Tuesday, August 30, 2005

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Starry Night 1.5 Gigapixel Image!

This is pretty cool.

This image is a photomosaic of the famous painting 'Starry Night'. The image is made with over 210.000 tiny photographs and a total size of over 1.500.000.000 points in other words it is a 1.5 Gigapixel Image. Click over the image (Zoom In) until you start to see the tiny images.

read more | digg story

Monday, August 29, 2005

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Avoiding & Removing Spyware

This looks like a nice little article for helping to prevent my current most hated aspect of Windows-based PC's... the dreaded spyware!

read more | digg story

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Shuffle Woes

I purchased myself an iPod Shuffle a couple of months back and have been using it off and on, mostly when I go to play golf and want something light to carry around with me to listen to various podcasts, music or whatever. I have to say, it sounds great and is very small and handy, but it's also got some serious issues.

First off, with my other iPod, I have the choice upon plugging it into my computer on whether or not to auto-sync or not. With the Shuffle, I don't have the choice. It syncs, and syncs, and syncs. So sometimes I end up having to wait for it to copy a bunch of unwanted music, eraseit, and drag what I really want to it manually.

Secondly, I know life is random, but I tend to want to listen to things in the order that I have set them up. For some reason, the Shuffle sometimes doesn't want to play my playlist in the order in which I had it on my computer. Maybe I'm not doing something right, I don't know. I
guess I need to research it more.

And lastly, the darn thing doesn't seem to want to plug into my front usb connector, so I have to use a usb extension cable that I have run from the back of my pc. Annoying. I'm currently looking into getting a new lcd monitor with a built in usb hub, so hopefully that will solve
that problem.

If anyone has any suggestions, please feel free. This thing drives me nuts sometimes.

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Asterisk@Home (v1.3) Review

With the costs for VoIP coming down, the acceptance of personal use of Vonage et al. for home phones rising, and open source projects becoming more capable, Asterisk is at the cutting edge of a new breed of PBX-replacement products for small and medium business.

read more | digg story

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Golf GPS 'Caddy' System

The new 'Caddy' system can be clipped to a belt or golf bag and will provide exact read-outs of distances to bunkers, ponds and greens. Uses gps technology. Not sure what's so special about this thing, as I've been seeing Peter Jacobson push the Sky Caddy on the Golf Channel for weeks.

My thoughts on this are probably not the most traditional. I can't afford a real life caddy, and even if I could, not many courses around these parts even offer caddies. So I don't see anything wrong with using technology to basically give me the same advantages that tour pros get. As long as everyone else has the same technology available to them, I don't see anything wrong with it.

read more | digg story

Friday, August 26, 2005

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Mars Lander found?

An imaging specialist thinks he may have found the Sars lander, Spirit, that crased in 1999 due to rocket failure 130 ft. above Martian surface.

read more | digg story

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

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Google Talk

So Google released it's much anticipated IM service today, dubbed Google Talk. I've been using it this morning and so far, I have to say I like it. As one would expect of Google, it's small, simple and bloatless. It does what you want it to do and seems to do it well.

Also, and this is my favorite part, it uses the open source Jabber protocol, which means you don't have to use the Google Talk client at all, you can use other clients out there that support Jabber. That's always been my beef with IM services... being tied to a certain client. It's like having to use a GE phone to talk to someone on another GE phone. Of course, you do have to have a Gmail account, but who doesn't have one of those nowadays?

Monday, August 15, 2005

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Validation

I've often wondered, and unfortunately I'll never know for sure, if winning one's second major was more difficult than the first. Phil Mickelson won his second today, ridding himself of the title "Best Player Lucky Enough To Win Only One Major".

Validation is the word that comes to my mind. Proof that you're as good as everyone thinks you are and that you can get it done at crunch time. The thing is, and what's great about the game of golf, I can kind of know how it feels too, by dropping a 20 footer on the 18th hole on a Sunday afternoon at my local club tournament. Golf doesn't know that I'm not a pro playing for millions of dollars, and neither does my heart.

Props to Phil. If I'd known predicting Tiger to win would produce these results, I'd have started doing it a long time ago.

Saturday, August 13, 2005

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What Is It With Me?

Ok, so I guess I'm a jinx or something. No sooner do I predict Tiger to win the PGA handily, and he decides to barely make the cut. Not that he can't come back and win the thing, but something is telling me that this golf course is going to be hard for anyone to make up a lot of ground... especially for someone like Tiger, who likes to eat par 5's for lunch. They're basically playing several par 5's on this course, but only two of them have that designation on the score card.

It will be interesting to see what happens this weekend. I think Tiger can still pull it together and have a respectable showing, but unless the entire rest-of-the-field collapses, he's going to have a big crowd to push through in order to get the job done.

(There, maybe that will lift the curse...)

Monday, August 08, 2005

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Who Will Get 2nd?

With the way he's been playing in the majors this season, as far as I'm concerned, it's a foregone concusion that Tiger will take the PGA this week. So I'm wondering who will finish 2nd? Or, if you want, who has the best chance at the upset?

We all know if Vijay can make a putt, he's probably got the best chance of the lot, and with Retief's win yesterday, he's probably gained a little confidence back. As for a wildcard, I've not been following golf very much lately, so I would have no idea... maybe Roy McAvoy?