Oct 9th, 2008 • Comments Off
Categories • Music, Technology
Tags • album art, freeware, image, Last.fm
I seldom bother to look at the links in the footer of a webpage, but this time I'm glad that I did. If you click on the Build link at the bottom of the Last.fm pages, you'll be whisked off to build.last.fm—a site full of "free extras built by the community to extend your Last.fm experience."
Many of them look pretty cool, but the one that I liked the best was Gijsco's Desktop Generator. This free application is full of customizable options that allow you to tweak everything just the way you like it: from canvas size to individual album size. It even lets you select what pool of data to draw the albums from, whether it be from your Top Overall, to All albums listened to in the past 3/6/12 months. The result is a beautiful collage of album covers that make for a stunning desktop wallpaper or page background.
I settled on a simple grid of 16×16px album covers, randomly drawn from the pool of albums I've scrobbled from in the last year. Here's a full-scale screenshot showing just a portion:
Sep 23rd, 2008 • Response
Categories • Technology, Videos
Tags • COMDEX, Computer Chronicles, nostalgia, television
Computer Chronicles was a TV show that aired on the U.S. west coast for twenty years starting in 1981. The Internet Archive is currently hosting all (?) episodes of the series; a full list can be seen here.
My favorite episodes are generally the special reports from COMDEX (Computer Dealers' Exhibition), a now-defunct computer trade show held each fall in Las Vegas from 1979 to 2003 (a spin-off COMDEX/Spring debuted in 1981). The CES (computer Electronics Show) and MacWorld Expo episodes are great, too. Anyone interested in retro tech or the historical timeline of personal computing should appreciate these videos. Each one is about ~28 minutes runtime.
COMDEX 1986
COMDEX 1987
COMDEX 1988
COMDEX 1992
COMDEX 1993
COMDEX 1994
COMDEX 1995
COMDEX 1996
COMDEX 1997
COMDEX 1998
COMDEX SPRING 1999
COMDEX FALL 1999
Sep 13th, 2008 • Response
Categories • Informative, Technology
Tags • AIM, generators, Gus Verdun, instant messaging, links, screenname, URL
Gus Verdun's AIM Link Generators:
You type in your AIM screenname, and it spits back the URL for you. Very handy.
Gus has a couple others to pick from here, but they're not as widely used as the two posted above.
Sep 11th, 2008 • Response
Categories • Technology
Tags • Acer Aspire One
Set for Saturday arrival!
Jun 23rd, 2008 • Response
Categories • Technology
Tags • junk, mail, Poetry, spam, verse
"He called her Santiago (or was it Santiago?)"
Back in the summer of 2004, I began receiving a lot of spam which included the most bizarre paragraphs of garbled nonsense imaginable. Strangely, the emails never seemed to advertise anything. Almost immediately I fell in love with them. I proceeded to collect them all, and I have posted the best ones below, along with their titles (the subject line), their authors (the from line), and the dates I received them. Sadly, they abruptly stopped appearing in my inbox one day: disappearing just as suddenly as they had once appeared.
Read on..
Jun 15th, 2008 • Response
Categories • Technology
Tags • applications, file sharing, Mojo
Mojo is a music file sharing application developed and distributed by Deusty Designs, LLC. The program allows users to make their iTunes library visible to one another through clever implementation of a couple well known application layer chat protocols. Once "connected" to each other, users are able to browse the iTunes library of the remote computer, listen to full-length previews, and download anything s/he so desires.
What makes Mojo stand out from other file sharing programs is its unique approach in giving users complete control over who they interact with. Unlike many of the alternatives out there, signing onto Mojo is not the equivalent of rolling out a blanket at the flea market, displaying your wares for the world to see. Rather, users may only connect with one another if two-way permission is confirmed.
My username on Mojo is swarthychins@deusty.com
If you would like to interact with me on Mojo and setup two-way access between your music library and mine, fill out and submit this quick form so that I know who you are. The reason for this is that there is a certain degree of anonymity about the whole thing; and when Mojo prompts for the approval or rejection of a pending "friend request" it identifies the user making the request by their Mojo username only. Therefore, if I get a friend request from BonerJeff@deusty.com and I have no foreknowledge of who BonerJeff really is, then I'm left with no other choice but to reject the request since it is my policy to only approve requests from people I know.
cforms contact form by delicious:days
Mar 29th, 2008 • Response
Categories • Technology
Tags • Google
Read the announcement here
Mar 24th, 2008 • Response
Categories • Technology
Tags • Cornell, extra-terrestrial, image, numbers, radio, space, star, telescope
From Wikipedia.org—
The Arecibo message is a radio message that was beamed into space at a ceremony to mark the remodeling of the Arecibo radio telescope on 16 November 1974. It was aimed at the globular star cluster M13 some 25,000 light years away because it was a large and close collection of stars that was available in the sky at the time and place of the ceremony. The message consisted of 1679 binary digits (equivalent to nearly 210 bytes, since (1679 / 8) = 209.87 (8 bits in 1 byte)) transmitted at a frequency of 2380 MHz and modulated by shifting the frequency by 10 Hz, with a power of 1000kW. The beam was extremely narrow (giving a power equivalent to 20TW if it were omnidirectional) making it the strongest man-made signal ever sent. The entire transmission lasted 1679 seconds and was not repeated. The number 1679 was chosen because it is a semiprime (the product of two prime numbers) and therefore can only be broken down into 23 rows and 73 columns, or 73 rows and 23 columns. This assumes that those who read it will choose to arrange it as a rectangle. The information arranged the first way (23 rows, 73 columns) produces jumbled nonsense (above), but if arranged the second way (73 rows, 23 columns) it forms another image, which is assumed to be recognizable as data.
Reading the image from top to bottom and left to right, it can be divided into 7 parts that state (or show) the following:
- the numbers one (1) through ten (10)
- the atomic numbers of the elements hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus, which make up deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
- the formulas for the sugars and bases in the nucleotides of DNA
- the number of nucleotides in DNA, and a graphic of the double helix structure of DNA
- a graphic figure of a man, the dimension (physical height) of an average man, and the human population of Earth
- a graphic of Earth's solar system
- a graphic of the Arecibo radio telescope and the dimension (the physical diameter) of the transmitting antenna dish
Because it will take 25,000 years for the message to reach its intended destination of stars (and an additional 25,000 years for any reply), the Arecibo message was more a demonstration of human technological achievement than a real attempt to enter into a conversation with extraterrestrials. In fact, the stars that that message was aimed at will no longer be there when the message arrives. According to the Cornell News press release of Nov. 12, 1999, the real purpose of the message was not to make contact, but to demonstrate the capabilities of newly installed equipment.
Dr. Frank Drake, then at Cornell University and creator of the famous Drake equation, wrote the message, with help from Carl Sagan, among others. Whether or not this message has any ostensible effects, it has nevertheless forced humanity to consider how it might communicate with extrasolar beings, and what the contents of any such communications might be.
Dec 10th, 2007 • Response
Categories • Life, Technology
Tags • coffee, innovation, inventions, photography, starbucks, Technology
There will always be a great big place in my heart for no-tech innovation. Tackling the problem of drink spillage, this simple device is smart, reusable, and works with any drink lid similar to the one manufactured by SOLO® that Starbucks uses. Oh, and they hand them out for free (if you aren't offered one, just ask).
Nov 30th, 2007 • Response
Categories • Technology
Tags • Clipmarks, Douglas Adams, grammar, language, pronunciation, quote
It's a shame (but no surprise) that English speakers in the United States can't arrive at some concurrence on a better way to verbalize "www" than by speaking out each letter. I am personally a fan of "tri-dub" or "three dub" or "triple w", or even something more daringly imaginative, like "prefix web". Perhaps I'll just pick one and start using it… and maybe, just maybe, people will come around.
The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for.
– Douglas Adams, The Independent on Sunday, 1999
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