does this software do once it's on your PC? ... The DRM itself is almost unbelievably restrictive, and some have suggested that the reasoning behind it is part of Sony's ongoing war over digital music supremacy with the decidedly more supreme Apple."

How the mighty have fallen.


Link to list of offending CD's (via EFF)
Link to Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Link to Wired News.

Italian police are investigating and watch for the inevitable class action lawsuits on this one. UPDATE: yup, less than 24 hours after I posted on this... California files a lawsuit.

and if you think all this is insane, check out SONY's End User Licence Agreement for playing a music CD on your computer. Unbelievable.

UPDATE: Link to great Wired News summary of the whole mess.

Google Maps mashups for Canada

Some cool Google Maps mashups for Canada.

"Google Maps mashups are providing visual context for location-based information on the Internet. A mashup is an information source "mashed-up" with Google Maps. These mashups are invaluable new web-based tools to find information in Canada. I've collected all known Google Maps mashups and tools which are specific to Canada to get you started:"

Link via GoogleMapsMania (in Waterloo).

A serious samy...

A sandwich that cost $47.00 and sports 30,000 calories.... yumm....

Link to sandwich hell... via Cory and Kottke.

Solar Generator

I'm sure this thing is safe but if I was an ant I wouldn't go near it...

Link via Gizmodo.

Yo Yoda

Watch Yoda busta move in this uber funky easter egg treat from the new Star Wars DVD.

Link to Google video.

Creature Comforts

Best. Movie. Ever.

An early ancestor of Nick Park's "Wallace & Gromit" characters (Aarman Animiation in the UK). The Jaguar in the tree is my absolute favorite character in this Academy Award winning short. His dialogue is actually the recording of a Brazilian medical student living in the UK. Hysterical.

Link to the 5:00 min short - hosted by iFilm.

Social Isolation?

A great personal essay by Alex Pang, Institute For The Future (Menlo Park, CA) on the Joy of the iPod...

Link via DaveP at BoingBoing.

Giant Squid

Japanese researchers photograph a Giant Squid... but can they find a 50 gallon drum of tzatziki and an 80 foot wide grill?

Link to National Geographic article.

World of Music: Visualization

A visualization of 10,000 artists and how they are related to each other...
Music geek nirvana.

Link to the Stanford University project page.

Robo-Baywatch

It doesn't look as good in a Speedo but this robot design concept for rescuing distressed swimmers is pretty cool.

Nice to see a robot concept that doesn't say:
"kill, crush, destroy" or "bite my shiny metal ass".

Link via Engadget.

Duck and Cover

... or make a suit out of Tin Foil ASAP!
If you can't do that just keep looking up for some awesome aurora's over the next couple of nights.

Doc Searles has a posted about a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) that's headed for earth -- expected to arrive Sept 14th or 15th.

Link.

A Caveat on "Yes Men"

Salon.com's Scott Rosenberg writes:

"So of course Michael Brown, and all the other Michael Browns in the Bush administration, didn't tell Bush the truth about what was happening. "Everything's fine, sir! Carry on with your vacation!" Even if they actually knew, which seems unlikely, they understood -- as you can bet every commander in Iraq knows -- that to do so was to ask to be fired. Mr. Bush is to hear only what Mr. Bush (and Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rove) wants to hear. Anything else is disloyalty -- a firing offence.
Any organization run on such principles is, of course, a juggernaut of dysfunction, headed for the ditch".

Link to the full Salon.com article.

Guerilla Drive-Ins

Aside from the MPAA sliding down ropes from Black-ops Helicopters to bust copyright infringers, this looks way cool.
I wonder if the cars get steamed up?

Link via Gizmodo.

Boot Windows from a USB flash drive

Toms Hardware has a review on a pretty useful and cool gadget here.

Satellite Imagery of New Orleans

Comparative imagery of a Highway interchange in New Orleans, pre- and post-Katrina


Comparative imagery of Gormley Stadium, City Park, pre- and post-Katrina


Comparative imagery of City Park in New Orleans, pre- and post-Katrina


From GlobalSecurity.org.

BBC TV channels heading to the net

...and so it begins:

"The BBC reports that it's "TV channels will be made available on the internet,BBC Director General Mark Thompson has confirmed.He announced plans for the MyBBCPlayer,which will allow viewers to legally download seven days of programmes,at the Edinburgh Television Festival.He said he hoped the service would launch next year".

This could be pretty cool.

Link via the good folks at SmartMobs.

Bram Cohen on P2P TV

A great post from Chris Anderson (The Long Tail) about his encounter with Bram Cohen (inventor of Bittorrent) at FOO camp ("Friends of O'Reilly") this weekend. The topic: P2P TV.

Link.

Cuban on how the NYTimes spins...

This is a pretty cool post from Mark on how what he said in an email interveiw was spun by Andrew Ross Sorkin, business reporter for the NY Times.
The 5th Estate indeed.

Link to Cuban's post and text of the email interview (which includes a link to to the NY Times pubished article.

Reminds me of the Sesame Street segment:
"One of these things is not like the other" :-)

Business as usual...

Rolling Stone's interesting, depressing and semi-terifying article at how Congress really works... wow.
Way different than they taught me in "School House Rock".

Link via EFF.

Cool Bike

... but without a bannana seat, streamers on the handlebars and hockey cards clipped into the spokes... wait... no spokes?

Link via Gizmodo.

Gallery of Star Trek Business Cards

I guess Harry Mudd wasn't "good for nothing..."

Link here via Xeni at BoingBoing.