Cory Doctorow worried that folks might not find the 404 Wine Bar for his pre-Play performance meet-and-greet the other night in Chicago. But everyone can find his latest story, serialized at TOR Online, and read it as each chapter gets uploaded. The story is Makers, and for those of us who get cross-eyed after staring at the screen for 18 hours a day it will come out in print in the fall (what date in the fall is a variable dependent on which continent you live on). Or perhaps for those of us who can’t wait for the serialization to finish up in Jan 2010. But there is an extra, Online-Level draw on this one; the images with each chapter! Download and collect them all, then download the Flash/Java App that will allow you to create your own image structure for the story. This is the extended (I.E., Complete) story originally told on Salon as ThemePunks. Now you can finally find out how it turns out! The folks at Barnstorming are doing the graphics, and they are building them to inter-connect. Which means the Flash App, whenever it gets released online, will allow you to take the various tiles and build your own cover for the book. All in all, this looks like a fun ride!
Word has come out that the new season of Dollhouse will be starting a week later than the announced original air date, but this is not a bad thing. They made the move to give a bit of extra production time to the team, since they only start building the new episodes this month. If Fox wasn’t already aware there was a serious following for the program, they probably got a clue when their sales servers crashed from people hammering on it to order the limited edition season 1 box set available only to Comic-Con 2009 attendees. Fox finally got it right, now can NBC do the same with Day One? The last TV show built by Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the creator of Day One, was The Middleman, which comes out on DVD on July 28th.
At least the finest Steampunk TV I have seen so far. The new show Warehouse 13 has some quality Steampunk props, including a 2-way TV communicator built by Phylo T Farnsworth, a ray gun assembled by Nikola Tesla, and a computer keyboard that had to at least be inspired by Jake’s Steampunk Workshop, if he hasn’t been hired to build the props for this show. Watch it now, along with a Tesla short…
In just a few hours the ISS (International Space Station) will be sweeping overhead where I am, and I have clear skies tonight. For others inclined to do naked-eye viewing of manned orbital craft (or unmanned, or perhaps planets are your chosen targets to watch), there are a few resources you might find useful. First off, there is NASA’s Human Space Flight App, updated with the latest orbital tracking data, not only for the ISS, but also the Shuttle, the Hubble Space Telescope, and a number of others. You can reverse that as well, using their Realtime ISS Photos page to see an image of what is below the ISS right this moment. Note that the ISS location is in realtime, but the pictures are from an archive, possibly even the EarthKam; and the European version is the EuroKam variant. In Europe or the rest of the world you might want to use the ESA ISS Seeker applet. Which interestingly enough is built on the next tool I wanted to mention…
Heavens Above isn’t just for multinationals or government agencies; you can create your own account there, and customize your interface for your own interests. It is an extremely powerful database and toolset, so much so that even NASA links to them, and this site makes the wonders of the skies available for everyone to know and observe. They did a killer job on the setup parameters and the graphic output, making it both very easy to select your location and objects of interest, and even easier to understand the results it gives you.
There are a number of other online satellite/planet tracker software packages I use on a regular basis, the next most frequently visited being Night Skies, the Sky and Telescope interactive extension of their This Weeks Sky At A Glance page.
I am both a Geek and a Guy, which gives me two counts of wanting to know about, and play with, new toys. So I hang out at web sites like EnGadget, and skim the short version from DVice, and check the new stuff at Gizmodo. I also stop by the more specialized (and therefor lesser-known) sites like Dev Hardware or Girls N Gadgets or TechOn to name a few, because they cover things the monster sized sites miss. When I get seriously into Geek Mode, I hit the MIT Technology Review or the IEEE Explore sites.
Now there is a new player in town; GDGT is a hardware junkies forum, with a twitter-like community twist. It just launched in the last 11 hours or so, which means I can’t even hint at what it might grow up to be. But I love the premise, the interface is intuitive, the layout is clean, the posts are frequent and informed (quantity AND quality, my favorite combination!), and I am signing up for an account there. I recommend you do the same.
Three of the first sites mentioned here included an announcement about Asteroid Storm in the last few hours; a game played by raising your arms while siting in the theater. The tech works by mounting two cameras on the ceiling on either side of the screen and pointed at the audience. As the screen shows them the pilots-eye view, they can modify the spaceships trajectory by raising their hand. If 25 folks to the left of the screen raise their hands, and 22 on the right, the ship will gently steer left. If the count is still 22 on the right, but only 4 on the left, the ship will jackknife right… (It might be amusing to build a virtual version of that movie theater and use the voting of the House and Senate to steer, to see how many orbital rocks our government has tried to slam us into over the years.). This group game environment (NOT an MMORPG, but it should function a lot like one in some respects) will be introduced in UK theaters on July 10th, meaning next Friday. I can’t wait to see how the first few games go, and whether the audience works together to save the ship, or against each other to take it out. The next logical step would be two ships, with the two sides of the audience competing against each other.
Now play that game with a pair of Open Source Data Gloves, which you can build yourself for $23 in parts if you don’t want to buy the $400 commercial version, and you are ready to take over the theater!
I tend to assume everyone who drops by this website is also already a frequent visitor to The Deuce Project, one of the best places to hear science fiction related music. Even if you are a frequent visitor, you might have missed their silliest episode yet: Splitting Infinitives While Exploring The infinite. That particular link will pull up and play such songs as William Shatner’s – Rocket Man, Nichelle Nichol’s – Uhura’s Theme, and Leonard Nimoy’s – Music to Watch Space Girls Go By. And many other silly songs…