Link is back in a new DS Zelda Game

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I have already been a die-hard Legend of Zelda fan. Well, you can just imagine how ecstatic I was last week when Nintendo announced a new Zelda game for the DS during the GDC conference in San Francisco. Using the graphics engine and the same stylus-only controls as Phantom Hourglass, this new title mainly seems to be focused around a single island where Link uses a train go get around the various locations. I can’t wait

You can see the first video of the new game on the IGN site.

Smart Bookmarks: Simple yet very useful Firefox plugin

I love using the Firefox Bookmarks toolbar. However, one thing that I found is that it tends to get crowded once you start having a lot of regular sites that you visit on there. A colleague of mine recently showed me a plugin that solves that issue called Smart Bookmarks Bar. What it does is quite simple, it just hides the text descriptions of the bookmarks on the toolbar, leaving only their icons. Since most sites have their own icons today, you can still easily tell sites apart using their icons.

Kutiman remixes Youtube

I am not a big fan of YouTube since a lot of the videos that it contains seem pointless to me. However, once in a while, I hear about something great, go see it, and am just amazed at the creativity, time and effort that is put into the videos that are put on there. A recent example of this is the Ep album Thru You, made by Israeli mix artist Kutiman.

What he did is quite a feat. He searched through YouTube to find videos of various people playing musical instruments or singing. He then stitched all of these excerpt together to compose 7 different songs.

Here is my favorite of the pack. If you like it, check out the rest on the link above:

A new project for VAPS Creator

If you’ve known me for some time, you know that I have been working at a company that works in the Aerospace market that is currently called Presagis. Well, before being bought by CAE, Presagis was called Engenuity Technologies and even before that, it was called Virtual Prototypes. The original company was created around a tool called VAPS, created by Eugene Joseph, that was designed to accelerate the creation of aircraft displays.

Since then, Eugene has moved on to other projects and the latest one of these was announced today at GDC, a video game called Bot Colony. Based on research on natural language analysis that Eugene’s company (North Side), has been doing for many years, Bot Colony is an adventure game where the player interacts with a variety of robots living on an island using natural speech. The results are quite impressive and you can see a demo on YouTube.

Good luck to the whole North Side team on bringing this game to market.

Quickly download YouTube videos

I recently wanted to keep a video from Youtube for my personal archives. After a quick Google search, I stumbled upon a simple yet efficient site called KeepVid. By going to this site and pasting the URI of the Youtube video (or a few other services) that you want to keep, you will get a download link to get the file in a nice high quality format. Simple, elegant, and very useful. From what I can see, they mainly make their money from the ads.

Free Live Barenaked Ladies Concert

There’s been a roster change in the Canadian Pop Band Barenaked Ladies’ ranks a few weeks ago when co-lead singer Steven Page left the band to pursue other projects. To follow on this sad news, the four remaining members of the band have decided to make the recording of their first show as a four-piece band available as a free download for a limited time on their web site.

I have always been a big fan of their music and look forward to listening to these tracks, although it will definitely be strange to have Ed Robertson sing tracks that were previously done by Steven.

Good luck to both M. Page in his new projects and to the rest of the guys on continuing to rock.

A ‘Google Maps’ for the skies

When I tried to find some interesting map images a few weeks ago online for a demonstration at work, I stumbled upon an amazing site called SkyVector. This site is basically a browsing site similar to Good Maps where you can view civilian flight navigation charts for the entire North American continent, with smooth panning and zooming capabilities. For people who fly, you can even map out a course by laying down waypoints on top of the map.