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British Museum makes over half of its collection viewable online
The British Museum is helping history buffs during the pandemic by making over half its collection, and 1.9 million images, available online.
Smithsonian opens up 2.8 million images to the public
The Smithsonian Institution is releasing a whopping 2.8 million high-res, two- and three-dimensional images from its collections to a new Open Access online platform. The material comes from all 19 Smithsonian museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives and the National Zoo, and it's available for free to anyone with a web browser.
Nefertiti's bust joins the digital age
Can museums can really "own" the digitization of cultural heritage artifacts? The bust of Nefertiti shown above is a 3D rendering I created myself on 3DS Max from a digital file, obtained by artist Cosmo Wenman after three years of persistence. Now, anyone can download it and marvel at this masterpiece, to get a closer look than you ever could at Berlin's Neues Museum, where the bust itself resides.
Flickr protects all its users' Creative Commons photos
Flickr has taken extra steps to protect the photos on its platform uploaded under the Creative Commons license. On March 12th, the service will purge free tier users' photos until they only have 1,000 items saved -- not including CC-licensed items, that is. Flickr clairifed after it first announced the purge last year that it will not delete any Creative Commons photo. Now, its VP of Product, Andrew Stalden, has revealed that the platform will leave all CC images untouched, even those uploaded in the future. Further, Flickr will now memorialize accounts owned by deceased members to make sure they never get affected by the new free tier policy.
Haiku Deck extends on-the-go presentations to iPhone
As noted here on TUAW before, the presentation tool Haiku Deck (available as an iPad app and as a beta web app) makes the chore of building out a visually compelling, effective deck for your product or story as easy as it can be. In fact, Haiku Deck's CEO Adam Tratt told me that the spark for the company's product was struck when he and his co-founder Kevin Leneway (both Microsoft alumni) found that neither one of them wanted to slog through PowerPoint to create a critical investor presentation. Tratt and his team have remained focused on the Haiku Deck mission of "making presentations ten times more beautiful, and making people ten times better at presenting." With the iPad app as a validation of their idea and the beta web tool expanding the possible universe of deck authors, they began to notice the surge in deck views coming from those omnipresent 3" iPhone screens. To meet that viewing demand, today the company launched the iPhone edition of Haiku Deck. Rather than scale down the iPad authoring tools, the first version for iPhone leaves out the editing capability (for now) in favor of a no-compromises viewing and presenting experience. With offline caching of your favorite decks, you've got the perfect elevator pitch tool right in your pocket. Haiku Deck for iPhone allows you to present quickly on the device itself, or extend to VGA, HDMI or AirPlay displays for bigger audiences. You can show in landscape mode for slides-only or in portrait mode so you can read your notes as you go. If you've got an iPad with Haiku Deck installed, the iPhone app can act as a remote control for the iPad's display of the deck. Meanwhile, the iPad and web apps have been souped up with new features, including a slick charting engine and a featured presentation gallery. The iPad app allows you to export presentations in PowerPoint or Keynote formats, and you can now pull in your personal images from Box.com, Facebook or Dropbox while putting together your deck. Haiku Deck for both iPad and iPhone is free in the App Store, with in-app purchases available on the iPad app to expand your authoring options. If you spend any time creating presentations, it's worth a look.
Arcane Brilliance: Challenge mode tips for mages part 1
Every other week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. Stacey Landry is the resident mage here, bender of space and time, conjurer of delicious confectioneries and expert at dressing well while setting things on fire. Happy new year! Welcome to 2014. This week I'm going to talk about something we haven't looked at yet: challenge modes. Every column I've posted, someone has asked about or remarked on my current transmog. (Thank you for that. It warms my heart that you're also fashion-conscious). I'll admit, I haven't been able to change my transmog since I got the CM one. It's such a perfect combination of unique, exclusive, and also it's a credential. It says, "Trust me, I know what I'm doing here." But the best thing about it is that you don't need a raid group to get it. Why would you want to do challenge modes as a mage? Read on to find out.
Glitch preserves game memories via encyclopedia
It's slightly unusual to get a "post-game update" from a closed MMO, but then again, Glitch always was unusual. Tiny Speck wrote a post to thank players for the support and encouragement received following last month's sunset and also to let everyone know that the team is preserving Glitch's art assets and memories through the website's encyclopedia under a Creative Commons license. "When we shut off the servers on December 9th, players left thousands of notes scattered throughout the world. They were wonderful -- sometimes sad, sometimes funny, occasionally weird, and always heartfelt," the team wrote. To honor the players, the staff has included these notes in Glitch's encyclopedia on the location pages. Tiny Speck says that the encyclopedia and other assets will remain up and running even as the rest of the website spins down in upcoming months.
Friday Favorite: Haiku Deck for iPad concocts instant presentations
If long-suffering Dunkin' Donuts franchise owner Fred the Baker had decided to get an office job, chances are his early morning grumble would have been "Time to make the PowerPoint." Doing decks is part of every organization, from the military to not-for-profits to businesses of all sizes; even if you make the chore easier with Keynote, it's still a chore. Creating something that doesn't look like every other presentation is possible, but if you aren't gifted with design acumen it might not turn out like you hope. PowerPoint's automatic templating helps somewhat, but how about using your iPad to spice up a slide or two? Giant Thinkwell's free iPad app Haiku Deck may prove to be the spice rack for your flavorless decks. The idea is straightforward: use one of Haiku Deck's provided two-line templates for your slides and the app will search Creative Commons-licensed photos to provide a fitting visual complement to your verbiage. You can swap in your own local photos from the iPad or ones from social services; to share, upload your deck to the Haiku Deck site or export it to a PowerPoint file. The app is beautifully designed and easy to use; some of the free supplied templates are lovely, and there's a $14.99 optional pack of additional looks (or $1.99 per template, bought solo) if you're not thrilled with the built-in options. Yes, you can only use two lines of text per slide, so it's not ideal for bullet-heavy fiscal briefings. Yes, the results have a tendency to wander into Demotivators territory. But you can certainly use Haiku Deck to inspire a theme for a longer presentation built in a desktop app, or pull one or two key concept slides into a presentation that's begging for some creative zing. [hat tip AllThingsD]
Create Creative Commons games and art in the 'Liberated Pixel Cup'
If you're cool with a little freeware/open-source jargon ("free-as-in-freedom"), we encourage you to check out the Liberated Pixel Cup.Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, and OpenGameArt, three organizations naturally concerned with the free transmission of culture, are partnering to make the world a better place for free game development. The contest is taking place in two phases: first, participants are encouraged to create new game art usable by anyone (as long as they attribute the source), and upload it to OpenGameArt.Then, all that art will be used to make games, between July 1st and July 31st. Prizes will be awarded for standouts in both categories. It seems pretty likely you'll be able to download and play all the games from the contest as well, given that, you know, "free software" business. If you don't want to participate artistically, you can do so financially, by donating to the style guide artists and prize fund. Consider it an act of ironic charity.
Tacit sonar gauntlet gives the blind ultrasonic eyes (video)
Sure, your Arduino project can make a stuffed monkey dance, but is it really doing anything for the greater benefit of mankind? Okay, maybe -- but not to the same degree as Grathio Labs' Tacit glove, an Arduino powered sonar device that can help the vision impaired navigate foreign environments. This wrist-mounted gauntlet is comprised of an Arduino microcontroller, a few ultrasonic sensors, and a pair of servomotors to apply variable pressure to the user's wrist to indicate their distance from an object or obstacle. Best of all, the gizmo's circuit and software are registered under Creative Commons, which means you're free to snag the plans from the source link below, and build your own. Go on, build one. Sure, it's a lot of work, but would you rather rock a wrist-mounted sonar gun, or don an ear-tugging bicycle helmet? Your choice.
YouTube embraces Creative Commons licensing, turns your cutesy kitty into mashup fodder
Sourcing material from the mecca of viral video has always been a bit iffy -- who knows which rabid Beyonce fan will bite back when you slice and dice their Single Ladies tribute video. However, YouTube's recent addition of the Creative Commons licensing option just made it a whole lot easier to make mashups without stepping on anyone's stiletto-sporting toes. Users are now given the option to choose between YouTube's standard license or the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which, when selected, automatically adds the video to a library of similarly appointed videos, now available for your cutting and captioning pleasure. An attribution is placed beneath any video sourcing material from the Creative Commons library. Among the more professional outfits adding their videos to the CC pool are Al Jazeera and C-SPAN -- who's ready to see Mittens the Kitten and Sarah Palin battle it out over tax cuts? You can now access the Creative Commons library through the YouTube video editor.
New sci-fi novel features gold farmer protagonists
Ever wanted to read about the exploits of young gold farmers toiling away in Asian sweat shops and ruining/enabling your MMORPG experience? Science fiction author and Boing Boing founder Cory Doctorow thinks you might, and has devoted his newest novel to fleshing out the torrid existence of a group of young grinders who decide to organize. When we say organize, we don't mean making lists or using spreadsheets to farm at the optimum rate, but rather, organizing as in worker's unions. Doctorow has made an audio excerpt of the novel, titled For the Win, available on his web site. He calls the book a spiritual successor to his Anda's Game short story, and has targeted it specifically to a young adult audience. For the Win debuts on May 11 and will be freely available online under the Creative Commons license.
FunMail adds instant images to Facebook status & MMS
At the risk of invoking a round of reader rage, I'll admit that I've never really been that hyped on the idea of MMS on the iPhone (and, by the way, get off my lawn). If I want to send someone a picture, I've got their email address; I'll just send them a picture. No big whoop. I do have some friends and colleagues who 'came up' on mainline camera phones and they gleefully pop pics back and forth via MMS. I also appreciate the ability to decode the snapshots my wife sends from her Motorola RAZR, but overall I wouldn't rate it among the top iPhone features I was eager to get from AT&T (not like the ongoing lack of tethering, which is making me grind my teeth in my sleep). That prejudicial attitude may have made me a little skeptical when I met with FunMobility's CEO Adam Lavine this week to get a preview of his company's new free app FunMail [iTunes link], which promises to leverage the Semantic Media Project and add appropriate imagery to your MMS messages, short emails, Facebook wall posts, et cetera. It's available in the US App Store as of last night. Sure, the app is simple enough to use (once you register and accept the company's TOS, which may subject you to occasional text messages from them if you don't opt out) -- type in your message, and the system gives you the text (up to 140 characters) atop your choice of image from a list of five, sourced from FunMobility's licensed libraries along with Creative Commons remixable content from Flickr and other repositories. If you want to include a hidden search term, putting it at the end of the message with a double-hash (##) will tell FunMail to search those words without including them in the sent message. You can send it to any mobile phone number in your address book, to email recipients, or to your Facebook friends or wall via Facebook Connect. The result is a little bit inspirational office poster, a little bit LOLcat, and in some ways strangely intriguing... but not really, you know, useful.
Crystal Castles rips off chiptune artists
For those of you who don't follow indie music, no, we're not throwing plagiarism accusations at Atari's Crystal Castles arcade game, nor are we denouncing She-Ra's headquarters of the same name. Crystal Castles is a Toronto-based, two-man group generating a lot of buzz on the strength of its "new sound" and favorable reviews from tastemakers like Pitchfork.Though the band claims to have no connection with chiptune artists, their songs don't venture far from the micromusic genre. As fans of the chiptune scene, we were irritated to see Crystal Castles snub the community in a recent Exclaim! interview: "It was only to create annoying sounds. That keyboard was made back in 2004 and then we learned about this whole 8-bit scene, which we don't really have anything to do with. It's a completely different world."Attentive ears, however, have noticed that the group has a very direct connection with several chiptune artists, such as Lo-Bat and Covox, two artists whom Crystal Castles has sampled without credit or compensation, disregarding the Creative Common License the original songs were released under. Crystal Castles' response? They're denying it. Listening to the juxtaposed tracks in the video above, the similarities seem obvious ... [Via Gameboy Genius, GameSetWatch]
Cinemassively: Mr. Fancy Pants
We've all had those moments where we're sure that we're the biggest and the best at something. Then someone comes along and steals our thunder. Jonathan Coulton and Mike Spiff Booth know how we feel.During Jonathan's Thing a Week project, he came up with Mr. Fancy Pants, a whimsical look at the perfect pair of pants. While Coulton's songs are mainly reinterpreted by Spiffworld as World of Warcraft machinima, they are actually released with Creative Commons attributes, so they could be used in other MMO machinima too!If you have machinima or movie suggestions from any MMO, please send them to machinima AT massively DOT com, along with any information you might have about them.
San Jose's Tech Museum looks for virtual exhibits in Second Life
The Tech Museum in San Jose is worth the trip alone. Always chock-full of fantastic and informative exhibits and events, it's the go-to place for the rare combination of education and entertainment that neither preaches nor panders. As befitting such a forward-looking institution, The Tech has created a virtual museum location in Second Life. Further, they're accepting submissions for exhibits for that virtual space. From the press release:' The virtual Tech ... will begin accepting exhibits immediately as part of an exhibition design competition around the theme of "Art, Film, and Music." The Tech plans to replicate a number of the winning exhibits in its real-world museum in San Jose. A world-class panel of experts will review the virtual exhibits in Second Life, awarding prizes to winning projects for the physical museum. Winners will be announced in connection with the 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge, produced by ZER01: The Art and Technology Network, in June 2008.'Additionally, there will be cash prizes for certain categories of exhibits. Exhibits created through the Tech Virtual site, and installed in the physical location will, if chosen, receive $5,000. If you think you've got a good idea for an exhibit, go check out the Tech Virtual, and send your ideas in -- everything's shared under the Creative Commons license, so be advised before you go in. Get thinkin'!
Cinemassively: Chiron Beta Prime
Spiffworld has created another fantastic Machinima using the Creative Commons licensed work of Jonathan Coulton, the man responsible for the internet hit "Code Monkey." Coulton's song, Chiron Beta Prime, sets the scene for this WoW video about a family laboring away during the Christmas holiday. It also happens to be a present from Mike Spiff Booth to JoCo, whose birthday was on December 1st! "Awww!"I'm pleased to see the Christmas Machinimas flowing in at a nice pace so early on in the season. If you have made an MMO holiday film, let us know![Thanks, Krystalle!]
Los Angeles-area Boy Scouts can earn "activity patch" in copyright
Los Angeles-area Boy Scouts (this author used to be among them) will now be able to receive an "activity patch" in respecting copyrights. Different from a merit badge, The Associated Press reports that "an activity patch is not required to advance in the Scouts. Instead, they are awarded for various recreational and educational activities, such as conservation or volunteering at a food bank." Scouts will get a primer in copyright law, will have to identify five types of copyright, and will get to visit a movie studio to learn about "how many people can be harmed by film piracy," as defined by the MPAA. Boing Boing also adds that a movement is underway to educate the Los Angeles Area Council about their concerns of potentially pushing the MPAA's agenda. Jay Neely, an Eagle Scout (as is this author), writes on Boing Boing: "If it's as one-sided or erroneous as your post worries it will be, I'd like to get other current or former scouts to take part in a concerted effort to write the Los Angeles Area Council with our concerns." So basically, this ain't over yet, Hollywood.[Thanks, Rollins]Read - The Associated PressRead - Boing Boing
