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Posts with tag toronto

Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services

Bye Bye Free Toronto Wifi

no more free wifi for torontoWorking from anywhere in downtown Toronto was great for many wireless workers for the past nine months. There was no need to walk aimlessly looking for an open wireless signal, now that time has sadly come to an end. It was so easy to connect to one of Toronto Hydro Telecom's free OneZone urban Wifi network signals in the six square kilometer area that it covers. The area, centered on the cities financial district and spreading out over City Hall and the University, is now only accessible to paying customers.

40,000 users test drove the new Wifi service during the extended free trial offer, with the highest usage times tracked between 2pm and 5pm Monday to Friday. Starting on April 24th, users of the Wifi signal are required to pay either $4.99/hr, $9.99/day, or $29/month for access.

Is 10 bucks a day CDN too much or just right? Would you prefer a free service that is sponsored by ads or a sponsored login page?

If you are looking for free wireless points in Toronto, check out http://wirelesstoronto.ca/

Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Internet, Web services, Adobe

A preview of Adobe Apollo in the works

adobe apollo live tourA lot has been said about the upcoming Adobe Apollo environment, good and bad. Some people don't like the fact that its another installable runtime, some think its great because of the possibilities. For certain though, this cross operating system runtime is going to be sparking up some very intuitive rich internet applications for the desktop in the next little while. Apollo is scheduled for release at the end of the year, but is currently available online in a public alpha mode.

Adobe's Mike Downey took the audience through Apollo at Sunday's FITC in Toronto, and showed off some very cool in-development projects, including a desktop application that is in the works for eBay, RSS reader, and the Adobe Media Player.

Designers and Developers will have fun with this application; it's built to handle all of the standard tools and code, including support for Flash, Actionscript and HTML.

Watch the presentation below.

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Google

New York Times Travel Guides - Today's time-waster

new york times travel mashupIf you're planning on doing some traveling to New York City soon you're in luck. The New York Times just made finding your way a lot easier with their New York Times Travel Guides map. A Google Maps mashup designed to make it easy to check out popular locations in the city.

The New York City map mashup drops icons on places to stay, dining locations, attractions, and also gives out seasonal information. The New York Times also has map mashups for San Francisco, Toronto, and Miami.

[via GoogleMapsMania]

Filed under: Internet

IM doesn't butcher teens' grammar

IM doesn't kill teen grammarDespite widespread panic among parents and English teachers, it turns out that instant messaging isn't actually causing teens' grammar to deteriorate. A study by the University of Toronto that monitored the speech and IM habits of 70 teenagers found that "instant messaging language does mirror patterns in speech, but that teens, surprisingly, are actually using a fusion of different levels of diction." Online the teens use both informal patterns that English teachers would disapprove of as well as "formal writing phrasing that, if used in speech, would likely be considered 'uncool.'" Toronto linguist Sali Tagliamonte says IMing teens "actually show an extremely lucid command of the language," and English pedants shouldn't worry.

[Via Slashdot]

Featured Time Waster

Forumwarz - a potentially offensive time waster

I pwn UAfter spending the better part of an hour on Forumwarz I still can't decide if it's just sick or if it's kind of fun. It's a bit like a car wreck on the highway. I know I shouldn't be looking but I can't quite turn away.

It's sick, it's twisted, it's the internet on it's worst level and darn it, it's kind of fun. At least for a little while.

Forumwarz is a parody role-playing game that takes place on the internet - or at least the Forumwarz version of it. Your goal is to complete missions that are given to you through a mock up of GoogleTalk called Sentrillion.

Your first "friend" is ShallowEsophagus who begins giving you missions to pwn various forums by being a troll. Depending on the character type you are assigned at start up, you have tools like drooling on the keyboard or bashing your head on the keyboard that you can use to destroy forum threads and eventually, pwn a forum.

Future missions involve buying illegal software from the Russians, pwning more difficult forums and other internet oddness.

Completing missions gives you cash, called Flezz in game, and items that you can pawn or use in other missions. The game is NOT for those easily offended. It's crass, coarse and there are frequent f-bombs in the fake chat sessions.

This is also a game for a more mature audience as it requires you to shop at the Drugs R Fun store to get various concoctions to improve your playing, engage in certain cyber activities to get more Flezz and just generally use a more adult perspective.

If you can get past that, here are the more enjoyable and time-wasting aspects.

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