Rolandt

All images courtesy The Void

Strap on your proton packs: An insanely realistic VR experience in Times Square is making dreams come true for every Ghostbusters superfan who has ever longed to zap some spooks. Designed by trailblazing VR studio The Void, Ghostbusters: Dimension is lauded as the world’s first hyper-reality experience. Most VR experiences tether viewers to a computer, but this attraction lets prospective paranormal investigators gear up and go rogue.

Toting a proton pack, plasma blaster, and a pair of Ecto-VR-Goggles, you wander a virtual haunted hotel mapped to real walls and furniture while hunting down CG ghosts to bust. Ghostbusters: Dimension drops viewers into a series of rooms equipped with fun house-like moving floors and jump scares. Crossing plasma streams and getting hit by aggressive spirits triggers haptic feedback and leaves a trail of CG slime. An incredible scene on a rickety balcony offers sweeping views of the New York City skyline under siege by spooks. Gingerly crossing a swaying fire escape, you forget you are in a padded room with a computer strapped to your face, and the fear of tumbling to your death is very, very real.

“Haptics are directional now, which is fantastic, because if a ghost hits you on the right side and bursts through your left, you’ll feel it first on the right and then on your left. It’s positioned according to where the objects are in space, which makes the sensation feel very real,” The Void’s chief creative cfficer, Curtis Hickman, tells The Creators Project. “But it’s the little, discoverable things that I most enjoy, like the wind hitting your face, or when I see someone shoot a cuckoo clock and it bursts into a million pieces. We spent a lot of time on that to make sure it looked really cool when it blew up, so I love when people notice the details.”

Hickman designed illusions for the likes of David Copperfield and Chris Angel before pursuing VR, and the magic industry made him a master of getting spectators to question their reality. “With VR, you have to imagine the experience of the spectator. It’s the same designing a magic trick. Magic’s an ancient art, and it’s often done poorly, but when it’s done right it’s one of the most impressive art forms in the world. VR could learn a lot from magic, especially when it comes to creating the illusion of reality,” Hickman says. His background helped crack the problem of how to map choice-driven VR games to physical environments without needing sets the size of convention centers. Disappearing acts inspired him to craft rooms with dynamic, movable walls, allowing creators to build endless worlds within a 60-square-foot space.

Ghostbusters: Dimension is part of a larger homage to the franchise reboot at Madame Tussauds wax museum, a known tourist trap which, fittingly enough, traffics in disconcerintly realistic installations all the time. The extended exhibit is a recreation of the Ghostbusters set, peopled by spooky tech tricks such as a Slimer hologram terrorizing an elevator bank. But the scariest part of the show is easily the wax replicas of Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones. The hyper-reality experience is a marvel, however, and Ghostbusters cosplay superfans (like the New York City, New Jersey, and Long Island Ghostbusters chapters) give it their stamp of approval.

“I love seeing kids and superfans go through it," Hickman says. "They come out almost misty-eyed and say, ‘That’s what it’s like to be a Ghostbuster.’ And that’s awesome. What more could you ask for? What better authority than someone who lives and breathes Ghostbusters to come out and tell you you did a good job."

Experience a taste of Ghostbusters VR installation with the video below:

Ghostbusters: Dimension  is at Madame Tussauds New York in Times Square. Tickets start at $49.75 and are available here.

Related:

Daft Punk DJs a Club with Ghostbusters In This Video Mashup

Celebrate 'Ghostbusters' 30th Anniversary with a New Remix from Eclectic Method

How To Make An IRL Ghostbusters Photon Beam

mkalus shared this story from Das Kraftfuttermischwerk.

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(Symbolfoto: © US Army)

In der Lüneburger Heide sind drei Pokémon Go-Spieler in eine Schießübung der Bundeswehr gelaufen. Keine Ahnung, was genau es dort gerade zu holen gab, aber es schien für die drei wichtig gewesen zu sein. Geschossen wurde bei dieser Übung mit scharfer Munition.

Wie die „Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung“ berichtet, sammelte ein Wachdienst die drei Spieler auf dem Truppenübungsplatz der Bundeswehr im niedersächsischen Bergen auf. Dort wurde den Angaben zufolge gerade mit scharfer Munition zu Übungszwecken geschossen.

Die Pokémon-Monsterjäger hätten sich weder von einer geschlossenen Schranke noch der roten Flagge, die auf Schießübungen hinweist, vom Betreten des militärischen Sperrgebiets abbringen lassen, heißt es weiter.

Anzeigen wegen des unbefugten Betretens einer militärischen Anlage sind raus.

Adam Conover @adamconover
Gentle reminder: Folks can care about important social issues AND frivolous distractions simultaneously. Most do, in fact. It keeps us sane.

Strong Towns @StrongTowns
The “Choice” vs “Captive” #Transit Rider Dichotomy Is All Wrong bit.ly/29JD6JD @schmangee @StreetsblogUSA pic.twitter.com/BQWKcmqRbg

Amy Walsh-Harris @Amywalshharris
I did an Interview last year. It is in the Toronto Star today.... fb.me/1et0iWjpQ

WebSafe2k16 @WebSafe2k16
#006699 - Matt Haughey @mathowie - websafe2k16.com/006699 pic.twitter.com/805OHVbpuA

On a beautiful sunny day, I took the ferry to Bowen Island. As I travelled around on the community shuttle, I observed a doe and her fawn in their natural habitat. It was very cool to see some island wildlife. In the evening I spent time relaxing in the forest and chasing light. I love nature.

To recap: On Sunday, July 10th, I completed Cycle 19 Week 2. I have Multiple Myeloma and anemia, a rare blood cancer. It is incurable, but treatable. From February to November 2013, I received Velcade chemo through weekly in-hospital injections as an outpatient. Since February 9th 2015, I have been on Pomalyst and dexamethasone chemo treatment (Pom/dex).

Weekly chemo-inspired self-portraits can be viewed in my flickr album.

May 13, 2014: Fraser River Canada Line Bridge

The post Week 74 chemo complete: Chasing light on Bowen Island appeared first on Fade to Play.

I was asked yesterday if we host Minecraft servers at Reclaim Hosting, to which I responded no. One of the great strengths of Reclaim has been it’s laser focus (provide awesome shared hosting environments) and managed growth (saying no, remaining lean, and keeping focused on the core mission).  That said, I’m not always working at Reclaim. I get five minutes off every hour, and in that precious time I like to play a bit on my own. So, I took 5 minutes this morning to try out this Digital Ocean recipe from 2012 to get a Minecraft server up and running. And while the tutorial is 4 years old now, it worked beautifully.* The only difference is you need to make sure you download the most recent version of the Minecraft server  software. That tutorial will get version 1.7.4, but you should install 1.10.2, below is the command you’ll need if you are playing along at home:

wget -O minecraft_server.jar https://s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/versions/1.10.2/minecraft_server.1.10.2.jar

It literally took no time, and there is not much I can add to make it any easier (Digital Ocean’s documentation is pretty amazing as a rule). It was simply a series of following directions and copying and pasting commands into terminal. This doesn’t mean Reclaim will run Minecraft servers anytime soon because that’s not what we do, but I am continually impressed how easy it has become to get much of this stuff up and running on your own. I’m not even sure folks need Reclaim for this kinda stuff, and that may increasingly be the case in a future where infrastructure is a few clicks, some copying and pasting, and/or drag and drop. Servers are becoming simpler to manage and customize.

But, then again, I may be speaking from my own little web hosting bubble in the mountains of Italy given how much I’ve been playing with this stuff as of late, but it’s not like I’ve gotten any more technical in the last 10 months. Rather, the mystifying veil of how things work on the server side is being pulled back. A similar thing happened 10 years ago when I started hacking sidebar.php files in WordPress themes. I was by no means a PHP programmer (and that remains the case), but I could see just enough to get a sense of what the idea of programming even meant in a LAMP environment.

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• I would recommend running the $20 a month server with 2GB of RAM, seemed like the $10/mo option didn’t have enough resources.

Yesterday’s Daily Create C64 Yourself was a treat. The idea, run a picture of yourself through the C64 image generator. This was particularly fun for me because I have been on a real life C64 bender. In fact, we recently had our good friends Jennie and Mikhail in town, and Mikhail caught me red-handed with the Conan: Hall of Volta diskette.

Antonella’s mom gave me her old Commodore 128 to play with, and I have lost many an hour exploring this brave old world of computing. I’ve been in a bit of an alternative universe more generally since coming to Italy, 10 months ago I was worried this whole thing wasn’t going to work. Turns out I am living as well as I ever have. Our situation has been insane, and I know full well we are living far above our station thanks to Antonella’s friends and family. And while nothing gold can stay, I’ll take what may very well be the happiest time in my life for as long as it lasts.

We’ve also been really fortunate to have good friends like Shannon Hauser, Brian Lamb, Mark Morvant and his awesome family, and Jennie & Mikhail come visit Bavilla—and we’ve actually had the time and space to entertain (something I’m beginning to really enjoy). To that end, the picture I chose for yesterday’s Daily Create was not the one Mikhail took featuring me in front of a C64, well technically a C128. Instead, I chose the image below that Jennie took of me in front of the fiery pizza oven in our backyard with the modest background of vineyards and mountains. It’s crazy this is starting to feel somewhat normal. We had a pizza party Sunday night, and our friends here in Italy (Andrea, Tania, Giorgio, Claudia,) came by to hang with our American friends. It was a good time, and the pizza was insanely delicious. Jennie took this picture as I was officially handing off the baton to Giorgio (who actually grew up in this house) who was taking over the pizza oven and would proceed to make anywhere from 15-20 pizzas over the next 2 hours.*

But I love the picture because I think it captures the sense of my crazy 8-bit RealItaly. And nothing looks better in 8-bit than vineyards and brick ovens.  And this simple exercise in re-framing the pixels of reality in some ways captures the way I feel about being in Italy and looking back at America through social media. It seems oddly surreal, or even hyper-real, as I peek out from a C64 reality into a retina-display nightmare of seemingly endless violence, stupidity, and abuse that comes through my various feeds. I know no place is immune to these things, but it resonates quite differently when that is no longer your context for living.

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*I was simply employed to keep the fire burning for five hours before we started cooking.

In this how-to, we teach you how to use Google Photos’ Back up & sync service to save your photos and videos. This not only includes images and videos captured on your device using it’s own camera, but also those that you may have received via WhatsApp, email or the likes. Continue reading →

Kevin Kelly, BoingBoing, Jul 20, 2016

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Kevin Kelly has a long history of being wrong about the future and his streak will continue with this article. The world he depicts here is not some sort Star Trek Federation economy or  socialist ideal - it's an end-state for a capitalist dream, where all ownership has been consolidated in corporations and individual people have nothing of their own. It's a world where, if you don't pay, you don't have anything, which means that (as today) social control and individual labour will be secured by corporations through the threat of cutting access to food, housing, entertainment, and more. Security, continuity, affinity - these are important to people, and physical objects are tangible instances of them.

[Link] [Comment]

European language distribution pre-WWI.

“Be absurdly curious.”

-

Werner Herzog

“Evidence for human polygyny is not confined to physiological differences. Prior to the cultural homogenisation that came with Western colonialism and missionary coercion, more than 80 per cent of traditional human societies were preferentially polygynous. Moreover, genomic data tell the same story: there is considerably more variation when it comes to mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only from mothers, than in Y chromosome DNA, bestowed upon subsequent generations exclusively by fathers. In other words, over the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, a relatively small number of men produced children with a relatively large number of women. As a species, we have had a greater variety of mothers than of fathers.”

- How monotheists modelled god on a harem-keeping alpha male | Aeon Essays (via wildcat2030)

Uproar. The world is struggling right now. It is angry and off-kilter and feels out of balance. Between terrorism, race and gender-based violence, offensive politicians, and the dystopian landscape of Facebook, I often acutely feel that I have nothing to contribute the noise of the internet. But this past winter, I had the privilege to…

The post Silence vs. Impact appeared first on Leanne prain.

Just back from Hypertext 2016 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I’ve missed a couple of hypertext conferences lately – they’re costly, especially when in a remote place, and lately the center of gravity has swung toward empirical studies of Twitter and Facebook that strike me as irrelevant to – or actually destructive of – the hypertext of the Web.

This year, though, the conference had a really strong hypertext session and quite a few fascinating papers. The Engelbart Award was taken home by Millard and Hargood (again) for a nifty paper about Patterns of Sculptural Hypertext in their location-based narrative system Storyplaces. It’s fascinating work – hypertexts to be read while wandering through a city – and led to all sorts of fascinating discussions about literary experience, tourism, augmented reality, China Miéville’s City and The City, and much else. Almost makes up for missing Readercon, which was scheduled for the same dates.

Thomas Schedel and Claus Atzenbeck had a terrific paper on spatial parsers. This is an old core idea of spatial hypertext, in which the computer works to understand the layout of things like Tinderbox maps. Schedel’s just finished a doctorate on the topic, to which he brings some fascinating insight and a welcome sense of rigor. This is ambitious work that will have direct influence on systems you use, and you won’t need to wait very long to see the impact.

These two papers were the first I can remember in eons where I returned from hypertext with immediate implementation plans. My own paper on Storyspace 3 was in the same session and nicely received; it describes how the new Storyspace accommodates “exotic” affordances like sculptural hypertext and shark links – things originally termed exotic because they were not anything like Storyspace.

Stacey Mason chaired a creative track that was fascinating, too. A sidebar to the creative track reception was a performance by the 2B Theater Company of “REBECCA reads NORA reads MOLLY” – a staged reading of the entire final monologue of Ulysses. The work the referees selected for the creative exhibit were a fascinating mix:

• Apartment 613 (Carlos Ramírez)
• Cape (Bruno Dias)
• Cancel Cable Or Die Trying (Tony Smith)
• Hypertext and Cultural Autobiography: Talk with Your Hands Like an Ellis Island Mutt (Steven Wingate)
• Generative Stein Poems (Everardo Reyes, Samuel Szoniecky and Jean-Pierre Balpe)
• Decline and Fall (Mark Bernstein)
• Pluto (Mez Breeze and Andy Campbell)

I wrote some notes on Decline and Fall for the Narrative Workshop as well. We have a bunch of intriguing work here, not all of it ideal for reading at a cocktail reception, to be sure, but fascinating anyway and suggesting lots of directions for the future.

Heute im Herrngarten, Pokémon Central in Darmstadt. Frau läuft mit ihrer Tochter, großer Teenager. Tochter bleibt stehen und schaut auf ihr Handy. Genau vor einem Pokestop mit Lure Module. Ich zu der Mutter:

"Das kann jetzt etwas dauern."
"Ja, aber ich bin froh, dass sie mal mit mir läuft."
"Spielen sie nicht mit?"
"Ich habe das nicht drauf."
"Haben Sie kein iPhone?"
"Doch, habe ich. Und Sie? Spielen Sie das auch?"
"Ja, klar. Ist ganz einfach."
"Meinen Sie?"
"Sicher. Sie sind erst alt, wenn Sie nichts mehr lernen. Und wie oft können Sie denn noch mit ihrer Tochter was spielen?"
Zur Tochter: "Du, hast Du das gehört? Kannst Du mir das auch drauf machen?"

Als Alter Sack™ darf man das.

This, as though you hadn’t noticed, is the week of “Pokémon Go” hysteria. Everyone and his sister is out in the sunshine, phone in hand, hunting for cartoony critters hiding in the real world. Nintendo stock is up 50%, the game is bringing its creators $2 million a day (in-game purchases) and pundits are saying that games have changed forever.

If you’re Dennis Crowley, who co-founded Foursquare, this all might sound familiar.

“They’ve got kids running around, exploring the world. If you remember, this is the stuff we were doing with Foursquare back in the day [2009]: How do we encourage people to go specifically into one business or restaurant versus another?”

The object of Foursquare, too, was to get people interacting with the physical world, and each other. (And it was based on an even earlier Crowley location-based game, Dodgeball, which he sold to Google in 2005.)

So, having been a pioneer in location-based games, is Crowley bitter to see “Pokémon Go” take the world by storm as though it’s a new idea?

No, he says. “There have been tons of AR [augmented reality] games; there’s been hundreds of GPS games — I’ve probably worked on five or six of ‘em. None of ‘em ever get this level of traction. It’s fun to see this one and say, ‘Whoa, somebody actually pulled it off, in a way that people actually care about!’”

Having lived through the hype wave a couple of times, though, he’s not certain how long this one will last. “It’s timed very very well — all the kids are off from school,” he says.

“But how long are people gonna be infatuated with it? Are people gonna be as hooked on it two weeks from now? Am I gonna be hooked on it two weeks from now? Because different games and apps come and go all the time. It’s only a select few that get to stick around for a long time. So I wanna see how this evolves.”

Incidentally, Foursquare, the app, is no longer for “checking in” to shops and restaurants (and, if you’re the most frequent visitor, becoming the “mayor” of that establishment); you use the company’s newer app, Swarm, for that.

Today, the Foursquare app is what Crowley calls “a better, smarter version of Yelp” — crowdsourced recommendations. “We’re trying to make it very proactive. We want Foursquare to be the thing that, as you’re walking down the street, will buzz you and say, ‘Hey Dennis, you gotta go inside this particular dessert store and try this particular ice cream, because we think you’ll love it.’ We’re still building that.”

Crowley’s own role has changed, too; he’s no longer the CEO of Foursquare, but instead the executive chairman. “I don’t have to manage the day-to-day parts of the organization,” he says. “I don’t manage anyone directly. But I get to work with teams that are doing lots of R&D, that are setting the strategic vision for the company, that get to think about: now that AR is a thing, do we want to play in this space? How can the technology that we’ve built power the next hundred companies that want to build something like Pokémon GO?”

Meanwhile, the company makes a lot of its money from licensing Foursquare’s location technology —which translates your GPS position into a plain-English place name like Grand Central Station — and that, he says, is just the beginning. “Our belief is that Foursquare technology is going to power a lot of what you’re seeing in the future — games and experiences that change depending on where you bring your phone.”

David Pogue is the founder of Yahoo Tech; here’s how to get his columns by email. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. He welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below.

tries are key-value data structures optimised for very, very fast matching of the keys against user-provided data (and then the return of the associated values!)

Enter my newest project, triebeard. triebeard wraps Yuuki Takano's C++ trie implementation to make trie structures accessible to both R and Rcpp programmers and package developers. And it's named after a LOTR character, which makes it just that little bit sweeter.

triebeard is now out on CRAN, and pretty stable. You can get started with either the Rcpp or R vignettes (or both) depending on your area of interest. Get it while it's...uh, code, I guess!

The Honda Civic was the best-selling car in Canada in 2015, marking the 18th straight year it earned that distinction. The Civics that hit the road this year have the latest infotainment system that includes full support for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.

Honda brought the two platforms into the Accord line last year to mesh with its own HondaLink system, yet opted not to do the same for the Civic, which had come to market earlier.

I drove a 2016 Civic Coupe for this review, which utilizes the same exact head unit screen and layout as that used in the Accord. Incorporating the two platforms into its own system, Honda is making a commitment to offer something it otherwise couldn’t, but the automaker has to do something to make HondaLink stronger than it currently is.

The basics

On its own basis, HondaLink is deeper than it appears. The system now uses a capacitive touchscreen, and is specifically designed to weed out legacy devices. Hence, the iPhone 4s and earlier no longer work when plugged in, except for listening to music and phone calls. Neither CarPlay nor HondaLink Next Generation apps will work with those phones.

HondaLink Next Generation refers to an app-based integration introduced last year as a way to enhance the existing system. It only works with the iPhone 5 and later, and is not compatible with any Android devices because they can’t do MirrorLink, and thus, can’t work with Honda’s Display Audio System.

By adding CarPlay and Android Auto, this setup is shifted, putting HondaLink closer to its roots as a customer support tool for setting up appointments or getting help in real-time from a representative in case something goes wrong. The functional add-ons include soft keys to unlock the car and pushing GPS routes to the car, among other things.

Beyond that, there isn’t much that has changed, and it appears, on the surface at least, that Honda is letting Apple and Google handle third-party app integration, given that Aha Radio is the only one that is natively built-in.

As was done previously, there is native support for Siri Eyes Free through the voice activation button (with a long press) when the iPhone is plugged in or paired via Bluetooth. Google Now doesn’t work the same way, but is fully integrated when Android Auto is running.

Layout and connections

The biggest change here, obviously, is the inclusion of CarPlay and Android Auto, presenting the two burgeoning projection platforms onto the 7-inch head unit display in one of the most popular vehicle models. More on that later.

There were two USB ports, though only one is a dedicated smartphone port, and in the Coupe, it was under the dash in an open awning. Strange design, but understandable, given the real estate confines. A wireless charging dock is another reason for that, since it takes up the area where the USB port used to be. It’s a Qi mat, though it only worked for charging, meaning I wasn’t able to use the phone as if it was plugged in to the system, like BMW did with its 7 Series.

The other USB port was inside the storage compartment in the middle console, along with a 12-volt socket and Aux-In jack. Bluetooth is, of course, fully standard in the Civic, and with Siri Eyes Free, it’s possible to tap into Apple’s voice assistant while the iPhone is paired. A simple press triggers Honda’s own voice assistant, offering an entirely different set of built-in commands.

It’s not hard to criticize Honda’s decision to make volume control entirely touch-sensitive, though steering wheel controls do offer a tactile alternative. Despite that, many of the other controls have secondary options, like how steering wheel controls can easily skip tracks and trigger voice activation, for instance.

Honda has also included climate control by voice, a feature that fewer automakers have than is probably realized. Turning on the air conditioning or heating, and specifying a temperature doesn’t require fiddling with any physical controls, except the way in which the voice activation works made me wonder how much time I was really saving going that route.

A camera is attached to the right rearview mirror, and its live view appeared on the 7-inch display every time I signalled to turn right, overlapping whatever was on the screen at that time. Unusual in that I’ve never driven a vehicle with a camera there before, but it was still a cool thing to have.

Smartphone integration

The setup for CarPlay and Android Auto was no different here than it was with the Accord previously. Both platforms are set up in such a way where the respective phones are also added as Bluetooth devices to pair with HondaLink in cases where you don’t want to plug in.

As noted earlier, wireless charging isn’t integrated as an input, so the only functional purpose it can serve while lying down and getting charged is when paired via Bluetooth. Android Auto can’t work that way because it needs a wired connection. Same with CarPlay because Apple still hasn’t released wireless CarPlay. It would naturally be redundant to place the phone down on the mat while also plugged in via USB. Plus, there’s no real room to do that anyway.

One major caveat to having CarPlay and Android Auto is that their respective voice assistants supplant the factory one. Be it a short or long press, Siri or Google Now will perk up instead of Honda’s monotone assistant. That may be fine for phone calls, but it negates commands for in-car climate and HondaLink Assist that are native to the factory system. Tapping on the HondaLink app on CarPlay (it’s the icon on the bottom right in Android Auto) and then trying the short press didn’t work. I had to unplug the phone entirely to make that happen, or disable the platform through the HondaLink settings, neither of which made practical sense while driving.

It’s this sort of scenario that has probably contributed to the angst automakers have felt in allowing Apple and Google into their dashboards. Once either of their platforms are live, the factory portion not only plays second fiddle, it’s almost as if it ceases to exist in any meaningful way.

While streaming music through Bluetooth was completely fine, and phone calls were well done, the rest of HondaLink was easy to ignore otherwise. Navigation is okay, except Google Maps can now integrate offline maps through Android Auto. CarPlay defaults to Apple Maps, which may not be preferable for some users, but considering they get updated faster than the factory system’s navigation maps, it’s an easy sell.

The one advantage HondaLink has is in how the app can push directions to the car. The Civic has a built-in SIM with Wi-Fi as well. It’s not used to offer a car-only data plan like other automakers have been doing. Rather the SIM is embedded to communicate with the app to do things like unlocking or locking the doors, honking the horn or requesting assistance from Honda directly.

It appears that HondaLink may be Android-based, in and of itself, as is evidenced by the App section. Here, it is possible to load APK files, making it technically possible to put YouTube, Netflix and other apps on the unit by loading them from a USB stick. I didn’t really go all out in testing it, but I can confirm that video won’t work without the car being in park.

Music and phone calls

Little has changed in either case with music and phone usage. Audio streaming was very user-friendly once my phone was paired. Playback through CarPlay or Android Auto was also pretty standard, good and bad.

As I’ve noted in previous reviews, Spotify continues to have an issue where playback is stifled if the app has been frozen for too long — an issue that plagues the iOS version more than the Android one. And while playlists, artists and albums under Your Music are readily available, Android Auto still leaves out songs. If there was a song I saved, but didn’t add to a playlist, I would have no way of seeing it unless I looked for the album or artist. Such an omission doesn’t make sense.

Moreover, there is still the 20-song limit in the menu layout for a playlist, making navigation a terrible experience that is anything but safe. Google Play Music has the same thing, as does TuneIn, so it’s a restriction baked into the platform. CarPlay doesn’t do that, allowing a full playlist to be scrolled through at will. Not the safest method, perhaps, but it’s there at least.

Android Auto does at least offer voice-activated app launching. I could start up Spotify with a shuffle of music by just telling Google Now to ‘play music on Spotify’. The same could happen with Google Play Music. TuneIn would default to the last radio station played. As nothing has been indexed, it wasn’t possible to dig deeper and request a specific song, artist or playlist. Only with music files stored on the device, could that be done.

And that includes HondaLink, which is able to scour for songs in “iPod mode”. Yes, iPod mode. An iPhone doesn’t fool it, though I did find some success when putting it in airplane mode.

Wrap up

Like the Accord, the Civic gets an infotainment boost with the addition of the two most viable in-car software platforms to date. The fact they so effectively usurp HondaLink’s own features is a testament to the dashboard digital divide that has existed for years between the automakers and consumer electronics companies.

That divide may slowly become a conquering reality unless Honda can support both platforms with integration and features that, in practical terms, would make it more of an equal partner. That’s Honda’s challenge, whereas, for its customers, the addition of these two into the Civic is a major boost in smartphone integration for a vehicle that is among the most common on Canadian roads.

Inside this story is a larger one.  And right on time, as the Commercial Drive bike lane debate plods on, with no resolution in sight.

Kevin Griffin writes in Postmedia’s Vancouver Sun about new businesses springing up in response to the success of Vancouver’s existing bike lanes. This is all good.

First, in respect of existing businesses, Mr. Griffin updates those few who may have missed it on the bike-lane turnaround at the DVBIA, which represents 8,000 businesses of immense variety. He quotes Charles Gauthier:

Some businesses expressed a lot of concerns primarily that they thought their customers primarily arrived by parking and driving in front of their store,” he says.. . .  But a 2011 Vancouver Separated Bike Lane Impact Study included surveys that talked to customers and businesses affected by the Dunsmuir and Hornby bike routes. It found a big difference between perception and reality: 20 per cent of customers arrived by car compared to 42 per cent by transit, 32 per cent on foot and about eight per cent by bike.

“What we have seen in the intervening years along Hornby Street is that things have settled down considerably,” says Gauthier. “We’re hearing less and less about it as a point of concern.

Mr. Griffin goes on to highlight several new businesses that are bike-lane-related.  But there is something else hidden in the stories, which is the City’s reputation, and the reaction of visitors to Vancouver, amid these new opportunities:

Says Cycle City Tours’  Josh Bloomfield, who offers guided city tours by bike, and is ranked spectacularly high on TripAdvisor:

We get a lot of families, parents going out with kids, and people who have heard that Vancouver is bike friendly,” he says.

“If we didn’t have this reputation and the infrastructure that you can obviously see, you wouldn’t do that. . . .

“. . .  We see the smile on people’s faces when they come back,” he says. “They’ve experienced the city in a new way. They tell us ‘I wish our city could be like this.’

Says ModaCity’s Chris Bruntlett, about the move into bike-related filmmaking:

We’re telling Vancouver’s story and what’s coming out of this huge shift that’s got 10 per cent of trips to work on bicycle,” he says. “The eyes of North America are really on our city in terms of promoting and enabling cycling.

Here’s Bomber Brewing’s Blair Calibaba on their business success, located at the intersection of the Adanac and Mosaic bikeways.  Don’t forget that Cycle City offers a “Craft Beer Tour”, encouraging travel (by bike) to parts of town off the typical Stanley Park – Gastown circuit:

Part of the draw for us was the location and being on such a busy avenue for cycling,” he says. “We knew we would get traffic and consistent customers. The city’s bike culture is growing incredibly in this city, thanks to the infrastructure and more cycling routes.

My take is that the bike lanes we have work fine for existing businesses, and are spawning new locally-focused and visitor-focused ones.  Such opportunities will multiply as Vancouver’s AAA-network (*) spreads, and more and more destinations can be reached by people of all ages and abilities (AAA) on bikes.

I hope to see, some day in the future, more locals and tourists setting out (as they do now for other areas) for the Drive, — which is a wonderful area to explore and spend some bucks.  And they will increasingly want to do it by bike.  And it is the AAA bike lanes, and the network of them, which will get more people travelling to the Drive.

(*) All Ages and Abilities bike network defined.

Unless you have been living under a rock, by now you would have heard countless stories and articles about Pokémon GO, the newest and latest game for smartphones. With the exception of Windows based devices (though there are emulators available for Windows PC’s), this game has created a storm in every nation lucky enough to have it. Continue reading →

As usual, it all started out innocently enough. Susan [ed: names have been changed to protect privacy] had no way to meet the deadlines her bosses had set for her. Bob had recently and abruptly left the company, and Melissa was on an extended medical absence, leaving Susan to do the work of three people. That is, three people each trying to reconcile a few dozen 40,000+ row Excel spreadsheets representing the general ledger of the Fortune 1000 company they consulted for. She was about to brush off ever-chatty and annoying Michael from Compliance when, for once, he recognized the stress she was under and said something useful.

[Tim here: I didn’t write this! I read it on a mailing list, uh, somewhere, by Dave, uh, somebody, and I asked Dave “Where’d you get that? I wanna link to it!” and Dave said “I wrote it, go ahead and share it.” Dave doesn’t have a canonical URL, he says, but this gentleman clearly needs a blog.]

Useful and dangerous, that is.

“Hey, let me give you something that’ll help. A friend introduced it to me, and it’s made my life amazingly easy ever since,” he said. He handed her a USB stick.

Susan was understandably wary – the security team was always harping on not plugging in USB devices from untrusted sources, and Michael wasn’t exactly the type she would want to hang out with after work. But security didn’t have to close the books, either, so she reluctantly accepted it and plugged it into her workstation. Virus scans came up clean, and there was just one file on it:SQLite_Installer.msi.

She created her schemas and loaded the CSV files in. Everything was consistent. Numbers added up. The rush was incredible. For the first time since taking this job, high strung Susan felt a rush of euphoria. The books would close on time!

Susan wasn’t a daily user at first. Just a bit to help her get through the hard times. But a couple times a month turned into a couple times a week as the demands mounted. Worse, SQLite was starting to fray at the edges with its value-typing. The euphoria just wasn’t the same. Desperate, she turned to something stronger. MySQL fit the bill and the price was still right. Data types matched up again, and she was no longer stuck reconciling mismatched data. Oh, how good it felt to be on top of the world again.

And that was when the dealer entered into the scene. Forget your notion of the sketchy thug with a gauche display of jewelry. No, Ashley McIntyre was a well-articulated, friendly, and slightly diminutive lady in proper business attire. Ashley pointed out the dangers of how Susan was using MySQL: no backups, no way to recover the precious data she had so painstakingly entered in. One bump on her old Dell laptop, and the high she felt now would be nothing compared to the depression she would feel having lost all the data. Ashley got her set up on a full Oracle installation with consultants to get everything moved over.

This was pure dopamine. Not only was it consistent, it was fast. It took anything they threw at it. Yes, “they” – Susan had introduced others in her department to it. It wasn’t free anymore, but – she rationalized – you get what you pay for, right? And it easily fit within their budget.

Until, one day, Ashley returned – with a team of equally well dressed thugs from the license audit team. “You’re running this on a 32-core machine. That’s not what you’re paying for. You’re going to have to true-up.”

Susan panicked. She tried to explain how it was a virtualized server – “We’re only using two cores!” – but her pleas fell on deaf ears. The “diminutive” Ashley was unrelenting and threatening. Susan couldn’t let the books not close, so she had to find some way – any way – to keep the Oracle hits coming. She did what any addict did: she stole from other departments. In her mind, she rationalized her decision – “I’m just adding a few line entries into their accounts; we’re just ‘moving around’ the money.” But, of course, reality eventually caught up with her. Any legitimate accounting firm couldn’t risk having someone on their payroll with a less-than-stellar reputation. Officially, Susan was let go by “mutual agreement” – i.e., they paid her a bit of severance to keep her quiet – but the reality is that she was fired, unemployed, and – worse – unemployable.

Sadly, Susan was never able to get the help she desperately needed. She can now be found floating around between various DBA contractual agencies, ranting about denormalization and first-normal database schemas.

[This story brought to you by HARD – Humans Against Relational Databases – a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to ending the cycle of addiction to database licenses.]

[Tim again; I’ll forward fan mail to Dave, and point you at his inevitable blog when he launches it.]

Even amongst the near-blanket media coverage of Pokemon Go, another app has managed to make headlines lately by letting users see themselves as works of art.

Prisma’s concept is not necessarily unique – applying artsy filters to mobile snaps – but it’s gained attention for how accurately it imitates various visual art styles on any given picture.

The app’s design is extremely minimal, right down to the simple black triangle logo. It opens to camera view, where you can either take a picture or choose from your library, then moves on to the photo effects section, where users can pick from over 30 filters.

Many of those filters are based off of the artistic styles of famous artists like Munk, Mondrian and Picasso, while others feature popular patterns or drawing forms, like “Paper Art” or a filter that looks like a manga sketch called “Curly Hair.”

Flicking through the filters is engrossing due to the fact that each one is so different and so extreme, and yet the effects don’t tend to result in grotesque or overly bizarre portrayals of the original picture.

It’s a fine balance, but Prisma has succeeded in making an app that edits photos to look like art, without comprising the truth of the image.

The only downside is that the rendering of each photo can take a while to process – in my experience up to 13 seconds or so – which can be frustrating when you’re eager to try out each different option.

Once you’ve selected the best filter, though, sharing is easy. Above the photo effects section is a button for Instagram, Facebook and a button that holds a variety of other sharing options.

Prisma currently available for free only on iOS, but The Next Web reports that the app is coming to Android by late July 2016 and has also confirmed that it will launch a video editing feature in the near future, giving users yet another format in which to make themselves art.

Download Prisma from the App Store.

fuckyeahmovieposters:

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

I learned about the programming language Joy in the early 2000s, when I was on sabbatical familiarizing myself with functional programming. It drew me quickly into its web. Joy is a different sort of functional language, one in which function composition replaces function application as the primary focus. At that time, I wrote a bunch of small Joy programs and implemented a simple interpreter in PLT Scheme. After my sabbatical, though, I got pulled in a lot of different directions and lost touch with Joy. I saw it only every two or three semesters when I included it in my Programming Languages course. (The future of programming might not look like you expect it to....)

This spring, I felt Joy's call again and decided to make time to dive back into the language. Looking back over my notes from fifteen years ago, I'm surprised at some of the neat thoughts I had back then and at some of the code I wrote. Unfortunately, I have forgotten most of what I learned, especially about higher-order programming in Joy. I never reached the level of a Joy master anyway, but I feel like I'm starting from scratch. That's okay.

On Thursday, I sat down to write solutions in Joy for a few early homework problems from my Programming Languages course. These problems are intended to help my students learn the basics of functional programming and Racket. I figured they could help me do the same in Joy before I dove deeper, while also reminding me of the ways that programming in Joy diverges stylistically from more traditional functional style. As a bonus, I'd have a few more examples to show my students in class next time around.

It didn't take me long to start having fun. I'll talk more in upcoming posts about Joy, this style of programming, and -- I hope -- some of my research. For now, though, I'd like to tell you about one experience I had on my first day without getting into too many details.

In one homework problem, we approximate the wind chill index using this formula:

    T' = 35.74 + 0.6215·T - 35.75·V0.16 + 0.4275·T·V0.16

where T' is the wind chill index in degrees Fahrenheit, T is the air temperature in degrees Fahrenheit, and V is the wind speed in miles/hour. In Racket, this computation gives student a chance to write a compound expression and, if adventurous, to create a local variable to hold V^0.16.

In Joy, we don't pass arguments to functions as in most other languages. Its operators pop their arguments from a common data stack and push their results back on to the stack. Many of Joy's operators manipulate the data stack: creating, rearranging, and deleting various items. For example, the dup operator makes a copy of the item on top of the stack, the swap operator swaps the top two items on the stack, and the rolldown operator moves the top two items on the stack below the third.

A solution to the wind-chill problem will expect to find T and V on top of the stack:

    T V

After computing V' = V^0.16, the stack looks like this:

    T V'

The formula uses these values twice, so I really need two copies of each:

    T V' T V'

With a little work, I found that this sequence of operations does the trick:

    swap dup rolldown dup rolldown swap

From there, it didn't take long to find a sequence of operators that consumed these four values and left T' on the stack.

As I looked back over my solution, I noticed the duplication of dup rolldown in the longer expression shown above and thought about factoring it out. Giving that sub-phrase a name is hard, though, because it isn't all that meaningful on its own. However, the whole phrase is meaningful, and probably useful in a lot of other contexts: it duplicates the top two items on the stack. So I factored the whole phrase out and named it dup2:

    DEFINE dup2 == swap dup rolldown dup rolldown swap.

My first refactoring in Joy!

As soon as my fingers typed "dup2", though, my mind recognized it. Surely I had seen it before... So I went looking for "dup2" in Joy's documentation. It is not a primitive operator, but it is defined in the language's initial library, inilib.joy, a prelude that defines syntactic sugar in Joy itself:

    dup2 ==  dupd dup swapd

This definition uses two other stack operators, dupd and swapd, which are themselves defined using the higher-order operator dip. I'll be getting to higher-order operators soon enough, I thought; for now I was happy with my longer but conceptually simpler solution.

I was not surprised to find dup2 already defined in Joy. It defines a lot of cool stack operators, the sorts of operations every programmer needs to build more interesting programs in the language. But I was a little disappointed that my creation wasn't new, in the way that only a beginner can be disappointed when he learns that his discovery isn't new. My disappointment was more than offset by the thought that I had recognized an operator that the language's designer thought would be useful. I was already starting to feel like a Joy programmer again.

It was a fun day, and a much-needed respite from administrative work. I intend for it to be only the first day of many more days programming with Joy.

With World Emoji Day set to go down on this Sunday, July 17th, Twitter Canada has released an infographic that details the 10 most used emoji by Canadians.

While the company’s information on emoji usage is limited to data gleaned from its platform, it’s probably fair to say a more comprehensive study would return similar results. Preamble aside, let’s get to the results.

In first place, is the face with tears of joy emoji. That it should take the top spot is unsurprising. According to Emojipedia, the foremost authority on such matters, this emoji, approved as a part of Unicode 6.0, spent all of 2015 on the site’s list of 10 most popular emoji. It was even deemed the 2015 word of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary.

Following it the always dependable heart eyes emoji. Like its above counterpart, it was approved as a part of Unicode 6.0 back in 2010. Almost 90 percent of pop song are about love and so it goes with emoji usage; four of the top 10 emoji have at least one heart incorporated in their design.

Number six, the fire emoji, is interesting in so far as it speaks to the rising popularity of apps like Snapchat and Tinder, which use the emoji as part of their interface design. This emoji’s popularity likely also has a lot to do with “lit” becoming a common way to express that something is cool or awesome.

Interestingly, no Canadian specific emoji made their way into the list. Seems Tim Hortons’ EHmoji app was not a runaway success. Bummer.

Kathryn Cave, IDG Connect, Jul 19, 2016

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"It's at the intersection of machine learning and graph technology where the next evolution lies and where new disruptive companies are emerging," according to this article. These are neural network technologies, and they work by analyzing connections, not contents. But there's a difference between 'machine learning' and 'graph technologies'. "machine learning takes large quantities of data to make predictions about future events. While graph technology is more concerned with the relationship between different data points... Some ML methods use ‘ graphs’ to represent the learnings while others don't.” "

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One of the only good things about getting older is that I have gained a lot of perspective.

I never speculate what the future will hold by limiting it to what’s possible now because………when I began studying photography at Brooks Institute in the early 1970’s,

I never would have imagined:

• That I would own a personal computer that would change the way I communicated with people and ran my business.
• There would be the Internet, email and mobile phones.
• There would be auto-focus cameras and lenses.
• Cameras would be fully automated – if you choose to use them that way. When I began my career as a photographer, I needed to be a technician, and that meant understanding aperture and shutter speed and a lot of other things that went into making a still image.
• I would be shooting still images without film.
• I wouldn’t be limited to 36 frames on a roll of film.
• I could change the ISO on my camera, as need be.
• I could change the white balance on my camera, as need be. (No need for different types of film)
• I wouldn’t need to “get it right” in the camera because I could “fix it in post”.
• I could see what I shot – right after I shot it, without waiting for the film to come back from the lab or taking Polaroids.
• There would be data cards and hard drives that are able to store hundreds of thousands of images at affordable prices.
• I could transmit my images digitally and globally with ease and speed.
• I could share my portfolio electronically with virtually anyone, anywhere in the world.
• That still cameras would be able to shoot video.
• That video cameras would be able to shoot at high resolution with fast shutter speeds – good enough to take still images for frame grabs.
• My mobile phone would be able to shoot high res still images and video.
• Magazines and newspapers would publish electronically.
• I would be able to watch a movie in my own home.  (without being wealthy enough to build a home theater with an analog projector and sound system).  This was before the VCR was invented.
• That feature movies and TV shows (other than soap operas) would be shot in video.
• I would be able to make a feature length film without a Hollywood budget and a big crew.
• I could self-publish and distribute my book or a movie without a publisher or movie studio.
• My TV would have access to the Internet (what’s the Internet?)
• The Internet would give birth to “new networks” producing original content.
• I would be competing and doing business on a global scale  – as a small business owner.

A lot of the things I listed seem commonplace now.  But, I when I first began my career as a photographer, I never would have imagined any of them – not in my wildest dreams.

What do you imagine the future will bring?  There’s one thing for certain, if you limit your imagination to what’s possible now – you probably won’t even come close to what’s in store for the future.

 

Filed under: Photography