Dana Herlihey

I must have been in fourth or fifth grade the year my father connected our family computer to the internet. At that time I had been given a hand me down, black and white, Acer laptop. I remember thinking it was the coolest thing ever, even if I only used it for basic word processing and solitaire, it was my own personal laptop and that made it awesome. The Herlihey communal computer was a little more tricked out. I spent quite a bit of time playing CD Rom games with my older sister – we were particularly obsessed with DOOM – and learning about random items (such as the Nile) on Microsoft Encarta. I was standing in the doorway of the basement office where our lovely home computer lived, shifting anxiously from foot to foot as my dad and his friend tinkered about with the dial up connection. I was insanely curious to see what the internet was all about and could hardly contain my excitement. Perhaps out of his own enthusiasm, or anxiousness, my dad shooed me away as he and his unnamed friend continued tooling around; I sulked off as the dial up gargle sounded behind me.
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Halifax sketch comedy troupe, Picnicface, have taken a creative approach to raising funding for their upcoming film, Rollertown, by asking for help from fans in exchange for some absurd services. Read more »

I bought my Holga 120N over four months ago. I haven’t taken it off my shelf yet. Despite the fact that the Holga takes really beautiful shots, there’s something quite daunting about not being able to see your photos right away, having a limited amount of pictures to take, and paying to develop film – I’ve been spoiled by the digital age, I suppose.

Indian designer, Sakit Biswas has taken care of all that. Well, almost. Read more »

When I first witnessed Wired magazine’s tablet app at SXSW this past March, I was thoroughly impressed. I wholeheartedly believed that they had successfully bridged the gap between analog and digital, causing me to finally catch the ‘iPad anticipation itch’. The app was gorgeous and fluid, chock full of image galleries, beautiful layouts, video, animation, and a seamless navigation system. It appeared, at first glance, to be the ultimate interactive magazine.

Cut to four months later; the iPad has been released, selling over 3 million units worldwide, and users have been able to test out these magazine apps for themselves. Today, I read Pete Cashmore’s review of the magazine apps on CNN.com, an article which almost fully restored my initial disparagement of the iPad . Read more »

Dana Herlihey

Toronto was hit with a mild earth quake this afternoon. The Stitch Toronto office felt it at approximately 1:45, first with a slight tremor in the office, followed by walls and machinery shaking. Thinking the shaking was due to construction happening next door, Anna and I went to go check it out. Turns out, they had felt it too, leading us to conclude that we had just been in an earthquake.

I took to twitter and discovered other people around Toronto reporting shaking walls and buildings. #EarthquakeTO and #earthquake quickly started trending amongst my fellow tweeters, and a 15 second earthquake turned into a 15 minute twit-fest. As it turns out, there was a 5.5 earthquake along the Ontario – Quebec border that was felt all the way from Montreal to Waterloo. This city rarely ever feels earthquakes, so the novelty and cheeky humor of my fellow Torontonians made for some pretty hilarious reactions – the best ones taking a stab at the other most topical subject in Toronto – the G20. Read more »

At the Toronto office, we’re big fans of OK Go’s innovative music videos, and their latest video for End Love has our minds blown.  The video features not only some of the best time warping we’ve seen (just check out the quote from Gizmodo below) but also an awesome appearance from a curious Canadian goose.

How it’s done:

“The fastest we go is 172,800x, compressing 24 hours of real time into a blazing 1/2 second. The slowest is 1/32x speed, stretching a mere 1/2 second of real time into a whopping 16 seconds. This gives us a fastest to slowest ratio of 5.5 million. If you like averages, the average speed up factor of the band dancing is 270x. In total we shot 18 hours of the band dancing and 192 hours of LA skyline timelapse – over a million frames of video – and compressed it all down to 4 minutes and 30 seconds! Oh and don’t forget, it’s one continuous camera shot.” (Via Gizmodo)

Dana Herlihey

This weekend I’m participating in The Ride to Conquer Cancer – a 2 day, 200 km bike ride from Toronto to Niagara Falls benefiting the Princess Margaret Hospital. Last year, during The Ride to Conquer Cancer, I kept friends and family informed of my team’s progress via Twitter. To be honest, there weren’t very many other riders using twitter as a means to update their progress. However, with the impressive increase in adoption rates of smartphones and social media tools in the past year, The Ride to Conquer Cancer has successfully embraced everything from Facebook, twitter, myspace, delicious, flickr and now – Foursquare. Read more »

Apple unveiled the super thin iPhone 4 at the WWDC (worldwide developers conference) yesterday. And while I secretly loathe my contract with Rogers – which will have me missing out on all the new hardware fun – I figured that since I can still get in on the iPhone OS 4 features, I might as well suck it up (kind of, I can’t help but be a little bitter) and comment on some of my favourite iPhone 4 hardware upgrades. Read more »