Saturday, December 30, 2006

End of 2006

Every year the blogosphere has a bunch of interesting articles and end of year collections. Since I'm not going to be home tomorrow, I figured I would post a little early and list some of them.

To start off, Google has their annual end of year Zeitgeist data up, showing social trends through searches, as well as a bit on how the data was compiled.

Wired has a bunch of interesting articles, like their annual Vaporware roundup and their "Foot-in-Mouth" awards, also very funny.

BBC has a "100 things we didn't know last year" with many things I didn't know this year.

Bad Astronomy has a Top 10 Astronomy Images of 2006 with some very nice images (thanks /.)

Reuters has a news year in review section with most read articles, best pictures, etc.

JibJab has one of their excellent flash clips reviewing 2006 (politically).

A new version of Knoppix (the excellent Linux LiveCD/DVD) has just been released. Among other improvements, it now contains beryl a nifty 3D compositing window manager. Fun to play with for those of you with decent 3D accelerators (just about everyone now). Torrents available on the Knoppix Tracker.

Mashable has a social networking awards (ie myspace, etc) (via Qwerky)

Digital Photography School has updated their How To Photography Fireworks article in preparation for any New Year's festivities

The Google Earth blog has a round up of 10 GE animations for those of you with a recent GE4 beta. They also have a listing of GE Games (see their next post for more on "Mars Sucks")

If anything exciting happens in the next couple days I'll try to add it, but for now Happy Surfing (oh, and Happy New Year ;-)

Sunday, December 24, 2006

Merry Christmas

So maybe I'm jumping the gun a little here, but I figure people might be interested in how the internet is celebrating.

For example, both NORAD and Google have their Santa trackers going. (NORAD Google)

Digital Photography School has some tips on taking good pictures at any festivities you may be having, though the best pictures I took at my families little get together today were of some feathered friends enjoying my grandparent's bird feeder.

You may also be interested in this guide to photographing the lights that seem to be lighting up many towns these days. It looks like the trick is to take the pictures before it's completely dark.

Don't forget to check out Google's annual Holiday cartoon, if you haven't already noticed it (click the Google logo). Some of the old ones are still available too, just change the number in the end of the above link (ie: doodle12.html becomes doodle10.html)

Enjoy Your Holidays (if you are looking for an alternative)

A couple of my Holiday photos (NY weather is odd this year...)

Blue jay
Woodpecker

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Zudeo

I saw on Slashdot today that BBC will be releasing some of their old shows on the Azureus network. Maybe I've had my head in the sand lately (I have been busy with other things) but I thought Azureus was a Java based bittorrent client. Turns out that Zuedo is a website hosting torrents of various videos. They show a screenshot of a "Zuedo" client on the homepage, but it is just a copy of Azureus 2.5 (despite the fact that the site is "powered by Azureus 3.0", which I don't think is out yet). This could be because I'm using Linux though, maybe you get something different on a Windows machine. Anyway, they have a bunch of video available right now, mostly trailers and open source films but it looks like there should be more soon. It does work pretty well, the torrents are automatically loaded into Azureus using javascript (On my machine Azureus has to be running when I click the link). You might as well give it a try, and hopefully we will see more content soon. I guess if this one got past me, it probably got past everyone else as well.

Monday, December 18, 2006

Digitizing old Music

Since I don't have time to write much of my own these days, I thought you might be interested in Lifehacker's short guide to digitizing cassette tapes. This basic method also works for records, though you may need some extra hardware and an amplifier. I found that with my nforce2 motherboard's integrated sound I can wire an unamplified record player directly into line in and just up the volume with software while maintaining reasonable quality. It would be better to use an amplifier (even better, one that can take out all the noise associated with records so you don't have to do it with software). You should be able to get everything you need at your local RadioShack or equivalent. Audacity, which Lifehacker suggests is a great app, but if your using Linux, I suggest you also look at Rezound which has some nice filters to try and reduce the noise a bit. You may also be able to get mplayer/mencoder to clean up your audio for you, but I haven't tried it (look at mplayer -af help)

At any rate, this is a good rainy day project (seems like it never snows anymore). Anyone have any other suggestions for fairly automated filtering software to cleanup audio from older sources?

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Santa in Google Earth

It looks like Google is outdoing last year. As announced awhile ago, they are including a 12 day scavenger hunt as well as the usual Santa tracking. Even if your not into the whole Christmas thing (do people forget that there are non Christians around?) it is always fun to explore the earth. All you have to do is install Google Earth (if you don't already have it) and download the kml found on this page. If you happen to have trouble finding today's "present" try zooming out a bit. If you type the location in the search box it zooms in to the point were the 3d model is off screen.

Have fun!

VLC

Looking for a new media player?

A new version of VLC was released yesterday, which makes this a great time to bring it up. If you haven't already heard about it, VLC is a media player that can also stream video. In other words, if you have a fairly fast computer, you can play a DVD in one computer using VLC and watch it on another, also using VLC. VLC also has the advantage of being able to play most audio and video formats. Go check it out here, and if you want to try out the streaming feature look here.

Saturday, December 09, 2006

XFire Plugin for Gaim2-beta5

If you are a user of the XFire plugin for gaim that I mentioned back in October, you might be interested to know that there is now a pre-release build for the latest gaim beta (5). Get it here.

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Open Source Cookbook

One of the great things about the internet is that you can find information about anything with it, for example how to make food. It came to my attention that my family didn't know about the Open Source Cookbook, so I thought I might as well mention it here. Having some dietary restrictions I haven't actually tried any of the recipes, but the introductory info seems sound. There are two versions available right now. The newer one is much shorter, so I would look at both. I'm not sure if the "preview" version is only some of the content, or is just shorter due to formatting changes (it seems like everything is there).

If you would prefer something written even more for the "Geek" crowd, I would suggest you look at Cooking For Engineers

Flickr "Camera Finder"

There are a lot of things to consider when shopping for a digital camera. Once you decide what type you want go to a store and try some different models then read reviews on the ones you like. If you still need some more help, you can look to the world at large and see which cameras seem to be most popular. This is were the Flickr Camera Finder can help. It shows the popularity of all the cameras used by Flickr users (which should cover just about any model made recently I would think). You can see the most popular from each class of camera (phone, point&shoot, DSLR) as well as the most popular brand. You can also search for a specific model and see some pictures taken with that camera. This is very useful, since it allows you to get an idea of real world image quality. If every picture taken with a certain camera is blurry or discolored, it might be a good one to avoid. Unfortunately Flickr doesn't allow you to zoom the pictures to see the fine details, but its better than nothing.
It does seem to me like the Flickr is a bit biased toward DSLRs (maybe because they produce better images, overall) Even so the Camera Finder is at least an interesting and possibly useful tool. Try it here.