Here are a couple of interesting photo galleries from TechRepublic. The first’s about Where the menu is an appetizer” – a menu card which literally builds up your appetite as its made up of edible material and served as an appetizer. The second’s a photo gallery of the fastest train on rails which set the record recently.
Author: Aditya
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Some interesting .NET 3.0 prototypes from thirteen23
I was going through my feeds and came across the post “Killer Vista app demoed“. The post talks about apps being developed using .NET 3.0 and web services – specifically ones by thirteen23. I checked out the nostalgia prototype which is a browser for the flickr service.The interface looks quite nice, and allows you to login using your flickr id. If you choose to login, then the app downloads all your photos, and saves them locally (which is pretty useful in itself, though the resolution is quite low). It also allows you to launch photo editors, organize, tag and search photos. Not bad for a prototype.
There are also a few other prototypes available, which make use of other APIs, like cine.view for netflix. Some are available as downloads (like nostalgia) while others have to be launched directly from the browser.
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404 errors and server complaints
I was going through one of the Geek Trivia articles on TechRepublic on the origin of the 404 – page not found error (which everyone would have encountered at some point of time), and it contained a link to a very interesting and humorous page. The page is something like a page not found error from the “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” world, with the server giving you a nice lecture. Wonder what it would be like if we had the server responding in a similar fashion for all the errors that we encounter on the web.
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Some new google techs
Google seems to have launched a couple of revolutionary technologies today – one the Gmail paper and the other being Google TiSP (which you’ll find on the main page) – and both are free. Gmail paper is basically a service which allows you to get physical copies of your emails (including photos) delivered to you as regular mail. Google TiSP on the other hand is Google’s new free wireless broadband access service.
And just in case you are wondering how Google’s managing to provide these superb services for free, just take a look at the calendar, and things should become clear ;-).
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Clickers, cardboard computers & chaoscope fractals
A few interesting photo galleries I came across on techrepublic:
- Clickers live forever – on the evolution of remote controls and as a tribute to Robert Adler (co-inverntor of the first successful TV remote)
- Cardboard computer prank – A nice cardboard office setup
- Chaoscope fractals – some beautiful fractals created using the Chaoscope software
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More dynamic playlists for the iPod
I had written about the usefulness of dynamic playlists, ratings and tagging for organizing music on my iPod last year. Since then, I have loaded more music onto my iPod, and I was looking for ways to play the recently loaded music. In addition, I also found that just relying on the genre and ratings of songs to create dynamic playlists (the option can be found under the file menu) is not sufficient.
Looking at the play count of the files in iTunes, I found that over 2500 songs have never been played. So, I went about creating some more dynamic playlists. One had to be for songs that I have not yet listened to, while another for recently loaded songs. So, now I have the following dynamic playlists on my iPod:
- Top rated songs – for songs with a rating of 5 stars
- 4 stars – for the next best songs
- Recently added – for songs added in the last 60 days (this filter can be set in different ways)
- Low play count and unrated – for songs having play count of less than 2 (unrated songs is mainly to decrease the size of the playlist as high rated songs will feature in other lists) – useful for rating songs too
- Top rated Hindi songs – for songs having “Hindi” in the genre tag and rating >= 4
- Top rated Bengali songs – for songs having “Bengali” in the genre and rating >= 4
- Top rated Western – songs not having “Hindi” and “Bengali” in their genre and rating >=4
Now I find that the music is fairly well organized and I can listen to the types I want quite easily. Also for those looking to backup the contents of the iPod, there are some free alternatives like iDump. Also, the new versions of Winamp (5.3 onwards) also include plugins for backing up music from the iPod.
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Another virtual world coming up
I was going through my feeds today and came across a post on Scobleizer about a “New Virtual world coming from Australia“, which talks about another Secondlife like virtual world being developed. The virtual world is named Outback Online with the tag-line “User Generated Places”, and is being developed by Yoick. The basic aim of the project seems to be to provide a 3D social network. Right now, there is not much information available on the site or the blog, other than a beta sign-up form.
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Useless Account – just for laughs
Another site I came across through one of my Google Reader subscriptions – Useless Account. It basically satirizes the rate at which people (me included) are signing up for new services that are mushrooming on the net. The site allows you to create an account and tinker around with it – that’s about it. Read the faqs section for some more laughs. And no, I have not signed up for an account on the site….. yet :-).
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Software Wars
An interesting “graphic map depicting the epic struggle of FOSS against the Empire of Microsoft”.
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Make: iPod stethoscopes, chargers etc
I came across the Make: site through one of my RSS feeds, and it has quite a lot of interesting projects and podcasts on it. The site has quite a few projects for/using the iPod, including an iPod based stethoscope which can be used to record and playback heart sounds, a USB adapter and charger kit among many others. There are also many other projects like an open source mp3 player, an alarm clock that runs away and a wifi liberator.
