Category: News

  • WordPress 2.6 is out — and you’re using it now.

    photo cred­it: purple­lime It was a fairly pain­less update (thanks to the Word­Press Auto­mat­ic Upgrade plu­gin), but there were a few quirks I’ve had to address: Avatars. WP 2.6 has much bet­ter sup­port for Avatars (images used to identi­fy authors of com­ments). But, my theme does­n’t nat­ively sup­port them so I’ve had to main­tain use…

  • Canadian weather station on Mars brings you daily weather updates

    One of the ‘cool­er’ pieces of sci­ence being done on Mars by NAS­A’s Phoenix lander is the study of Mar­tian weath­er pat­terns, cour­tesy of a ‘built-in-Canada’ weath­er sta­tion. A daily spinoff of this is the daily Mar­tian weath­er report. Due to a com­mu­nic­a­tions glitch, the report­ing should begin tomorrow. On a loc­al note, the Cana­dian…

  • We’re down, baby, we’re down!

    I’ve been a fol­low­er of NAS­A’s mars mis­sions for a few years now. The Pathfind­er Mis­sion and the cute Sojourn­er were my intro­duc­tion to robot­ic explor­a­tion of Mars. Well, today marks anoth­er mile­stone with the suc­cess­ful con­tinu­ation of the Phoenix Mars Lander mis­sion. NASA suc­cess­fully landed anoth­er probe on Mars, this time using a powered rocked…

  • Blogging at the Edmonton Public Library

    A week and a bit ago the Edmon­ton Pub­lic Lib­rary launched a vari­ety of blogs. EPL does­n’t appear to use a stand­ard blog­ging tool (Word­Press, Type­Pad, etc) but rather chose to devel­op their own platform. On the top­ic of blogs top­ics, the blogs included are rather diverse, from Abori­gin­al Peoples, Com­ics, Manga, and Graph­ic Nov­els,…

  • Gmail increases online storage to 4.5Gb

    This may be old news, but I’ve just noticed that the Gmail stor­age counter has increased to ~4.5Gb. In their blog, the Gmail team did say it was com­ing, but I don’t read it reg­u­larly so it was a sur­prise to me 🙂 Well done Gmail! Tech­nor­ati Tags: Google Mail, Gmail, Stor­age, Online Stor­age, email, free email

  • 69 years ago today, Earth was invaded.

    Orson Welles and The Mer­cury Theatre on the Air brought the world the ‘mod­ern’ adapt­a­tion of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.     Per­son­ally, my favour­ite adapt­a­tion of this SF Clas­sic is the rock opera ver­sion: Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds.       For your listen­ing pleasure: mp3 down­load from the Inter­net…

  • Canadians save more money ordering books through Amazon.com

    image cour­tesy cote In Canada, books are sold at retail with two, or maybe even three prices prin­ted on the cov­er; US and Cana­dian. Often the Cana­dian price is up to 20% higher. In today’s eco­nom­ic world, the US dol­lar is almost on par with the Cana­dian dol­lar, so this pri­cing mod­el is, from the…

  • wiPod: the next big thing?

     If you man­aged to catch the news today, the twit­ter-sphere was abuzz with it, Apple is freshen­ing its product line in pre­par­a­tion for this upcom­ing hol­i­day sales season.   As vari­ous pun­dits both at the Apple event and mon­it­or­ing it remotely twittered away, it seemed that Steve Jobs was at his best, once again, in front…

  • New Flight Simulator on the block…inside Google Earth?

    Yep, late last week the boffins at Google updated Google Earth. The flag­ship fea­ture was the addi­tion of Google Sky, an astro­nomy map­ping feature. Also included was a little-known Flight Sim­u­lat­or. Very cool! While not tech­nic­ally on par with Flight Sim­u­lat­or X as far as actu­al sim­u­la­tion, the coolest fea­ture is the use of Google’s satel­lite…

  • Lego’ and Apple. Can it get much better than this?

    All right, so astute observ­ers will note that it’s not really a Lego set, but a cus­tom set cre­ated by Pod­Brix, a cus­tom Lego ‘hack­ing’ company.  For me, this is a must-have set. I wasted spent many hours of my youth on my Dad’s Apple][e. Flight Sim­u­lat­or and Wizardry…I remem­ber them well. This set seems to…

  • It’s time to go back to the moon

    I can­’t say it bet­ter, so I’ll quote: Because it’s the 38th anniversary of the moon land­ing, that’s why. 38 damn years, people. There ought to be a Star­bucks up on the moon by now, and a bunch of tour­ists exper­i­en­cing the chal­lenge of sip­ping a vente latte in one sixth G. …John Scalzi Tech­nor­ati Tags:…

  • Online backup one of Time’s top 50 websites for 2007

    Odds are, if you’re read­ing this, you’ll have read one of my pre­vi­ous art­icles about Mozy, a free (and sub­scrip­tion based) online backup service. Well, Time magazine has selec­ted Mozy as one of their top 50 web­sites for this year. Now, which pos­i­tion is actu­ally up to you and me. You see, Time has this…