Internet

If you love road trips -- even ones you take while never leaving your living room -- design agency Teehan+Lax's Labs unit has an intriguing tool: virtual animations of journeys based on Google Street View footage.

The Street View Hyperlapse animator creates interactive hyper-lapse sequences, which are time-lapse sequences with sweeping camera movements.

So if you're virtually driving down the highway in a Street View car, for instance, you can click on an icon and move it around to change the camera angle.

This simple tool eliminates the time-consuming stitching of photos taken from different locations to create a hyper-lapse shot. … Read more

My boyfriend is a little different than most. His name is Taira-kun. He's big and strong, though his arms are tiny. He's actually a Tyrannosaurus rex, but I don't seem to hold that against him. I'm all caught up in Jurassic Heart, an online dating simulator that pairs you up with an extinct beast for a love interest.

The sim gives you difficult choices to make, like which hair clip to wear before meeting your big lug. Naturally, the meat-on-the-bone hair clip is the one to go with. Cute and yummy.

According to the sim, Taira and I have a lot in common. We both like meat. We both play the ukulele (at least I do in real life), though it doesn't get into the specifics of how the necktie-wearing dino manages to play the tiny instrument. The sim takes you through meeting up with your carniverous heartthrob, buying a ukulele, eating grilled chicken in the park, and taking a romantic evening walk.… Read more

Russian "Cheech and Chong" fans, rejoice! The Russian language Wikipedia page for "smoking Cannabis" is no longer under the gun from government censors, but to get totally free and clear of the law, it did have to hand over all of its paraphernalia.

Last week, Russian communications watchdog Roscomnadzor confirmed to RT that the page had been added to an Internet blacklist of sites with banned content launched by the Russian government last year.

The pot page is apparently just one of a handful on Wikipedia deemed to be in violation of Russian law (other includes an online library hosting "The Anarchist Cookbook" and its recipe for marijuana soup), but it appears that it may have been the last spliff straw for the government. Possession of marijuana is illegal in Russia, and penalties can often include harsh prison sentences.… Read more

Do you believe in life after death?

I believe that several fans of singing icon Cher have had such beliefs bolstered by events that occurred today on Twitter.

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher passed away today.

She was admired and derided in almost equal measure. Some adored how she assaulted entrenched British institutions with her handbag. Others thought she was a petty and divisive shopkeeper's daughter.

One Web site that espoused the latter view is called Is Thatcher Dead Yet? It rather looked forward to her passing to the Safeway in the sky.

So when her death was announced, it immediately created the hashtag #nowthatchersdead.… Read more

Facebook is looking to get cozy with the home and lock screens of your Android device. The just-announced Facebook Home is a suite of apps that replaces your normal home and lock screens with social-media content. It puts Facebook in your face every time you power up your phone.

Users will get notifications from friends, plus photos, status updates, and link shares. It pretty much serves up all your Facebook information without you having to ask for it or open up a separate app.

Users will be able download Facebook Home from Google Play, like a regular app. It does require a special confirmation to install, since it makes such radical changes to the existing look of your screens.… Read more

When I hiked Yakushima Island a few years ago, it was the closest thing I'd seen to an alien planet from science fiction.

Famous for its staggering ancient cedar trees, the island off southern Japan has an interior that struck me as a mix of so many imaginary worlds I've seen on film: Endor, Dagobah, Pandora.

An hour into the hike, it began to rain. Biblically. It was coming down cats and dogs, or "earth and sand" as they say in Japanese, and it didn't let up for six hours.

Yakushima then seemed like Venus and its incessant, lethal rain like that in Ray Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man." My Nikon dSLR found itself swimming in an inch of water that got into my pack, and promptly died.

But I couldn't resist the island's enchanting scenery. It's said to have inspired Hayao Miyazaki's acclaimed anime film "Princess Mononoke." … Read more

Not long ago, The New York Times published an article exploring the likelihood of a solar storm hitting Earth. I didn't get around to reading it, but I probably don't need to now that I've discovered Times Haiku.

The site recasts Times stories in the traditional short poetry form of three phrases containing 5, 7, and 5 syllables. It offers this poetic summary of the solar-storm article: Only rarely does/a giant solar blast fly/directly at Earth. Well, phew.

Jacob Harris, a Times senior software architect, created the site between his more serious endeavors -- building news-driven sites for events like the November election. His original algorithm checks the paper's home page every few minutes for new articles, then scans each sentence looking for complete sentences that fit the haiku pattern. The software does this using a list of words and their syllable counts; if it spots a word it doesn't know, it skips to the next sentence and logs the unknown words to a database. … Read more

Hold your nostrils! And behold the olfactory search engine called Google Nose.

The service lets you type in keywords for smells like "lemon" or "new car." It's being billed as an "Internet sommelier" with an "Aromabase" of over 15 million "scentibytes."

"Street Sense vehicles have inhaled and indexed millions of atmospheric miles," the Google Nose page says.

"Android Ambient Odor Detection collects smells via the world's most sensible mobile operating system."

"Don't ask, don't smell: For when you're wary of your query--SafeSearch included." … Read more

The best April Fools' pranks are absurd but also have a kernel of believability at their core just big enough to reel people in.

While the notion that YouTube has been a 8-year-long contest and Google is finally choosing a winner and shutting the site down tonight is pretty hard to swallow on its face, Google did shock many people by announcing the shutdown of Google Reader recently. Perhaps Larry and Sergey are beginning to go all Howard Hughes on us?

That's how the below video just put out by YouTube operates. The basic premise is that YouTube has … Read more