.::REALITYRECALL::.

Partygoers will be treated to an extra full moon Thursday night, but don’t expect it to actually be blue.

USB 3.0 has been highly anticipated — and now, it’s finally here. Sort of. Find out about its availability, specifications, benefits, and limitations

Russia is considering sending a spacecraft to a large asteroid to knock it off its path and prevent a possible collision with Earth, the head of the country’s space agency said Wednesday.

Veteran defenceman and B.C. native Scott Niedermayer will serve as captain of the Canadian men’s hockey team at the 2010 Vancouver Games.

Windows only: Image resizing tools are a dime a dozen, but free utility Shrink Pic is actually an extremely clever original: Instead of requiring manual processing, it runs in the background and automatically resizes images whenever you attach or upload them.

A perfect tool for frequent Facebook uploaders, for example, Shrink Pic works with a number of applications (most browsers, Outlook, Thunderbird, Skype, and MSN Messenger, to name just a few) to monitor when you upload, attach, or send pictures via IM. When you do, it automatically resizes the images in the background based on user-defined settings, then uploads the smaller image (so you don’t have to wait several minutes for an upload to complete just to have it severely compressed at its destination anyway). It can even resize multiple photos in the same upload. The speed at which it resizes and the quality of the compression are nothing to sneeze at, either.

Shrink Pic saves the resized images in a temporary directory, so your originals are never touched—just copied. You can use any kind of compression level you want, as well as choose from 5 different photo types to check for. If you want to disable it, all you need to do is uncheck an option in your system tray—and re-enabling it is just as easy. You can even install a portable version to a USB drive, so you never have to resize images again—not even at other computers.

Shrink Pic is a free download, Windows only.

A complete list of thumbnail sketches detailing each member of Canada’s Olympic men’s hockey team competing in Vancouver.

Calgary Flames goalie Miikka Kiprusoff was among 23 players named to Finland’s Olympic hockey roster on Tuesday.

The number-one smartphone platform in the US, BlackBerries had apps years before the iPhone was a twinkle in Steve Jobs’s eye. What BlackBerries have never had, though, is an easy way to discover and install those apps. So we dig deep through the limited number of blackberry apps on the web and present the top 20 free apps.

Like millions of others, I saw Avatar last weekend. I loved it—despite the 3D, not because of it. Admittedly, my seat was shitty and I wear eyeglasses, but if the experience isn't guaranteed, 3D will fail. Updated

Even after arriving 40 minutes early and waiting in line, the only undefended territory left was right up in front. You may say you’d have stormed out and demanded a refund, but due to work and parenthood, I get a chance to see about three movies per year in the theater, and those have to be slated well in advance. If I didn’t see Avatar at that time and place, I'd have had to wait for it to show up on Blu-ray—or at least wait till after CES. And hey, at least the seats reclined way back, to avoid the stiff neck.

I have endured movies in the front row before, and yes, it’s annoying. You can’t take it all in, you have to look around. But when you add 3D glasses into the mix, it’s not just “annoying.” It’s “cerebrally disruptive.” Any shift of your eyes has to reorient your brain, and since you’re constantly shifting your eyes, you get a series of fleeting illusions combined with a lot of image jolts and jerks. Taking off my 3D glasses, I realized that the typical crappy front-row experience would have been peaceful and easy by comparison. Get this straight: Front row for 3D is 10X worse than front row for other movies.

There was another problem. I was wearing 3D glasses on top of my own glasses, which I need to see. I am not the only person in the world who chooses to wear eyeglasses instead of getting contacts or Lasik surgery. You’d think the 3D industry would plan for this sizable segment of the population. But the light playing between my glasses and the Dolby 3D glasses created weird holograms, floating text and images. I thought at first it was Cameron pulling a JJ Abrams and throwing a bunch of lens flare streaks into the mix, but no, if I adjusted the relative position of the two glasses, they images would move or disappear, at least momentarily. It was reflections of the movie projection bouncing off of my glasses and back onto the inside of the 3D glasses.

An LA Times story mentioned that Dolby 3D glasses were particularly ill-suited for people who are already wearing eyeglasses—hopefully other 3D providers are smarter when it comes to their four-eyed little friends.

As you can tell, I was encumbered with a lot to worry about besides the film, for which I had paid $15. I managed to sit through it all, and am glad I did, for the sake of having seen Avatar. It was great, and what I got was worth, say, $10 of the money I spent, a testament to Cameron’s abilities as a filmmaker, no doubt.

So I don't blame Jim for deliberately making me suffer. All the reports from people who got good seats—including our own Mark Wilson—say that the experience is the best use of 3D ever, and I admire Cameron for pushing the limits. (And also for releasing a 2D version at the same time.) I will say that, like good music producers who listen to a near-final mix from the crappiest boombox they can find, Cameron should be aware of how miserable the 3D experience can be. But he’s a busy man, and probably didn’t get a chance to sit through two-and-a-half hours of blue people, from the shittiest seat in the theater.

The theater management, a financially challenged group if there ever was one, are probably most to blame. They need to sell as many tickets as possible, and they’re not about to tape off the front section. But they should, and there’s a precedent for this. To get IMAX certification, theaters rip out some of their seats, reducing the capacity but enhancing the experience. Even though people have criticized IMAX certification as BS marketing, they got results. (I recall something similar a few years back with George Lucas, who used his influence to make sure only the best theaters could show his movies via digital projection.) You would think that Cameron, Fox and Dolby could combined their might to ensure theater-goers a uniformly baseline enjoyable experience—especially in light of the more strenuous technical and physical requirements of watching a film in 3D. Alas, they simply couldn't.

Or didn’t. When your goal is to rake in over $200 million in two weeks, you can’t be bothered with little things like the asshole who got stuck sitting in the front row.

Yeah, I said it, and you're thinking it. I'm to blame for not marching out, voting with my wallet so to speak. This is America, and corporations have the right to con us, because we have the right to complain. If all the theater, and Fox, and Cameron, and Dolby, and Hollywood as a whole wanted out of me was $15, they got it. (Don't spend it all in one place.) I don't complain in restaurants, I just don't go back. If something cheap breaks on me, I may not call the 800 number on the back of the box, but I sure as hell don't buy another—or anything from that brand. Next time there's an event movie like this, I may skip 3D altogether. Me and every other poor bastard with a pair of eyeglasses and somewhere to be other than the theater two hours before showtime.

Do all you can to guarantee me an experience, and I will gladly pay for it. But leave me to understand that there’s only a 50/50 chance I’m even going to like it, and you can play at-home proctologist with those 3D glasses, cuz I won’t be needing them.

Update: Apparently at least one theater chain is willing to take a fiscal hit in order to serve a better experience to moviegoers. A Giz reader named Garth just sent me this hopeful note:

I went to go see Avatar IMAX 3D on Saturday at the Regal 16 in Escondido, CA and they had blocked off the first three rows in front and the three seats on the extreme left and right of the front section with specially made seat covers that read “Not for 3D viewing.”

Good for Regal! And thanks again, Garth.

Note: The top image is an artistic rendering intended to represent the author’s general frustration, not of the specific technical problems he experienced during the viewing, which can’t be reproduced in a still shot.

New engines for Ford Motor Co.’s 2011 Mustang GT vehicles will be built at the Essex Engine plant in Windsor, Ont., the company has announced, bringing much-needed optimism to a struggling auto sector.

iPhones and iPod touch models can’t sync with Firefox bookmarks, but you can regularly push your bookmarks to them on a Windows system. The trick involves the Xmarks sync service, Internet Explorer, and a tiny system tray utility.

It’s not quite automatic, but the way blogger Shawn0 details his own solution for synchronizing his Firefox bookmarks to his iPod touch, it’s much better than a manual import/export of HTML files. And, as Shawn found out, some of the previous Firefox-to-iPhone solutions don’t work with the latest builds of Firefox (3.0 and newer, specifically). It’s not a tricky process, just systematic, and requires, at most, a right-click of a system tray utility (intended for Internet Explorer users of Xmarks) before you next sync your iPhone.

The New York Times has a fascinating obituary on Kim Peek, the man who was Dustin Hoffman’s inspiration for Rain Man‘s character Raymond Babbitt. Some of his powers were absolutely uncanny:

• He could read two facing pages simultaneously, one with each eye.
• With that ability, he read 12,000 books and remembered every one of the pages.
• He knew so many plays and music pieces with absolute precision that he would be able to tell if an instrument was a note off in a philharmonic orchestra.
• He could remember every day in the calendar, area codes, ZIP codes, maps, countless classical compositions, a zillion trivia bits across dozens of fields in human knowledge and the arts, and give GPS-like directions for any city of the US.

And yet, with all these powers, Peek— who died a few days ago—wasn't able to understand poetry or conceptualize ideas. It was all about the memory and his extraordinary processing abilities.

However, the most important thing is that this man, who was born with these superpowers but also with grave problems, was able to go through life, cultivate his skills, work on his disabilities, partially solving his problems to interact socially, and finally emerged as someone passionate about what he liked, and loved by many.

Head to the NYT to read the complete obituary. [NYT]

Showtime has begun selling episodes of Weeds online before the show’s full-season DVD release, a first for the series. And Weeds isn't nearly the only one—is Hollywood finally embracing digital as the successor to DVD?

Well, sort of. This is really more of a symbolic shift than a full-scale adoption. Thing is, even as DVD sales decline and Blu-ray fails to explode, they both still dwarf revenues from digital streams—so you can't really blame the studios for moving slowly.

But pushing the digital release (and here we’re talking about streaming, not iTunes-like downloads) ahead of the physical, as in Weeds and a few other movies and TV shows, is a definite shift for the studios. Typically, they've tried to protect physical media with its larger profit margin, so this is a pretty big change for them—but it remains to be seen how widespread and how soon the digital adoption will be. [WSJ via Electronista]

Team Canada defeated Switzerland 6-0 on Monday at the world junior men’s hockey championship in Saskatoon.

One of the most persistent myths about Windows is that you need to reinstall the operating system regularly to keep it running at top performance. Let’s take a look at the real problem and how to fix it.

Today we’re talking about the myth that Windows slows down over time, and how to solve the problem. The reality is that Windows doesn’t slow down if you just take care of your PC a little more. Follow these procedures, and you won’t have to wonder if spending hours backing up data, installing from disc, and re-installing your essential applications is really necessary.

What Does Slow Windows Down Over Time?

I'm not going to sit here and tell you that your Windows PC will never slow down—because for many people, they almost always do. What actually slows your PC down are too many poorly written applications that stay resident in memory and waste CPU cycles, having too many badly written low-level applications that hook into Windows, or running more than one antivirus application at a time. And of course, if you’ve run your PC’s hard drive out of space, you can hardly blame Windows for that.

If you aren’t getting the picture, the problem is usually the person behind the keyboard that installed too many junk applications in the first place. More gently put, it’s often that (very well-meaning) person’s gradual easing of their safeguards and cleaning regimens as time goes by.

Stop Installing Junk Applications

Installing software should be thought of like feeding your PC. If you constantly feed your PC garbage apps, it’s going to get sick and won’t be able to run fast anymore. These poorly written applications clutter your drive with unnecessary DLL files, add always-resident Windows services when they don’t need to, bloat up your registry, and add useless icons to your system tray that waste even more memory and CPU cycles. Usually you can get away with using a few terrible applications, but as you continue to install more and more of them, your PC will slow down to a crawl.

Be Smarter About What You Do Install

We feature and recommend a lot of software applications around here, but you should keep in mind that we aren’t trying to tell you to install every single one of them at the same time-just install the applications that you actually need and you’ll generally prevent the dreaded format and reinstall.

Here’s a few tips to help you know what applications you should be careful with:

• Apps that function as an Explorer plug-in, because they directly hook into the shell and any problem will make your entire PC slow or in the worst case, crash repeatedly.
• Antivirus applications are notorious for slowing your PC down, and you should never, ever, ever use more than one real-time antivirus application at a time. We recommend Microsoft Security Essentials as a free, fast, and awesome antivirus tool.
• Anything that says it will “Speed Up Your PC” or “Optimize Your RAM” will most likely slow it down, or best case, do nothing at all. Avoid these like the plague.
• Make sure to install official system drivers from the manufacturer website. Drivers have a huge impact on performance, and you want to have stable, updated drivers.
• Registry cleaners are a mixed bag, and really aren’t going to speed up your PC in most cases. The biggest problem, however, is that too many of the commercial registry cleaners set themselves to run at startup in the system tray, wasting your memory and CPU cycles.
• You should strongly consider the idea of using portable applications wherever possible, since their self-contained nature means they won’t clutter up the rest of your PC with things you don’t need.

Keep Your Computer Clean and Trim

Once you’ve rid yourself of your junk application habit and resolved to only use healthy, useful applications, you’ll want to make sure to keep your PC clean of any remaining clutter that doesn’t need to be there. You can set up a shortcut to manually run CCleaner silently with the push of a button, but your best bet is to set up CCleaner to run automatically on a schedule, so you don’t have to remember to do it.

Since CCleaner is only going to clean up temporary files, you’ll still need a good solution for keeping the rest of your PC clean-and Lifehacker’s own Belvedere can help you automate your self-cleaning PC or automatically clean up your download folder.

With all of this automated file deletion going on, your hard drive is likely to get a bit fragmented. If you’re already running Windows 7 or Vista, automatic defrag comes out of the box and probably shouldn’t be messed with, but Windows XP users will need to use Windows Tasks to setup a schedule and automatically defrag their drives.

Use a Virtual Machine or Sandbox to Test Software

If you still want to test out all of the latest software, including apps that look a bit rough around the edges, your best bet is to use a virtual machine to test out anything before putting it onto your primary operating system. You can install all of your software in an XP or Windows 7 VM just like it was a real PC, and with the latest VMWare player releases, you can even enable Windows Aero in a guest VM. If you are new to the idea and need some more help, you should check out our beginner’s guide to creating virtual machines in VirtualBox, or Windows 7 users can check out our guide to using XP Mode. If you don’t want to go the virtual machine route, Windows XP and Vista users can alternatively use Windows SteadyState to protect their PC and roll back all of the changes on a reboot.

So what about you? Do you always take the reinstall route, or have you devised your own best maintenance practices? Share your experience in the comments.

The How-To Geek reinstalls Windows only every few years and has no speed problems at all. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.

If TMZ.com has taught us anything, it’s that there’s a lot of cell phone footage out there. Researchers at Microsoft’s Labs in Egypt are doing something cool with all that content, combining feeds from multiple phones into multi-angle, live broadcasts.

Dubbed Mobicast, the system requires two sets of software, one for the phone and one for the server receiving the footage. When two or more phones are in the same place capturing the same scene, the software synchronizes their clocks so the framing lines up correctly. Image recognition technology on the server then figures out how the footage should physically mesh, using features of the landscape or scene to recognize parts of the images that match. It then blends the images to create a wider, more detailed view of the scene, sort of like PhotoSynth for video (but without the 3-D – for now).

The coolest part, of course, is that Mobicast can do all this in real time, so an event can be captured and broadcast live to the Web by several cameras at once. Users also receive feedback to their phones showing stills of the stitched video with their contributions highlighted, helping them to see how they can better position themselves for the best contribution.

Before going public, there are some issues to sort out, like how to tell if several phones are in the same vicinity filming the same scene (GPS?). Until then, all we can do is keep on filming and dream of the day that celeb scandals break in full 360-degree 3-D.

[New Scientist]

Popular Science is your wormhole to the future. Reporting on what’s new and what’s next in science and technology, we deliver the future now.

Want a cleaner, less Farmville-filled Facebook experience? Try loading your friends’ and fan pages’ status updates, links, notes, and other material into an RSS reader. Facebook doesn’t make it easy, but it can be done with some clever URL copying.

LiveJournal user Jamie Zawinski details the steps needed to pull the vast majority of Facebook material you’d (theoretically) want to see into an RSS reader like Google Reader or NetNewsWire. In most cases, it involves heading to the right page for your friends’ Posts, Notes, and Notifications, looking in the right-hand sidebar box, and grabbing the feed URL for “My Friends’ [Whatever].” In the case of status updates, which is what you really would want to grab from Facebook, it requires a little URL tweaking of one of the above feeds, explained at Jamie’s post.

The real benefit to using Facebook in a feed reader? You avoid exposure to Mafia Wars, Farmville, and all that other application cruft, and get just the raw details on what your contacts are up to. You also, unfortunately, miss out on updates about your friends’ photo album updates, for reasons unknown to anyone but Facebook’s coders, but it might well be worth it for those who find visiting the social networking site’s actual page a cluttered experience.