London’s plan to grow up might go down, Elon Musk’s quest to make electric cars cool, and funny anti-Rob Ford ads appear in Toronto. Plus: Learning from streets in Vietnam, Paris, and Manhattan. All this and more in this week’s Urban Reads.
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Cities change: skyscrapers go up, row houses are torn down, neighborhoods gentrify, earthquakes destroy. Vintage photographs of cities can be fascinating in and of themselves, but the familiar unfamiliarity of these time-warped photographs are especially intriguing.
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Last night in Toronto, Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei presented a new version of his incredible Forever Bicycles installation. As the centerpiece of this year’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, the all-night contemporary art event that takes over city streets, 3,144 bicycles, the most Weiwei has used of this work to date, were stacked 100 feet in length and 30 feet in height and depth in Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square. This was the first time the installation has been displayed in an open air, public space. Since this was a night-time festival, it was spectacularly lit up with pink and blue lights.
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You’d imagine that it would take quite a few plows to clear a snow-covered highway, but not quite this many. Keep count as they go through and you’ll see a whole 21 plows in formation (and a couple of sand trucks) painstaking passing piles of grey road-sludge to the right and to the right again and to the right again on this highway in Toronto. More »
If you’re mooching around for second-hand books, you probably give the bargain bin a very wide berth. Toronto bookseller The Monkey’s Paw, however, wanted to jazz up the experience of selling unwanted literature, so it hired effects whizz Craig Small to design the Bibliomat. With the use of a few levers, pulleys and a telephone bell, he built a vending machine that offers up a random title when you feed it $2. If you’re not in the area, you can watch how it works in the video after the break, and if you are, we advise you don’t go with pockets full of cash — you might wind up with fifty copies of something you need to donate to goodwill.
Continue reading Meet the Bibliomat: a homemade vending machine for old books (video)
Meet the Bibliomat: a homemade vending machine for old books (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Nov 2012 04:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Solar cell development is typically a small numbers game, and a group of researchers at the University of Toronto have managed to eke out a few more percentage points in efficiency with a new record-breaking cell. Setting a high mark for this type of cell, the team’s Colloidal Quantum Dot (CQD) film harvests both visible and non-visible light at seven percent efficiency, a 37 percent increase over the previous record. The breakthrough was achieved by leveraging organic and inorganic chemistry to make sure it had fewer nooks and crannies that don’t absorb light. With the advantages of relatively speedy and cheap manufacturing, the technology could help lead the way for mass production of solar cells on flexible substrates. In the meantime, check out the source for the scientific lowdown.
Filed under: Science
Researchers create record-breaking solar cell, set bar marginally higher originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 05 Aug 2012 03:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Rogers was the first with LTE in Canada. Its budget brand Fido has largely been left out of that 4G fiesta, but the gap is closing today with official plans to give the yellow doghouse some LTE of its own. The initial deployment this summer will largely overlap Rogers’ fledgling network, starting with benchmark cities Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, St. John’s, Toronto and Vancouver. Only a Fido Mobile Hotspot with 10-device sharing will kick off the hardware selection; if you’re impatient, though, any compatible and (usually) unlocked LTE device will do with a relevant SIM card. About 20 million Canucks will potentially have the high-speed option by the end of the year — and with Fido’s plan costs expected to stay the same, that coverage could make the provider a de facto choice for fast data in the Great White North. Click past the break for the official word and the full 2012 expansion list.
Continue reading Fido hops on the LTE bandwagon, gives Canadians frugal 4G this summer
Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless
Fido hops on the LTE bandwagon, gives Canadians frugal 4G this summer originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Jul 2012 03:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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You’ll find over 35 different billboards in the streets of Toronto which are ironically called ‘Info Pillars’, considering the fact that they’re used to display ads and not information. So what’s an urban hacktivist to do, when the redesign of these Info Pillars have replaced bike parking and caused the cutting down of trees by the sidewalks? Occupy the pillars, that’s what!
Members of the cARTographyTO creative team took down the ads that previously occupied these Info Pillars and instead replaced them with art installations, some containing actual bikes and art maps.
The more entertaining ones include interactive chalkboards where passersby can write down their own thoughts, opinions, or messages to the rest of Toronto. Through their efforts, cARTographyTO has managed to raise public awareness regarding the issue, encouraging the city to use them for disseminating information, as their name asserts.
[via Pop Up City]
Living it up in the True North and wishing there was a Microsoft Store near you to take advantage of that subsidized Xbox 360 deal? Or, you know, give Windows Phone a run for its money? Well, if all goes according to plan, you might be able to do just that pretty soon — this fall, to be exact. According to Canadian Reviewer, Redmond’s own Tedd Ladd has told the site his company’s about to open up one of its decorated retail shops in the Land of Poutine later this year, with Yorkdale Shopping Centre in Toronto being chosen as the place to help kick things off internationally. Currently, all of Microsoft’s 20 B&M stores are in the US of A, so this would mark the outfit’s first outside of the States — and surprisingly enough, Ladd also mentioned this will be the 31st when it opens, perhaps hinting that there’s some more on the way.
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Microsoft’s first international store set to open this fall in Canada originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Jul 2012 08:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Speaking during Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference keynote in Toronto, Corporate VP and CFO Tami Reller announced that the software giant will release Windows 8 to manufacturers next month. She also confirmed the previous October ship target — that being the timeframe that consumers can expect to pick up a Windows 8-equipped machine, or presumably upgrade from a previous version of the OS. There’s not much to report beyond that — manufacturers will see Windows 8 next month, while the rest of us will need to hang tight until the fall.
Microsoft confirms Windows 8 will reach RTM stage in August, consumers in October originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Jul 2012 10:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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