Archive for February, 2010
Vancouver 2010 – RIP Nodar Kumaritashvili
Feb 15th
As many of you may already know Nodar Kumaritashvili, 21 died Friday durning a practice run on Whistler Mountain. The tragic accident happened just as Vancouver and Whistler were reaching hours before the official opening of the Winter Games. On Behalf of the INTE@CAP team we would like to pay our respects and condolences to his family and friends. Feel free to leave your comments/thoughts as well below as loosing a friend or family member is never easy.
To Watch the video please click here. (CTV OFFICIAL FOOTAGE OF THE CRASH)
WARNING: Graphic Footage.
Rest In Peace – Nodar Kumaritashvili, 2010
Sublime HTML5 Video Player
Feb 14th
With HTML5 just around the corner many people are excited as to what this new technology will bring us. One of the coolest parts of HTML5 is the ability to watch video without any plugins what so ever! This means no Adobe Flash or DivX to watch movies on your website! HTML5 is still being finalized but the people at Jilion have already hopped on to the band wagon and created their own custom HTML5 Video player. They have created a beautiful interface for the video player and it is currently supported by most HTML5 capable browsers. You can check out the Sublime Video player and full details here. I hope more people will get inspired by this and create their own video players for their own sites. If you haven’t already heard Vimeo and YouTube have already created their own HTML5 video players that you can test out right now!
If you liked this post, you might also like…
HTML5 Local Storage, Session Storage, and Client-Side Database Tutorial
Awesome Uses of HTML5’s Canvas Tag
Top 10 Web Design Resources Every Designer Should Know About
Feb 14th
Where would web designers be without the invaluable resources provided on the web for us? Design inspiration, stock photos, tutorials, fonts, freebies, brushes, textures … the list goes on. Take advantage of the resources and expertise other web designers offer for free! Here are 10 of my absolute favourites, in no particular order:
Design Meltdown (design inspiration)
Browse thousands of cataloged sites to get inspiration for your own web designs – invaluable for finding inspiration on specific design elements, styles, themes, or colours.
Scrnshots (design inspiration)
Browse screenshots of inspirational web design uploaded by other users or upload your own favourite designs. Very useful for finding inspiration about specific elements since you browse by tags and keywords.
Designer’s Toolbox (design resources)
Provides many miscellaneous design and print resources, including PSDs of HTML form and browser elements for realistic design mock-ups.
Stock Xchng (stock photos)
One of the best free stock photo sites; Stock Exchange provides thousands of super high-quality stock photos for FREE for both personal and commercial use.
Smashing Magazine (interactive design blog)
The most well-known web design blog out there, Smashing Magazine provides TONS of information, resources, tutorials, and tips from industry professionals. Try to soak up as much of their expertise as you possibly can.
DaFont (free fonts)
Browse their huge selection of free fonts to spice up your design. They make it easy to find a specific type of font since you can browse by theme, name, or search for keywords!
Blind Text Generator (dummy text)
Generates highly-customizable dummy text (lorem ipsum) for use in the text areas of your design.
Type Tester (css font comparison)
Preview different web-safe fonts to see what they will look like on the screen and customize the different CSS font options.
Color Scheme Designer (colour palettes)
Highly-customize colour palette generator which allows you to also preview what the colour scheme could look like on a web page.
Design Resources Search Engine (design search engine)
This search engine has endless usefulness – it allows you to do a Google search but only on the selected design-related websites. Great for finding tutorials, resources, and blogs.
What are YOUR favourite web design resources? Comment and let us know! 
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CSS Custom Font-Face
Feb 11th
On the request of my friends, this post will show you how to simply add your own font face to your website using CSS. This comes in handy when you want to display dynamic text on a webpage when the user does not have the font installed on their system. This is a very old CSS trick that is not used very much and is not even CSS3. It will work in all browsers but Internet Explorer. The reason being is that Internet Explorer uses a different font-face type. For this tutorial we will be using the “True Type” format for our fonts and has the “.ttf” file extension, you can download any True Type font and use it.
Get started on my tutorial by clicking the link below! It literally takes 10mins or less to learn!
Radio Tags – A glance into Our Future.
Feb 9th
What’s a radio id tag?
A radio frequency identification tag is a tiny tracking device with a microchip and antenna. Each tag has a unique code to identify the product, person
or animal wearing it. More than 50 million pets and 20 million livestock have already been tagged. Are humans next?
It is said that soon humans will started being implanted with radio tags so it is easy to access their medical data. These are called VeriChip. It is a medical radio identification tag that can be implanted under the skin of a patient. The chips memory holds the patients indemnification number. This enables doctors to access quickly the vital medical records of unconscious patients in the hospital emergency room. The Verichip is about the same size of a coin.
How do medical tags work?
- Chip is implanted into the arm of a human
- Handheld scanners send radio waves to the tag’s antenna to power chip.
- Powered chip sends radio frequency signals back to scanner.
- Patients number is sent fro ma scanner to a local computer
- Computer connects to main server and requests patients file.
- Server uses patient number to find file and send it to local computers in seconds allowing them to access all the medical history and information for the human.
Uses of ID chips:
- Pets – with tags on their collars, stray cats and dogs can be returned to their owners.
- Prisoners – whether in jail or out on parole, the authorities can track their movements.
- Marathon runners – runners can have their laces tagged so supporters can check locations and times.
- Medical patients – in the future, tags will store patient’s medical history as well as their patient number.
- Car Security – A chip in the car key holds the drivers number. If it matches the number in the cards memory, the card starts.
Also See … Smart Cards for more information on micro tagging and security.
Smart Cards – The magic bankcard Chip! What does it do?
Feb 9th
Smart card is a plastic card with an embedded microchip. It can store large amounts of data, from bank details to medical records in its memory. The data is encrypted – put into code – for security.
So why a smart card? How does it protect me?
A smart card is more useful and secure than a magnetic strip card. The card can hold up to 80 times more data and is much harder to copy a chip than magnetic strip. Data is protected because it is encrypted inside the chip. Although it is not possible to steal data from the chip, the high cost and computing power required deters criminals. The memory chip requires authentication before stored data is unlocked.
The “Chip & Pin” process makes a card payments more secure. The chip in the cards holds an encrypted copy of the users four-digit personal identification number (PIN). By entering the number into a reading device, a user can prove they own the card. This has reduced instances of card fraud; without the PIN, it is almost impossible for a crimincal to steal and use another persons card.
Smart card uses
- In money – people use smart cards to access their individual bank accounts and withdraw money or check their account information.
- Telephone calls – prepaid telephone cards are credited with a number units to make calls
- Cell Phones – Smart cards in cell phones contain subscriber information to identify the user to the network.
- Computer Security – to gain access to a personal computer, a smart card can authenticate the user.
- Travel – Many subway systems use prepaid smart cards instead of tickets, passengers swipe their cards to gain access.
- Health – smart cards provide an easy and safe way of storing and checking confidential medical information.
Interesting Facts:
- The gold pad found on top of a Smart card allows a two-way flow of data between the card and the reader.
- The first smart cards were introduced in Europe during the 1990s. They were mainly used as pay-phone cards.
- Smarts cards will be replaced by radio tags embedded in objects that can be scanned remotely like key rings or even the uses body.
Want to know more about Radio Tags and Smart Card Like Chips? Will a Radio Tag be eventually implanted in you? Click here.
GIMP – The FREE Alternative to Photoshop
Feb 8th
Let’s face it: Photoshop is freakin’ EXPENSIVE. At a whopping $700 US for Photoshop CS4, you had better hope your parents decide to spoil you and buy it for you next Christmas. Unfortunately, the high price point makes it difficult for beginners and aspiring web designers to get into the business – you had better be darn sure web design is what you want to do before spending $700 on Photoshop. So what are the alternatives?
GIMP is the best Photoshop alternative out there and it’s completely free. It offers many of the same advanced features as Photoshop – for FREE. While, so far, nothing can replace Photoshop as an industry standard, GIMP is certainly a passable equivalent for beginners.
CNET Download.com reviewed it and gave it 5/5 stars:
“One of the most powerful general-purpose image editors around, the upgrades make the GNU Image Manipulation Program eminently comparable to Photoshop. Older features include channels, layers and masks, filters and effects, tabbed palettes, editable text tools, perspective clone, improved printing, and color operations such as levels. New improvements include GEGL integration for 32-bit color support, dynamic brushes, and more options for the free select tool. It even has regex-based pattern matching for power users.”
Interesting & Random Computer Facts!
Feb 6th
- 80% of all pictures on the internet are of naked women
- Another name for a Microsoft Windows tutorial is ‘Crash Course’!
- Bill Gates’ house was designed using a Macintosh computer.
- By the year 2012 there will be approximately 17 billion devices connected to the Internet.
- Domain names are being registered at a rate of more than one million names every month.
- E-mail has been around longer than the World Wide Web.
- For every ‘normal’ webpage, there are five porn pages.
- In the 1980s, an IBM computer wasn’t considered 100 percent compatible unless it could run Microsoft Flight Simulator*.
- MySpace reports over 110 million registered users. Were it a country, it would be the tenth largest, just behind Mexico.
- One of every 8 married couples in the US last year met online.
- The average 21 year old has spent 5,000 hours playing video games, has exchanged 250,000 e-mails, instant and text messages and has spent 10,000 hours on the mobile phone.
- The average computer user blinks 7 times a minute, less than half the normal rate of 20.
- The first banner advertising was used in 1994.
- The first computer mouse was invented by Doug Engelbart in around 1964 and was made of wood.
- The first domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com.
- The world’s first computer, called the Z1, was invented by Konrad Zuse in 1936. His next invention, the Z2 was finished in 1939 and was the first fully functioning electro-mechanical computer.
- There are approximately 1,319,872,109 people on the Internet.
- There are approximately 1.06 billion instant messaging accounts worldwide.
- While it took the radio 38 years, and the television a short 13 years, it took the World Wide Web only 4 years to reach 50 million users.
Sam’s “Outtakes from Fail U”
Feb 4th
Here are the outtakes put together by Sam of some hilarious Fail U sketch comedy recordings we did for Rich Media. Done using iMovie and QuickTime, compressed with Episode.
HMTL5 Local Storage, Session Storage, and Client-side Database Tutorial by O’Reilly
Feb 4th
This tutorial will take you through the new features of HTML5 involving client side storage, sessions and databases. The tutorial is based off creating a web app for the iPhone but will serve you the same purpose if you are looking for any web based platform. HTML5 is the future and its a good idea to make good use of this information ahead of time.
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