Category: Blog

A crime was committed? To the holodeck!

trevor
virtual crime scene

There’s a small problem that crime scene investigators have when it comes to sharing their findings. In spite of fancy tools that allow them to map environments in 3D to determine things like bullet trajectories, investigators, prosecutors, and lawyers often have to resort to 2D printouts to get that information to juries. Instead of trying to communicate complex spatial relationships on paper, juries are going to start to be able to step right into crime scenes, using 3D visualizations and the Oculus Rift. Check out the result below: I’m going…

I Should Not Be Allowed to See Videos Like This Backyard Foundry

trevor

This video on how to melt aluminum cans into ingots for casting in metal is… something. I don’t know if I’m more happy I found it, or more worried that I’m going to give myself third-degree burns trying to build a foundry. Paddle your own canoe, folks.

Opportunity’s Getting Forgetful in its Old Age

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Opportunity Mars Rover

Ask my 5-year-old who her favourite robot is, she’ll quickly tell you “R2D2.” Press her about who her favourite real robot is, and she’ll confidently answer “Curiosity.” The SUV-sized mobile science lab who charmed the internet with its selfies may have captured her imagination, but for my money, little Opportunity has Curiosity beat, hands-down. To date, Opportunity has exceeded its mission by somewhere near 10 years. That’s pretty old for a space robot, it seems, because the flash memory onboard Opportunity has started getting corrupted after being in use for so long. In human terms, Opportunity is having trouble…

Stunning Timelapse from the ISS

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Dragon capsule and Canadarm

The European Space Agency released a spectacular timelapse montage a couple of days ago of ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst’s photos from the International Space Station. It’s absolutely stunning, featuring auroras, city lights, awesome weather, and images of the atmosphere as seen from outside. My favourite? Canadarm 2 and Dextre manipulating a Dragon resupply capsule. According to the ESA, the process went something like this: Often while conducting scientific experiments or docking spacecraft Alexander would set cameras to automatically take pictures at regular intervals. Combining these images gives the timelapse effect…

10 Reasons I Didn’t Realize I Missed Windows Phone

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You know, I have been happily wedded to Android for a while now. I’m typing this on my old Nexus 7, and it’s still a great device. It’s not as hardy under the hood as my Note 3, on which I do most of the art for this site. But even this Nexus 7 is a powerhouse next to my first smartphone from as few years ago, the HTC Surround. I charged it up for a lark recently and realized that as much as I enjoy Android, there’s a lot still…

Get Outside and Save the Planet This Weekend – 6 Reasons Why You Should Be Playing the ARG Ingress with Your Kids

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Ingress by Nantic Labs at Google

“Going for a walk” is way less lame when you’re saving the world in the process. There’s only so much hiking a kid will ever want to do (mine will cap out from boredom pretty quickly, even though they have endurance in spades), until the next portal they need to capture is almost two kilometres away. Then, they SPRINT THE ENTIRE WAY. “Why did we come here?” always has a sweet answer. “Because THE RESISTANCE NEEDS US” is more effective at convincing a child than “Because there are pretty trees and…

Correction: That Wasn’t Ultron!

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Well, it was, but not the Ultron we’re going to get in Avengers 2. When I posted earlier this week about how slick and not Transformers-y the new Ultron design was, I referenced this image: Well, I had pretty well ignored the fact that right below that picture was this one: My motivated thinking led me to believe that this was a dressed-up image for the big splashy cover, a way to get the Transformers audience on board, instead of being the actual Ultron design. But alas, no luck. A little bit…

Avengers 2’s Ultron is a fresh take on movie ‘bots

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It’s kind of amazing how little we’ve actually seen of Avengers 2, the follow-up to Joss Whedon’s incredibly successful 2012 superhero mashup flick. You’d think that we would have had more leaks on a production that big. Still, it’s worth the wait. The movie’s villain, Ultron, has finally been revealed, and he looks awesome. He is the anti-Transformer; instead of going the route that director Michael Bay and ILM went with their staggeringly complex robots, some of which bled into Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, Ultron is a slick, modern throwback to science fiction serial villains…

Pizzeria

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Not long ago, I watched Tested’s in-depth video talking about pizza stones and their virtues when it comes to making pizzas at home. Being a fan of cooking in general, knowing that Whistler and the Fish (my girls) have a ton of fun making pizza from scratch with me, I wanted to see what kind of results we’d get with a pizza stone. I was mightily surprised when it turned out that WE HAVE ONE. The Fish, the eldest, gave it a good cleaning, and both helped me make the…

The work that goes into making Spider-Man swing is incredible

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Sony Imageworks, the company behind The Amazing Spider-Man’s visual effects, has done a spectacular job of making Andrew Garfield’s digital double a realistic, believable entity — so much so that a lot of the shots I expected to be a combination of live-action shots of a stuntman in a suit and animation are just straight-up digital. What they do more than most VFX houses is that they seem to trust in simulation, whether it’s simulating cloth or even muscles juggling with the force of punches or steps. It adds a realistic dimension to what may…

Canada: Get Better or Get Over Yourself.

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I’m seeing a fair bit of smugness and crowing from we Canadians following the UK’s same-sex marriage laws coming into effect. It’s unearned, and you need to stop. Yes, we’ve had this kind of legislation for a decade, but we’ve been stagnant on social justice for this government’s last two terms. We’re being outpaced by every other western power on social development and we have nothing to be smug about on this front. Even America, who we tend to look at as our backwards big brother, is making waves where…

Resurrected (Edited)

trevor

mea culpa I posted this earlier incorrectly stating that the restoration was done by Carrying Place Canoe and Boat Works up in Kleinburg, Ontario. Turns out I got some wires crossed while talking to the folks about it. Carrying Place came up in conversation as we were talking about paddlemaking, and I apparently retroactively applied that to the canoe restoration. While Carrying Place does beautiful work, the restoration was in fact done by Jim Spencer of Spencer Canoe Company in Muskoka, and the post has been updated to reflect this.…