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Q101 (formerly on Chicago radio @ 101.1 FM) The Alternative - Chicago's New Rock Alternative - Everything Alternative - Chicago's Alternative - Gen X - Generation X
Go ahead, laugh at me. I didn’t know what GIF stood for until recently. But I AM a fast learner and catch on really quick. Which means that someone else with a somewhat above average level of intelligence probably didn’t know what it means, either. Lucky for you smart people, Mashable has given us all the information you ever wanted to know, and then some, about GIFs.
“GIF” stands for “graphics interchange format,” a mature name for an image format just coming of age in the digital space (the GIF turned 25 this year). Specifically, Steve Wilhite of Compuserve debuted the GIF in June 1987. The GIF improved on black and white image transfers with 256 colors, while still retaining a compressed format that slow modems could load easily. Using the Graphics Control Extension (GCE), the GIF achieved animation via timed delays.
However, in its infancy the GIF met controversy. Allegedly unbeknownst to Compuserve at the time, the compression technique was patented in 1985 by Unisys. The two companies engaged in a copyright disagreement that carried into 1994, whereupon Unisys announced it would allow commercial properties to license the format for a small fee. In response to the disagreement, many developers vowed to boycott the GIF, preferring the new PNG format (1996), a single-image, patent-free alternative to the GIF.
But the GIF would not be stymied. Early World Wide Web users adopted the GIF when designing their webpages — and for a variety of reasons. Some introduced animated placeholders while constructing their web properties, in the form of blinking construction signs and spinning hard hats. Others preferred a flashy banner at the top of their pages — we remember flames, prowling dinosaurs and rolling eyeballs. (Reads kind of like a horror movie, doesn’t it?)
Whether you call it GIF or JIF, These days, people are less concerned with grammar and more fascinated by the GIF itself. The file format has become a default brand of web humor, alongside impact-font memes and viral YouTube videos.
Graphic artist and photographer Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck, respectively, believe the web has returned to GIFs in a desire for speed. “We like things fast,” they write in an email. “If you have something to say or want to make someone laugh, it’s more effective to give them the immediacy of a GIF than send a link and ask them to watch a video, which they may or may not do. [GIFs] eliminate variables that aren’t important to the core message.”
“I think that we, as artists, have gotten better and better at expressing what we want to show and being more brave about exactly what we want,” says Reed, “and just seeing how our work has evolved from being really simplistic eye blinks and hair GIFs to creating complete worlds now.”
A world of GIFs sounds pretty unbelievable to us. But we’re still loyal to our roots — let’s face it, pixelated bananas and animated dinosaurs will never go extinct.
READ MORE
http://mashable.com/2012/10/19/animated-gif-history/
Meet CHARLI-2, Virginia Tech’s skinny, five-foot tall humanoid robot. His balance is enviable: Jostle him, and he’ll right himself — which is one of the reasons the Navy is using him for research on its firefighting robot of the future. Oh, and he also dances Gangnam Style.
This week, CHARLI-2 will formally meet his flesh-and-blood shipmates at an expo in Virginia thrown by the futurists at the Office of Naval Research. His creator, engineer Dennis Hong of Virginia Tech’s Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory, has a $3.5 million grant from the Navy to help design CHARLI-2′s son, the Autonomous Shipboard Humanoid, or ASH. CHARLI-2, the current test platform for ASH, will take the stage at the Office of Naval Research’s annual science and technology showcase to demonstrate how robots can interact with humans.
“If a robot can do all the tasks that come with fighting a fire, it can do all these other things on ships, like mopping the deck,” Hong tells Danger Room. “It’s like the Swiss Army knife of robotics.” Or at least the PSY. Watch the smooth moves of CHARLI. He will probably dance better than most of you out there. SEE?
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/navy-robot-gangnam-style/
Are you waiting for someone else to tell you about cool apps? You are in the right place. No need to research, Mashable has done it all for you.
This week, Mashable has found an app that will let you share a glimpse of your life with others, and another that will have you fighting for your life against zombies.
If your phone bill has been getting you down, there’s a new Android app that will let you get free incoming calls. Another app tests your mind and your dexterity, having you contort your finders in different ways on your iPad.
http://mashable.com/2012/10/20/app-roundup-october-20/
Like you need an excuse to act stupid in public? Now there’s an app for it. Klash, a social-rewards network, is the digital intersection of truth or dare and Foursquare. Launched two weeks ago, Klash allows users to log in to the app via Facebook or Twitter, and begin challenging friends in their networks in exchange for user-set rewards. It’s available for iOS or the Web.
The idea behind Klash came about when three then-students at Spain’s ESADE Business School took a surfing trip in Barcelona, and challenged a friend who had never surfed to catch a wave. His reward? One cold beer. At the end of trip, the friends began brainstorming ways to share their actions on a larger scale, and decided to develop a mobile application.
“With Klash, we try to connect people through their competitive instinct,” co-Founder Alessandro Petrucciani says. “We have seen a lot of people engaging in various klashes with each other. It’s a platform that is not only used in your friend circle, but also helps connecting like-minded people with same interests.”
Users can view the public page and pledge support for specific klashes, or just send challenges to friends within their own networks, and share through social media. Many of the current challenges, such as “Do 30 pushups in the morning in exchange for compliment”, are harmless. Others, such as “Moonwalk through every crosswalk” could get interesting. I would LOVE to see some challenges you Q101ers would dare each other to complete…do share!
http://mashable.com/2012/10/13/klash/
The bottom line: If you have something to hide, DON’T PUT IT ON FACEBOOK. Do not chat inappropriately. Do not post secrets. Do not THIS. Do not THAT. You never know if somehow your deepest secrets will “accidentally” become fodder for the masses to enjoy.
The social network has offered a growing array of options and settings to control privacy, particularly for what shows up on your own page, which Facebook now calls your ‘Timeline’.
But one thing you can’t control as well is what your friends post about you. Your best bet? Only post what you WANT people to think you are, not who you REALLY are. Sugarcoat it. Lie. Force the rated “G”. That way, when you run for Congress “they” will have nothing to get you on.
But have you totally protected yourself? Probably not. Maintaining your reputation and credibility as an upstanding citizen (if it matters to you) is not as easy as you might think. The Wall Street Journal has identified three loopholes you may not have thought of where leaks of your dark side could surface without your knowledge. Be educated. As for past transgressions, all you can do is hope and pray that your secrets remain, well, secret. Forevermore.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/10/12/three-facebook-privacy-loopholes/
Are you sick of all the junk mail you get in your email box but still want to read it “sometimes”?
The Swizzle, a service that launched last week, lets you easily and securely unsubscribe from commercial e-mails and combine any e-mails you do want to keep into a daily digest. The goal of The Swizzle, which is owned and operated by Keep Holdings Inc., is to eliminate the e-mails you don’t want and help you engage with the brands you do like.
To use The Swizzle, you have to provide your e-mail address and grant the service access to your mailbox. The service will then generate a list of all your commercial e-mails and give you the option to either “unsubscribe” or “move to digest” for each one.
If you choose “move to digest,” you will no longer receive e-mails from that brand. Instead, news and deals from the brand will appear in your Daily Swizzle Digest without you having to sign up for a subscription. You can also browse other brands in The Swizzle Gallery, which has nearly 1,200 popular brands and stores that you can add to your daily digest e-mail.
Users can receive digests daily or once a week, and they can choose the time of day the e-mail is delivered.
http://mashable.com/2012/10/03/swizzle-emails/
For the price tag, the coffee better be the most exquisite tasting ever brewed. Named more like a rocket ship than a Mr. Coffee competitor, the Blossom One Limited is, in fact, a gorgeous, $11,000 coffee machine.
An apparent improvement-by-miles on the simple, mundane kitchen coffee machine, the Blossom One Limited was designed and developed by three impressively-credentialed young coffeephiles — all recent university grads with stints at Apple, NASA, BMW, and Tesla Motors on their collective résumés.
Why the Blossom One Limited? Too much variation in the copious amounts of coffee consumed during late night study sessions.
And so Jeremy Kuempel, President of Blossom One Limited, then a thermodynamic engineering student at MIT, set out to define what was causing these slight variations in the quality of his coffee. After much experimentation, controlling for the beans and amount of water he was using, he found that there were essentially six variables in the coffee-making process that determine the flavor, aroma, and level of perfection of a given serving of joe. They are (get out your pad and paper, coffee snobs): temperature of the water; amount of agitation (stirring) over the course of the preparation; ratio of coffee to water; pressure; and amount of time the coffee is in contact with the water.
The Blossom One Limited controls all that. But with the price tag, I would expect to only find this machine in the most discerning coffee drinker’s kitchen. Remember the percolator?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/01/blossom-one-limited-apple-nasa-coffee-machine_n_1920529.html?ir=Technology
Aiming to do away with the need to remember passwords for growing numbers of online services, Intel researchers have put together a tablet with new software and a biometric sensor that recognizes the unique patterns of veins on a person’s palm.
Making laptops, tablets and smartphones responsible for identifying users would take the requirement of remembering passwords away from individual websites. It would do away with the need to individually enter passwords into each of them, said Sridhar Iyengar, Director of Security Research at Intel Labs.
The palm-reading technology, still under development, requires new software and biometric sensors built into consumer devices, but does not require the development of any new kinds of chips.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/13/intel-hand-password_n_1881811.html?utm_hp_ref=technology
3D printing is a process of making three dimensional solid objects from a digital model. 3D printing is achieved using additive processes, where an object is created by laying down successive layers of material. 3D printing is considered distinct from traditional machining techniques (subtractive processes) which mostly rely on the removal of material by drilling, cutting etc.
The technology is not new. They’ve been used to make manufacturing and engineering prototypes for more than 25 years. But printer makers are now turning their attention to the consumer market, and have been rewarded with soaring sales and stock prices — as well as the prospect of lucrative buyouts.
Some printers capable of churning out simple items such as keychains, wine bottle holders and missing board game pieces are already selling for as little as $350. That’s cheaper than a high-end version of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 with Kinect.
Copyright holders will cringe, but people are already using printers to make Star Wars battle cruisers or a cheaper alternative to Lego or Mattel Inc toys.
Currently, though, the process is slow — about 45 minutes to make something the size of an egg, and about four hours to create an item the size of a soft drink can.
WATCH A DEMO
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/13/3d-printing_n_1881710.html?utm_hp_ref=technology
You can normally describe any new consumer electronics device or service with one of four words: bigger, smaller, smarter, faster.
Just looking around last week’s IFA event in Berlin, a whopping great 4K television set from Sony that comes in at 84 inches across; a Windows handset from Samsung that’s a “crazy thin” “powerhouse.”
What is changing?
Basically, product designers are becoming much more aware of the need to foster intimacy between the things they make and the people who use them—and we’re seeing a new vocabulary of ideas and services emerging that do precisely that.
Why? We often feel ambivalent and distanced about mass manufactured goods and try to find different ways to make them feel special, intimate, and personal. Now new methods (in both design and manufacture) are being developed to capitalize on that desire.
At a design level, creators are learning lots of new ways to foster intimacy before customers can even get their hands on the end result. They want to involve people.
That’s one reason Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms have been successful—they create a level of intimacy between the product and the customer. Partly, people are buying into a dream, supporting people they are fans of, or just paying for the entertainment value of being part of a movement—but they’re also joining in because they want to have a personal relationship with a product (and the product’s creators). They want to imbue it with a story.
Crowdfunding is really about a method of service design that creates intimacy while the product is still on the drawing board.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-05/what-do-future-products-look-like-personal-sensual-intimate#r=hpt-ls
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