gofwd:

No webpage is an island.

Every time you click a link on the internet, you set off a cascading series of events. Some are the ones you would expect: the site needs to talk to a server to download images, for example, which takes some time. Others are less obvious. These are the obscure URLs that flash by at the bottom of your browser, and slow the whole process down.

Those little URLs are just the tip of the iceberg, and Ghostery is a free browser extension that lets you see the whole thing. For example, here’s what Ghostery, which sits in the background while you browse, tells us about those invisible parts of this IMDB page:

To see the IMDB page for Pacific Rim, my browser talked to nearly 30 sites outside of IMDB (disclosure: BuzzFeed racks up about 15, and the NSA’s official website counts just one: Google Analytics).

They’re a mixture of advertising sites, tracking software, analytics tools and social plugins — tweet buttons, Facebook buttons and the like. A lot of the names in the lists will be familiar: Google, Amazon, etc. For the ones that aren’t, Ghostery gives you a summary of what they do. Usually the weirder ones are ad products; sometimes, they’re pleasant surprises:

The Most Important Piece Of Software You’ve Never Heard Of

And Buzzfeed is one of the worst sites for this kind of thing.

Don’t click through to Buzzfeed’s garbage article (it doesn’t tell you anything that this post hasn’t). Instead, just download Ghostery and move on.

Adios AltaVista →

One of the elder search engines is going to be pulled from life support later this summer. It was part of the early web in the mid-90s and will be well remembered for products like Babel Fish which predated Google Translate.

AV Club Gameological Society on why backwards compatibility is bad for gaming →

Just click the link.

Its a fairly well reasoned argument. I think there is something to be said for respecting the “legacy" of games.

HOWEVER, what he doesn’t point out is that this is a business decision to ensure that the hardcore fans of those legacy games will buy them as digital downloads.

As Joe Keiser points out in the article, the capability of the PS3 to play games via a software emulator solution could have been fairly easily applied to work with PS2 discs. Sony decided, as a matter of business, to not allow that support, instead relegating the emulator to only function on content purchased through their online store.

Does this surprise anyone? That, given the capability, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all have moved to encouraging customers to re-buy their favorite games year over year?

Of course you could always keep your old systems around, but eventually they won’t be able to display properly on your TV without some sort of work around.

Bringing BBM to Android and iOS should have happened a year ago →

BlackBerry has just announced that its hugely popular BBM messaging service is going multi-platform: it will be released for Android and iOS as a free app this summer. BBM will support iOS hardware…

It was just announced that Blackberry Messenger is going to be released for iOS and Android later this summer. Thorstein Hiens claims that its a show of strength. That they are so confident in the BBM platform, and it will help draw people back to Blackberry.

This is a move that should have happened a year ago or sooner. The messaging market has never been so competitive. Just off the top of my head I can think of

*Kik messenger

*Moped

*whatsapp

*Gchat

*iMessage

*Facebook messenger

*Skype

And those are just the ones available in the US that I’m aware of. I guess you could still lump Yahoo chat and AIM into that list as well (though I won’t because its my list). Let’s also not forget good ol’ SMS. 

Adding BBM to that mix isn’t going to win any hearts or minds unless, for some weird reason BBM is *INSANELY* better than the other options out there. I’m pretty sure it isn’t.

Even if BBM is excellent. That doesn’t matter because only one person I know uses a Blackberry and her next phone isn’t going to be a Blackberry (she’s told me). It may be nice that she can keep the handful of BBM contacts when she moves away from the platform, but that doesn’t sound like the kind of progress Blackberry wants (and its definitely not a moneymaking endeavor to appease customers not buying your products).

Blackberry has lost so much ground in the past decade that cracking open BBM at this point is an almost empty gesture. I would almost call it a hail mary, but that would imply that its a last ditch “all or nothing" move on Blackberry’s part. It isn’t. Its just weak and it won’t really help resurrect Blackberry as a handset maker.

-Ben

thisistheverge:

Tumblr launches first-ever mobile ads in its iOS and Android apps

Prepare for an onslaught of gif ads

Finally, there's a phone for your phone. →

Think a miniature “dumb phone" for your HTC smartphone sounds absurd? We try out the Bluetooth-enabled add-on, which comes bundled with selected HTC One purchases in Singapore.

prostheticknowledge:

Manfred Mohr’s Youtube Channel

A collection of videos featuring works by pioneering computer artist Manfred Mohr, many dating back to the early 70’s. Also includes interviews and lectures:

Manfred Mohr is considered a pioneer of digital art. After discovering Prof. Max Bense’s information aesthetics in the early 1960’s, Mohr’s artistic thinking was radically changed. Within a few years, his art transformed from abstract expressionism to computer generated algorithmic geometry. Encouraged by the computer music composer Pierre Barbaud whom he met in 1967, Mohr programmed his first computer drawings in 1969.

You can go to the Youtube channel here

The Independent Crowdfunding Blog - backers.co: There are eight hundred crowdfunding sites say Indiegogo →

backrs:

A recent Google search led me to make a list of all the active crowdfunding sites I could find. I reached sixty without too much trouble, but beyond that I started hitting expired domains and works in progress.

CEO and founder of Indiegogo Slava Rubin however, claimed in his keynote…

800 seems a little dubious. This reminds me of the coupon sites that were trying to piggyback on Groupon and LivingSocial. I still think it would be nice to see some other players in this space beyond Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

theremina:

Chris Novello introduces the glorious Super Mario Spacetime Organ: 

In this video, I directly manipulate the RAM state of Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers to transform it from a game into a strange instrument.

First, I play the game as it is traditionally played.. but I have access to the game’s memory, so I change Mario’s Y position using the Madrona Labs Soundplane (a surface that sends data to the computer about where it is being touched). This is how I hover Mario during the playthrough.

Also, before I start playing, I flip a switch on illucia (a patchbay instrument that I designed) to trigger recording — not video, but actually recording the entire memory state of the NES for each game frame.

Think about it - Mario’s universe is held in RAM, which the NES uses to draw his world for each frame of the game. By saving the entire state of NES memory for every frame, I’m able to go back to any moment in Mario’s life.

So then I use the X-axis of the Soundplane to sweep through the timeline of Mario’s universe.

Not only that, but the Soundplane is multitouch, so I use a second finger to specify start and endpoints in a playback loop. Technically, this is similar to the way samplers and granular synths work in audio.. but with the entire memory state of the NES. Conceptually, it is like Super Mario meets Groundhog Day. Mario’s universe computer/time machine gets caught in hellish loops. 

Then I start using illucia to send alien data into various other places in Mario’s universe, which makes for all sorts of audiovisual insanity amidst the spacetime loops. This is sort of like circuit bending, but in a protected sandbox - at any point I can revert back to the clean recording of RAM states (aka moments in Mario’s universe).

I then try to go back to “playing” the game, watching Mario navigate a melting world of glitched-out ephemera. I then push things into full on glitch insanity. I use a pair of rubberband mallets on the Soundplane to jump around in Mario’s universe while leaving illucia to send a heavy stream of alien data into Mario’s RAM state. I eventually (accidentally/luckily) land at a place that triggers the game over music, and end the take.

(via parasitk)