Results tagged “technology”

Remember how Canadians were locked out from the worldwide Kindle launch last month? Well, whatever was happening behind the scenes conveniently got worked out in time for the holiday shopping season, so Amazon's Kindle e-book reader is now being shipped to that primitive backwater known as Canada. The thing about e-books is that they last for weeks between charging, can be read in direct sunlight, and product can be downloaded via 3G networks "over the air" without syncing with your computer. If you want a Kindle, be prepared to pony-up a cool US $259, plus import fees (what free trade?), which, in Canadian dollars, is a little over three hundred smackers. Don't discount Sony's similar e-book offerings, but Barnes & Noble's sexy little nook isn't on its way north any time soon.

Since its official launch in August 2008, Google Suggest has been fuelling a new auto-complete meme that has taken off on social sites like Digg and Reddit and even encouraged news sites like Slate to take a pseudo-sociolinguistic look at Google's most popular searches. What we search can tell us a lot about who we are, so we thought it would be funny illuminating to use Google Canada's version of Suggest to find and dissect common queries about Toronto.

When we heard that the Eaton Centre had launched their own iPhone app in time for the start of the holiday shopping season [iTunes link], it seemed like a good, ol'-fashioned trashing would be in order. Why, we wondered, would you need an Eaton Centre app on your handheld if you were already in the mall? And if you weren't in the mall, how much use could it be?

On Monday, Torontoist spent the day at the Toronto Innovation Showcase at City Hall, learning about data sets, queues, and civic engagement. At the top of the agenda was the unveiling of toronto.ca/open, Toronto’s new open catalogue of city data, ranging from—as Mayor Miller explained in a press release on Monday morning—"apartment inspection data to child care availability to dozens of GIS mapping data that will enable a broad range of location-based applications. And yes," he added, "our initial data offering also includes the TTC’s scheduling data."

Last night's episode of the increasingly addictive Being Erica sent its eponymous protagonist ten years into the future, where she proclaimed that 2019 was pretty similar to 2009. And indeed it was, save for a bad haircut and a few subtle embellishments that we're really looking forward to a decade from now.

Contrary to what Google Street View indicates, Browns Line doesn’t have a huge gap in it. Although Google has mapped most of the city in 3D, Street View still has a few dark spots, including almost all of the neighbourhoods of Alderwood and Long Branch, an area east of the Greenwood Subway Yards, and a residential neighbourhood southwest of Finch Avenue East and Warden Avenue. We smell conspiracy, and based on the omitted areas, we can only conclude that Google is covering up some sort of secret government plot involving City Councillor Mark Grimes, outdated factories, subways, and 1960s-style bungalows. God help us all.

Effective Monday, October 26, it will be illegal to operate any handheld device while operating a vehicle in Ontario. Following years of studies demonstrating that holding a phone to your ear while driving shows a similar level of impairment as driving drunk [PDF], the province has banned any handheld electronic device that takes a driver's attention away from the road: no dialling, no talking, and—we can't believe we have to say this—no texting or emailing. And this should be obvious, but if you're behind the wheel and need to call 911, call 911. Tickets won't be issued during a three-month education period (though police can still lay charges if talking on your beloved BlackBerry leads to other violations), but after that, it's handsfree or hands off. Recent evidence seems to show that even taking a call on a Bluetooth headset might pose a similar risk to holding a device, so expect to be entirely incommunicado on wheels some day.

It turns out that technology once only dreamed about in the back of comic books is now a reality: T-ray scanners may soon be deployed at an airport near you, and they know what you look like naked. Transport Canada is now reviewing a six-month trial of the security scanners, which are currently only voluntary and are used only when someone has set off the metal detector. The subject's body is scattered with terahertz radiation, which—unlike X-rays—are believed to be harmless to human tissue. A technician reviews the scanner results in a windowless room, and the resulting images are anonymous, incredibly unflattering, and decidedly unerotic. Images can't be stored, faces are obscured, and cameras aren't allowed in the viewing room. Still, opponents say that peering at nude bodies is even too extreme for already-excessive security theatre, and may even run afoul of child porn laws. According to a spokesperson from the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, however, 95% of travellers in the Kelowna, B.C., trial preferred it. If approved by Transport Canada and the Canadian privacy commissioner, the high-tech peepshow could be coming to Toronto airports soon.

It’s true that Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is wicked. Yes, God of War III will rock. And, most likely, Heavy Rain is a strong GOTY contender. But if you’re the type who knows enough about games to know what the hell the previous three sentences mean, you also know that you can find all this out (and more) on the myriad Toronto-based gaming sites out there as they release their coverage of the Sony Playstation Preview Event over the next few days. Indeed, as much as some of us here love playing with our joysticks (quiet, you), it really all comes down to what Tuesday’s shindig had to do with Toronto. After all, this is Torontoist, not Today in Gameplay.

                                   

Yesterday's launch of Google Street View created a new wave of digital tourism, with most of us starting with our home address and then scouring the mostly anonymous bodies nearby for flickers of recognition. As is par for the course with the service, the camera sometimes captures some unusual, quirky, and mysterious events. Here are some of our local favourites (so far).

Now ranked as Amazon's best-selling product, the Kindle has been a remarkable success in the American marketplace, possibly signalling that e-book readers have reached a tipping point. The devices can download books wirelessly without being tethered to a computer, and text is displayed on a reflective electronic paper screen, which isn't backlit and uses very little power. The Kindle has been available south of the border for two years, and in a press release late yesterday, Amazon announced the rollout of their iconic e-book reader in more than a hundred countries. While consumers in places like Botswana, Sri Lanka, and Mongolia are now able to order the thin white tablet, however, Canadians are—again—left twisting in the breeze.

At long last, Google Street View has gone live for Toronto as of this morning. We're gonna be perusing the sights today, but if you spot anything great, email it to tips@torontoist.com.

James Redekop loves to cycle. Between 2004 and 2009, he estimates that he's cycled for six hundred and fifty hours and covered more than eight thousand kilometres. Using the GPS data from these rides, Redekop created the Etch A Sketch–style animation above (the red lines represent five minutes of his cycling and the red arrows indicate rides outside of Toronto). But turning his riding into a cool animation wasn't always his intention.

Sure, Torontonians are notorious for bitching about our city, but we bitch because we love! Complaining about garbage pickup or graffiti is a whole process, however, and sometimes it's just not worth the time to bother hunting down the appropriate department by email or navigating a phone tree.

Making an ATM withdrawal is a mundane task, and one that doesn't differ much across the different banks or types of machines, but the Edward Day Gallery is aiming to shake up the experience by injecting a little art into every transaction.

What happens when your poor-listener girlfriend forgets that you're backpacking around Europe for two weeks with no access to your mobile phone or the internet?

Since its release in 1983, Microsoft Word has WYSIWYGed its way onto approximately a bazillion desktops worldwide, but a little Toronto tech company with a really ugly website could force Microsoft to stop selling current versions of their cash-cow word processor. Word uses custom XML tagging technology that i4i says they hold a patent on, and an injunction issued yesterday by a judge in patent haven Texas seems to support that claim. The details are all very nerdy and boring, but there's no way that Microsoft is going to bail on one of their most important flagship products, so dukes will be up and bank accounts will be looted. Et plus ça change…even more reason why it may be time to abolish obscure software patents.

Last Friday at Bloor and Lansdowne, Torontoist reader Caitlin Jane spotted one of Google's Street View cars, caught precariously in the middle of an intersection, as the cars are wont to do. Jane writes: "it was trying to turn right onto Bloor (heading west) and had to wait for the light, then waited for pedestrians, which was how I was able to take such a great picture. Then I waved, haha."

It’s a surreal experience—interviewing a guy about an online “lifecasting” experiment and unwittingly becoming a part of it. But if there’s one lesson we can take away from the hour we spent with Hal Niedzviecki and his surveillance equipment (in his home, no less), it’s this: we should probably get used to it. That is, we should—and you should—probably get used to being watched.

Last Friday, Torontoist visited Google Canada’s headquarters in the Toronto Life Square Complex to discuss Toronto and Google Maps with Mike Pegg, Google Map's product marketing manager and the founder of Google Maps Mania (a blog devoted to Google Maps mashups and tools) and Tamara Micner, Google Canada’s communications officer. For the last few months, Google has remained elusive about its plans for Toronto's Street View, and we were hoping that our meeting might shed some light on its "impending" release. But unfortunately, we couldn’t pry a date out of our hosts. "We want to launch as soon as we can," said Pegg, somewhat ambiguously.

Back when Parliament Hill was in the throes of its last electoral shake-up, Bill C-61, An Act to amend the Copyright Act, was nearly forgotten, buried beneath all the high-stakes drama of a government on the brink. When Governor General Michaëlle Jean dissolved the thirty-ninth parliament at Harper's request on September 7, 2008, the legislation died, with a promised—or threatened—resurrection should the Conservatives win re-election.

Well, kind of.

Hey, what do you know—it's Google's Street View car, stuck in traffic! (Lesson learnt, we suppose.) The above photos, captured recently by Torontoist's Nick Kozak, provide a rare close-up of the roof-mounted device used to capture Street View's 360-degree shots, which looks unnervingly like the love-child of Bentham's panopticon and WALL-E.

This week, NOW Magazine called out Jesse Brown, of TVO’s Search Engine, over comments Brown made on Monday night at SaveOurNet.ca’s Open Internet Town Hall meeting at the Gladstone Hotel. If you missed our coverage of the net neutrality event, here’s what Brown said: "NOW Magazine, Rabble.ca, the absent Mrs. Chow—is it necessarily a good idea to align net neutrality with the far left in Canadian politics? I can see it just as easily being a right-wing free market libertarian issue…why don’t we keep net neutrality neutral and put up a big tent, and everybody who cares about it can get under?"

The subway has significant delays or issues from time to time, whether technical, human, or weather related. I can see the screens or hear the PA while I wait on the platform. But riders already on the trains rarely get announcements about problems on the other line, which makes it frustrating to arrive at Yonge/Bloor or St. George to discover that platforms are packed, trains are turning back a few stations away, or running fifteen minutes apart. Why can't the TTC make effective system-wide announcements so commuters know whether to switch to a bus or streetcar to en route, or continue to another crossover station?

On Monday night, the Gladstone Hotel held the first of three cross-Canada net neutrality discussions established by SaveOurNet.ca. Speakers included SaveOurNet co-founder Steve Anderson; Rocky Gaudrault, CEO of TekSavvy; Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation; Derek Blackadder, a national representative with CUPE; Raymi Lauren White, of Raymi the Minx; and Sass, of zucket.com. The panel discussed a variety of internet-related topics, including throttling, public infrastructure, and the oligopolies of Bell and Rogers, but most of the debate focused on the movement’s deepest problem: how to sell the concept of net neutrality to average Canadians.

Earlier this morning at their head offices, the TTC announced changes to its Metropass fleet, with the aim of making counterfeiting, as Chief General Manager Gary Webster put it, a "tougher issue for the bad guys"—and with the not altogether unintended consequence of making the passes a little nicer to look at now, and a lot nicer to look at as of April next year.

We are all geeks now. It's seen in the massive popularity of the Star Trek reboot, in the adoption of instant messaging and Twitter (descended from the chat rooms and IRC channels we forever associate with old-school modem sounds), and in the way people soup up laptops or accessorize iPods. The gravitational pull of the social web is so strong it seems every and any company has dived in, racking up Twitter and Facebook accounts, hoping to capture a few seconds of attention span from the overstimulated millenials. The banks—often the most careful corporations in Canada about use of their image and brand—are no exception and have dived into the Wild Wild West of Web 2.0. Scotiabank, CIBC, RBC, TD, and ING Direct, for example, have all joined Twitter, the rapidly growing micro-blogging site.

For almost a year and a half now, some of Canada’s major ISPs, including Bell and Rogers, have defended their throttling practices by arguing that excessive BitTorrent traffic is crippling their networks. Open-internet proponents, like Michael Geist, SaveOurNet.ca, and even Google, have questioned the telecoms' motives and asked the CRTC to step in and stop throttling. Geist further argues that throttling, high prices, and slow speeds, are reducing Canada’s competitiveness in the new digital economy. Today, a report released by the OECD on broadband growth and distribution, revealed that Canada’s broadband services are among the slowest and the most expensive in the developed world. In terms of price per megabyte, Canada ranks twenty-eighth overall, just ahead of Mexico and Poland. With the CRTC’s July traffic-management hearings fast approaching, net-neutrality advocates are working overtime to spread awareness of the issues and rally Canadians behind their cause.

Why is the configuration of seats on the streetcar and subway the way it is? Couldn't more people be accommodated with bench seating running all along the sides?