Popular Science magazine has put its entire 137-year history of issues online for free.  In partnership with Google, the magazine is offering a search tool that will allow you to read anything it ever published.  Here’s an example of a publisher who actually knows what it is doing in the 21st century.  There are very [...]

It’s hit me what I really can’t stand about the new Apple iPad.  It’s been mentioned by most of the reviews of this new tablet device, but I don’t think people are really getting the scope of what Apple is up to.  The iPad, like the iPhone and iPod Touch before it, does not support [...]

Google’s Crisis Response Center is offering free voice calls to Haiti.

YouTube has built an open-source application called YouTube Direct that allows news organizations to request and accept uploaded videos from citizen journalists anywhere in the world.  The idea is to give news organizations the ability to put out a call for videos on a specific news story and then review the direct uploads to select [...]

John Grisham on NBC’s Today Show discusses his new book, writing novels versus short stories, and so-called predatory book pricing by large retailers like Walmart, Target and Amazon.com.  I like Grisham in this interview.  He’s a good interview and he seems sharp.  He talks about how it’s much more difficult to fix a problem in [...]

There’s a huge blue whale swimming the internet.  It’s monstrous.  Life-size.  This is no laughing matter.  You should see this thing.  It’s gigantic and blue.  The mouth alone could swallow you whole.  You could probably live inside this creature for a few weeks at least.
Want to see it?  The ginormous blue whale is right here.
The [...]

Marvel Comics has a Create Your Own Comic tool that lets you put together either a simple 3-panel strip or an entire 22-page comic book.  You don’t actually draw anything, but you choose layouts, backgrounds, characters and objects.  You can re-size everything and layer objects on top of each other.  It’s great for trying one’s [...]

The NFB (National Film Board of Canada) has just released a new free iPhone app that lets you watch hundreds of their films.  You can use the app even while you’re away from hotspots by downloading films for viewing during a 24-hour period.  The NFB is one of my favorite places on the web for [...]

A science fiction web serial!  The Mercury Men.  This is amazing. I love stuff like this. A group of filmmakers are producing a series of cliffhanger shorts just for the web. The trailer looks very interesting, well-shot, exciting, and perfect for web viewing. These people seem to really know what [...]

Two French photographers, Serge Brunier and Frédéric Tapissier, spent weeks in the desert highlands of Chile, and a week in the Canary Islands, taking photos of the stars. Using a Nikon D3 digital camera, they took thousands of photos of the night sky and then stitched the photos together to make a panoramic view [...]

The University of Texas has an excellent program online called The Edgar Allen Poe Digital Collection.  They’ve got digital copies of Poe manuscripts, letters, early editions, books that he owned, newspaper clippings, and photos.  This image shows an edition of collected poems owned by Poe in which can be seen his handwritten notes and corrections [...]

Smith Magazine has another Harvey Pekar comic with drawings by Sean Pryor.  It’s called Searchin’.  I buy every book Pekar publishes.  His collected editions keep me fascinated for weeks because I try to read them slowly to make them last.
Pekar makes comic books out of the ordinary.  Of course they are much more interesting than [...]

I don’t think there is a more significant American comic book writer than Harvey Pekar.  Now he is making comics on the web.  Smith Magazine offers the first installment of what promises to be a series.  It’s called The Pekar Project.
The first story is Pekar & Crumb: Talkin’ ’bout Art.  It’s drawn by Tara Seibel.
This [...]

Animator Nina Paley, who single-handedly made the feature film, Sita Sings the Blues, has released all of the Flash animation source files (.fla files) that make up the entire film.  She’s giving away the building-blocks of the entire film!  That’s like a traditional animator giving you all the drawings.  Paley has given the files a [...]

Last week, Amazon.com unwittingly dealt an enormous body blow to the concept of Digital Rights Management (DRM) by remotely deleting legally purchased copies of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from all Kindle ebook devices.  The excellent TeleRead site devoted to all things e-book and e-reader has a very well-considered post about the dangers of DRM and [...]

We have totally had enough of Amazon.com at Candlelight Stories and have completely removed them from advertising space on this site and permanently severed our ‘associate’ relationship with the company.  The reason is simple.  Over the weekend, Amazon went into customers’ Kindle ebook devices and deleted purchased copies of George Orwell’s classic novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four [...]

Yesterday I posted about the JFK Presidential Library’s interactive recreation of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing mission. The mission has now reached stage 6 with the command module at a distance of 22,000 nautical miles from earth. The site is doing an absolutely marvelous job of making you feel as if you [...]

At 8:02 am Pacific Time, Thursday July 16, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library’s We Choose the Moon project recreates the launch of the Apollo 11 moon rocket.  The interactive site will recreate the entire mission to the moon down to the minute, complete with status reports, images, 3D animations and even Twitter updates.  The [...]

A fascinating development at YouTube: The Reporters’ Center, where you can get tips on effective journalism from prominent reporters. The new YouTube channel went live today and is already offering some interesting how-to videos like the one above by reporter Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. He shows you how to be [...]

Penguin’s Puffin Books has a new membership site called We Make Stories, where kids can use an online tool to create stories.  There are several types of story creation, including a remix tool to use on existing classic tales, a map maker, and a comic book style creator.  It’s all drag and drop type stuff [...]