Yesterday I had the great privilege of going behind-the-scenes at the Royal Ontario Museum, that incredible home of extraordinary specimens and rare artifacts, items that seem to have a life unlike anything else in our world. I was there representing Canada AM, part of a team that was shooting an upcoming story on how the museum is introducing an array of new technologies to help them expand the number of specimens on display while adding more depth to the information and stories they can offer. It’s an interesting tale and one I’ll leave for our show to air (coming soon), but what I want to share with you today, is the extraordinary thing that happened after we finished our shoot, the things you would only dream of happening should you be so lucky to visit the hidden sections of a museum, things we did not, could not grab with our cameras, moments that gave me so much pause as to seem to permanently effect the way I breathe, now a little bit slower and more deeply. [More]

This week YouTube is upgrading their service to allow its users (those with actual YouTube accounts) to install a new feature called “RealTime” that adds a toolbar to show you when your friends are online and what videos they’re watching. It’s a fairly basic, commonplace feature really, one that many other social networks already have (Facebook, ICQ, Xbox Live, etc.), but it’s one that YouTube has decided will not be available to everyone right away, instead they’ve chosen to give out the feature “by invitation only”.

Are you interested in being invited? I have 25 invites that I can hand out. Here’s what you’ll need to do.

The iPhone and iPod Touch come equipped with a sensor called the Accelerometer which senses when the device itself is being moved. This is what allows it to switch from a portrait view to a landscape view automatically when you simply turn the phone sideways. Free Art & Technology (F.A.T.) have created an iPhone App that taps into this sensor to allow the iPhone to simulate a vinyl record player. The idea is that you load in a virtual record and then physically spin your phone on a table or flat surface. The speed with which your phone spins determines the speed of it's virtual turntable and the speed the record plays at. As the phone's spinning winds down, the music itself winds down, distorting the same as it would on a record player. I would love to see this become an official App offered through the iTunes store, but the trick will be finding a way to offer virtual records to play. If they can get away with using the iPhone/iPod Touch's own music library, that would be fun. The song featured in the clip below is Full Clip by Gang Star. 

Word geeks take notice of Deep Leap, a new online spelling game that's fast and challenging. As tiles drop down onto the screen, your task is to use them to quickly spell out words. Tiles that turn red are about to be removed from the list to make way for new ones. If you don't quickly find a use for a red tile, it disappears and you lose points. The scoring system is similar to other word games, the more letters you use the more points you gain and if you can keep up a steady stream of correctly spelled words, you can gain a multiplier to really increase your score. Each game moves through a supply of 75 tiles and if you can use all your tiles there's a bonus at the end. Although still in its early stages of development, this is a captivating game where the speed really works to make it addictive. How high of a score can you get?

Today I keep my promise. For several months now I’ve had multiple requests to showcase a selection of recommended hands-free devices and with a fourth province in Canada implementing a ban on cellphone use while driving, the timing couldn’t be better. Here are three different examples of leading headsets and for those who aren’t comfortable with sticking a gadget in your ear, two speakerphone boxes that slide easily into your visor or onto your dashboard. [More]

Over the past few months YouTube has been signing several deals with studios and content providers to add their full-length films and TV shows to their network, most notably a back catalog of TV shows from Sony Pictures that includes The Young And The Restless, Alf, Barney Miller, and I Dream Of Jeannie. For Canadians it hasn't been big news as all of the content has been restricted in access to American users only. That's starting to change. Manga Entertainment has just added Astro Boy, the animated television series from the 1980's and early 00's (sadly, not the original 1960's series which gave birth to Anime) along with other anime series and yes, this is open to Canadians too. [More]

Announced today at the Tribeca Film Festival, MakingOf.com is a new web portal founded by actress Natalie Portman and CEO Christine Aylward that focuses on sharing videos that discuss the behind-the-scenes process of making important films. There's a great deal of fascination regarding today's celebrities, the goal with MakingOf is to direct that interest towards an aspect with more substance. At launch the site includes more than 40 interviews with artists in film including Ron Howard, Marc Forster, and Michael Gondry. The site is divided into four sections; "Now Filming", offering behind-the-scenes looks at films currently hitting theatres, "Community" where users can gather for discussion, "Insiders" offering intimate interviews with key artists, and "The Vault" offering behind-the-scenes features from films no longer in theatrical release. 

Yet another twist on a classic video game, Twetris replaces the iconic coloured blocks of Tetris with tweets grabbed from Twitter. The game is still played the same way, you muse use your arrow keys to move and alter the position of the pieces as they fall in order to build formations that complete a solid line of a single colour. The real challenge is trying to read the Tweets while you find a place for them. Twetris is an excellent reminder that everything, yes everything, you write on Twitter is for public consumption and might even end up as a game piece or component of someone else's website. [More]

A new video network from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, ArtBabble presents video clips by artists, curators, and scholars that discuss the behind-the-scenes details of great works of art and new exhibitions. At launch they have clips from the Museum of Modern Art, The Louvre, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art amongst other institutions. Yes, you can think of it as a YouTube for professional art, but without the option for anyone to upload. All other features are there including channels, user accounts, the ability to embed any of their videos into your site or blog. They also have a complete listing of the many artists featured throughout. 

On April 1st, the CRTC launched an online forum for consumers to register comments, voice complaints, and take part in a discussion regarding the accusations that have been directed at Canadian internet service providers (specifically Bell and Rogers) towards the practice of “throttling” or “traffic shaping”, the slowing down or blocking of BitTorrent traffic. On April 30th the CRTC’s forum will close and as we near that deadline I’m sad to report that the participation level has been low, failing to match the outcry that brought about attention to the issue in the first place. [More]