.::REALITYRECALL::.

Following Rogers, Bell and TELUS is SaskTel. They have just put on a sale that sees all their Smartphone reduced to the sweet price of $0.00 on a 3-year. Again, if you’re into contracts these are worth considering: BlackBerry Bold 9780, Curve 9300, Torch 9800, LG Optimus Quantum, Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant. More here at […]

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Filed under: Japan

Due to the extensive damage in Japan caused by the massive earthquake and resultant tsunami on March 11, many have questioned if the island nation can recover in a year, much less a few months. If the swiftness with which the Japanese can repair roads is any indication, we wouldn’t bet against the country cleaning up this catastrophe in short order.

As a result of the quake, a 150-meter section of the Great Kanto Highway in Naka was absolutely obliterated, with massive chasms running right through the middle of the road. Work crews at the NEXCO road repair company sprang into action on March 17, working at a fevered pitch to help get their country on the road to recovery, literally. Amazingly, after only six days of labor, the road is silky smooth and ready for travel. Look at the the before and after photos above to see just how amazing this feat is.

Given the fact that road crews in the U.S. can spend three or more months repairing a single lane of concrete, only to leave the orange barrels on the road for another two weeks, we’re blown away by this feat of engineering. Simply amazing.

[Source: Daily Mail via Jalopnik | Images: AP Photo/NEXCO East]

Japanese repair quake-ravaged road in just six days originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 24 Mar 2011 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of the many nice things about Android is that you can install your own essential apps, like a browser, as your better default option. But do third-party alternatives like Firefox, Opera, or Dolphin actually deliver a better browser? In many cases, yes. Here’s how. More »

In what has to be the least surprising news of the decade, Duke Nukem Forever has been delayed. Instead of shipping on May 3 as previously planned, it’s now slated for stores on June 14.

You know, maybe it’s just me, but I think I would have made sure that I could hit whatever release date I set for DNF, the most delayed game in the history of man. Still, at least the announcement was made in a fairly humorous way, using this video with Gearbox President Randy Pitchford.

I’m sure that Gearbox will ship the game at some point, barring the intervention of some sort of alien race or temporal anomaly. It may even be that they can’t ship the game, because doing so would sunder the fabric of our reality. I guess we’ll find out in June, right? June!

Or maybe it won’t ship at all, just like we told you would happen.

Chrome (Beta/Dev): Voice input is now baked into Chrome’s Beta version and soon to hit the standard, stable release. When it does, consider installing Speechify. This simple, handy extension adds a microphone icon to Google, Amazon, Hulu, and other sites, so you can simply say what you’re searching for. More »

Elizabeth Taylor, one of Hollywood’s greatest stars, has died at 79.

Wordpress has a new feature for the iPad , which makes any of its 18 million blogs look and act like the magazine-inspired Flipboard, except it’s in mobile Safari. More »

Saskatchewan rolled out a surplus budget Wednesday that includes tax cuts and extra spending – and will be the last before a provincial election in the fall.

Android: If you’d like to be able to tell who’s emailing, texting, or calling you without even taking your phone out of your pocket, free app WhoIsIt will let you assign specific ringtones and vibration patterns to each contact on your phone. More »

“The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable…

Can the Xbox Kinect can help surgeons? A number of doctors in Canada thing so.They’ve been using the gesture-based peripheral to access photos, helping guide the surgery.

The doctors needed to access photos without having to touch anything. This allowed them to perform surgery more quickly, without having to stop to wash their hands. This may well be the first time ever that a hospital used a video game console as a guide in surgery.

The doctor has also claimed that he plans to use the Kinect more often in both surgeries, and other areas in the hospital.

Via TG Daily

The FDA is reportedly set to announce a decision that would force movie theater operators to post calorie counts next to their items in the same way that restaurant chains must. Not surprisingly, the theater owners are popping mad about this possibility.

According to a piece in today’s L.A. Times, the National Association of Theatre Owners has been lobbying the FDA and congressional staff members to exempt movie theaters from the nutritional labeling requirement.

“We’re not restaurants where people go to eat and satisfy themselves,” the group’s general counsel told the paper. “It’s dinner and a movie, not dinner at a movie.”

Of course, movie theater food is often more expensive than dinner… and profitable for the theater chains.

The Times quotes the CFO of Regal Entertainment Group as saying, “We sell a bucket of popcorn for about $6. Our cost in that $6 bucket of popcorn is about 15 cents or 20 cents. So if that cost doubles, it doesn’t really hurt me that much.”

But it might be hurting the people that eat the popcorn. A 2009 study by the spoilsports at the Center for Science in the Public Interest found that a large popcorn serving contained upward of 1,460 calories, almost as much as downing three Big Macs (approx. 1,600 calories).

Should theaters have to post calorie counts just like everyone else, or is movie theater food somehow different than restaurant food?

What’s in the popcorn? Cinemas would rather not have to say [L.A. Times]

Earlier today we reported a story from Digitimes, which stated that Motorola was winding down production on the Xoom. According to the numbers, the total units shipped is set to drop dramatically after this month, from around 500,000 units, down to 300,000 a month, eventually tapering off altogether by the end of June.

The humble MiFi from Novatel has, in various guises for myriad carriers, saved our bacon on repeated occasions at press events, feeding up sweet connectivity when 3G USB modems were few or ineffective. Now it can make that bacon sizzle, too, receiving DLNA certification and becoming a little media streamer. Content loaded to the MiFi’s microSD card will now be served up to any compatible media player, receiver, or computer, which includes watching movies on iPads and Xboxes and PS3's. Oh, my! It remains to be seen whether existing 2372s will be upgradeable to support DLNA or whether it'll be new devices only, but the company has said that AT&T will be the first carrier to offer the service. So, there's something to look forward to, T-Mobile subscribers.

Continue reading Novatel’s 2372 MiFi gets DLNA certified, can serve up some beats with those bytes

Novatel’s 2372 MiFi gets DLNA certified, can serve up some beats with those bytes originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Mar 2011 15:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Just days before MTS finally launches their long-awaited now-called “4G” network, TELUS has gone out and announced they will be investing $22 million in Manitoba this year with their own “4G” network. In a press release TELUS stated they’ll expand beyond the Winnipeg and into Brandon, Selkirk, Steinbach, Portage la Prairie and Victoria Beach. “In […]

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It turns out that Internet Explorer 9, in its 64-bit version, apparently has a different, slower JavaScript engine than its 32-bit counterpart. We didn’t know that when starting our browser tests, but we’ve now updated our tests with IE 9 32-bit results, at least in the JavaScript and CSS categories. Doing so gave IE 9 32-bit an edge in at least one category. Thanks to the eagle-eyed commenters and Twitter correspondents who pointed this out. More »

Previously the American Academy of Pediatrics said children more than one year old could switch to forward-facing seats.

Today we’re releasing a bunch of new features in Google Drawings, designed to make editing easier and more collaborative.

Presence + Revision history
Google Docs has always been designed to make it easy to work on documents together. We’re making that easier in drawings by introducing two new features. First, we’ve added presence highlights around shapes. The color that you see beside a person’s name in the sidebar is now used to highlight the shapes which that person has selected. In the example below, mfrederick is editing the triangle at the edge of the drawing.

When you’re working on drawings together it’s really helpful to see who made which change and to be able to go back to previous versions. That’s just what we’ve added. We took the new revisions interface from documents and spreadsheets and brought it to the drawings editor. Now it’s easy to see all the edits that went into your drawing. You’ll also see the full revision history for any drawings that you’ve already created.

Format painter & recent colors
The new format painter lets you choose a source shape, press the format painter icon to copy its formatting, and then click on another shape to apply that formatting to the destination shape.

Colors are a special type of formatting because in drawings you can choose any color value you want. This feature is nice because it lets you make your drawings just so, but it can be frustrating because you need to remember any custom color codes in order to make sure that different shapes had the same colors. You can now solve that problem with the format painter, but we’ve also made matching colors even easier by adding a recent color palette. The palette shows you up to eight custom colors that you’ve used in your drawings.

Sub-group selection
Groups help you keep your drawings organized and they make it easy to format a bunch of shapes with a single action. But sometimes when you have a group of shapes, there’s a single shape that you want to modify. Before now, you would need to ungroup the shapes, make your modification, and then regroup. But today we’ve added the ability to select a shape within a group. To do this, first click on any shape in the group, then click again on the specific shape that you want to modify. You’ll see outlines and dragging handles around the entire group and also around the shape you selected.

Hopefully these features make online drawings a little easier. If you’ve got any fun drawings that you created, please share them with us in the comments.

Posted by: Misha Leder, Software Engineer