You’ve heard about “How the west was won.”
Now find out “How the west was done,” at the Wild Western Festival in Phoenix Arizona.
This wild mix of old western activities, western movie stunt demos, animals, food, celebrities, and even a couple of bolts of steampunk will be happening on the weekend of October 24-26, 2014.
There’s nothing else quite like it.
Way way back in the 1960’s, there was a very strange TV show, a spy-western-SF-fantasy show called “The Wild Wild West.”
Just to indicate how strange it was, it has been credited as one of the origins of Steampunk. And this was waaay before Gibson and Sterling wrote the amazing book, “The Difference Engine.”
But of course, waaay after Shelley and Verne and Wells and Babbage, who started surprising sectors of the future we live in today.
If you want to find a really enjoyable set ot books and movies and images, check out some of what is listed in the fun and exhaustive entry, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk
The great thing about science fiction is that even when you come to it late, or very late, there’s usually something to enjoy.
Whether it is “War of the Worlds” or “Klaatu barada nikto” (“The Day the Earth Stood Still”) or almost any SF book.
Or, more recently, videos. The series “Firefly” and “Fringe” are two recent examples. Both are highly entertaining, quite different, and have huge followings, even some time after they were discontinued. More than a decade later, “Firefly” is being released as a video game. And there is a gem in Fringe–when you find out why, and thanks to whom, the lead scientist sometimes seems so foggy.
The participation of a great number of people made the Kickstarter a huge success, and has propelled LiveCode into releasing its first generation of free and opensource software and rapidly adding updates.
Create apps on your computer, publish to your own and even other platforms.
Go here to download it and play:
http://livecode.com/download/
In case you haven’t heard, there’s a Kickstarter to make a version of LiveCode software open-source—so it will be free for every school and home user on the planet—and only cost if you decide to sell apps made with it.
Only a few days left in the Kickstarter:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1755283828/open-source-edition-of-livecode
About the gears at the top of the page. They turned interesting colors in the woods, as the sun was heading into late afternoon.
Write out your blog in a text file before you sign in to WordPress, then just copy and paste it into the right area.
This way you will have a backup copy of your blog entry, and can easily use it in other projects.
There’s an interesting new software being born, today, this week, right now, name of Rodeo. It is the brand new way you to can create web apps for the iPad.
It’s quite unlike anything else out there. It lets you develop X-code client apps that can be used on the iPhone and iPad, or in Safari or Chrome. These hybrid apps and browser items can be much more powerful that old-fashioned html pages, because they feature HTML5, the new standard.
But because Rodeo software uses a powerful coding language, they are much easier to write than raw HTML5.
In addition, because Rodeo was developed by people comfortable with the hypertalk family of software, Rodeo, written in Objective C, plays well with RunRev, Metacard, and even Hypercard scripts.
Created by the experienced software team Daniels, Mara, and Reichelt, this is developing so fast that you need to go to the actual website to keep up.
This intro really can’t do it justice. You need to go see for yourself.
So saddle up and join the Rodeo.
If you get tired of all the blooming, buzzing Flash items popping up on web pages and spinning your cooling fans whenever you browse in Safari, the free donationware Clicktoflash will help you get rid of them–until you decide you want to see them.
In addition, it prevents Flash-related crashes.
Best of all, it lets you easily download Flash videos, from YouTube, for example, as high resolution Quicktime movies.
Finally, you can still see Flash whenever you want, by clicking on the page, or by whitelisting whole websites so that Flash still works where you want it to.
You need the latest version of Safari, and will probably want to fine-tune the Clicktoflash settings once you get it installed in Safari. If you ever want to remove it entirely, it’s just as easy–click to remove.
Thanks to F. Mackelroy for the lead.
News flash: users wanting to get their hands on the new iPhone manage, because of their sheer numbers, to crash Apple and AT&T websites.
Who would have thought, 10 years ago, that a new phone would someday cause a virtual stampede.
