I was having a look at some beautiful fractal flames on the Techrepulic gallery. The gallery mentioned an open source fractal flame editor – Apophysis – which I checked out. The software seems to be quite interesting and allows you to generate random fractal flames or create/edit some of your own. It also includes a scripting engine similar to Pascal which allows you to create/edit/animate the fractals among other features. It can make for quite some interesting viewings. The animations of the fractals is something similar to the visualizations available with various audio players (iTunes, Winamp etc). There is also screen saver called electric sheep which lets you generate & view fractal flames.
Author: Aditya
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Tags, ratings, dynamic playlists and the iPod
It turns out that tagging and ratings are useful not only for blogs and other web content, but also for music on your iPod (the 30 GB video version), especially when you have over 4000 songs in it. Audio files were probably one of the first to support tagging which was really useful for the user. iPod/iTunes (and many other players) can also use these tags to create dynamic playlists based on given criteria. This makes the tags all the more useful.
I listen to a variety of music, and unless the music is properly tagged, it would be nearly impossible (or atleast too tedious) to locate and listen to the song(s) I want to at a given time. The basic tags like title, artist, album and genre are pretty much a necessity, and identifying songs in their absence would be impossible without actually listening to them. Ratings also serve as a useful filtering criterion.
I have also found the dynamic or smart playlists feature of iTunes/iPod to be particularly useful when it comes to listening to music of a certain variety. I create a set of smart playlists based on different moods, ratings, genres etc and when the music tags are updated, songs automatically get into the appropriate playlist(s). This saves a considerable amount of effort and also keeps my playlists up to date.
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IE7 & FF2 flaws being blown out of proportion
The blog post » Can we STOP with the sensational browser flaw reporting? Please!
gives a pretty good indicator of the way the relatively minor flaws in
the latest Internet Explorer 7 & Firefox 2.0 browsers are being
blown out of proportion. In fact, as per the links given by the author,
the older versions of the browsers have had several critical flaws
being reported, and these have pretty much gone by unnoticed. -
Neodymium in my headphones
Ever wondered what’s so special about speakers and headphones which proudly exhbit the fact that they have Neodymium? Well, I certainly have. First of all, what is Neodymium? It is a rare earth metal which is used for a variety of purposes like making magnets. That explains its presence in speakers & headphones. It turns out that Neodymium is used to make some of the strongest magnets. Also, looks like we have our share of Neodymium in computers too – its used in the hard drive head motors.
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Encyclopaedia of cartoons and comics
Ever wondered when and how many of the popular cartoons and comic strips originated? The following site – Toonopedia – contains a lot of information about many a popular cartoon/comic strip along with some information on the persons behind them. Mel Blanc is one of them (in case you’re wondering who he is, he has voiced a majority of the Hanna-Barbera and Looney Tunes/Merry Melodies characters like Tweetie, Sylvester, Road Runner etc).
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MMORPGs people play
Yesterday I was having a look around for different MMORPGs available on the net, especially the free ones. Wikipedia’s got (as expected) a few list and comparisons for different MMORPGs available. So, here they are:
Currently, Second Life seems to be the most MMORPG getting the maximum attention due to it’s vastness, in-game economy and ability to create objects. I was wondering whether there are any other free MMORPGs which have grabbed the attention of people.
I’ve personally played Planeshift, a free MMORPG with a fantasy/mythological setting, currently in the pre-alpha stage, and RuneScape which can be played from within the browser itself. Both the games are pretty good, especially Planeshift which has pretty good graphics.
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Daily comics on the net
I had stumbled upon this interesting site (Daily comics by Raghu Angadi) quite a few months ago, which shows you a collection of the daily comic strips from various sources on the net. There are also archives maintained on the site, and so you can catch up on older issues of the strips too. The page is generated using a Perl script, and the author has also included a link to the script source on the page.
I am quite a regular visitor to the site. Yesterday though, when I visited the site, I noticed that all the comic strip images were replaced with links to the actual images. The following is the quote from the author on this: “Well friends, an era comes to end. Uclick.com has asked me not to show images here. I am just providing direct links to the strips. Thanks to all the visitors and to those who took time to write to me.”
However, it is still possible to view the site in its older form, thanks to user scripting which allows you to alter the way a page is displayed in your browser. There are extensions/plugins for various browsers which allow you to create or add small user scripts that alter the way you view a page. For Firefox & Flock, it is the greasemonkey extension, while for IE you have various alternatives like Trixie, Reify Turnabout, GreasemonkIE etc, and Opera has built in support for user scripts. You can find more information on user scripting in the wikipedia entry on greasemonkey.
I have created a greasemonkey script which replaces the links on the mentioned page with the respective images. You can download it from userscripts.org
or from here (this one has to be renamed to use .user.js extension in place of .txt– outdated, use the userscripts file). The installation procedure in greasemonkey is quite simple – just drag & drop the script in Firefox (after installing Greasemonkey), & then select install. The script may work in Opera, and with similar plugins for IE, though I’ve not tried it out yet.Update: Just found a nice post which explains how to use the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox.
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eyeOS – a Web Desktop Environment
I came across an interesting software recently – eyeOS, which is meant to provide a desktop like environment on the web. It provides you with an entire desktop like interface on the web with some basic office applications like calendar, calculator etc. In case you want to try it out, you have to create a new account (quite a simple process) on the site, and then log in to try it out. You can also customise the desktop theme and install new applications (not sure what’s available for it though).
I was also checking out the eyeOS site, and it is apparently an open source project. It is also possible to download and install eyeOS on your system. The Windows package comes with its own web server and browser (based on Apache & Firefox respectively), and so you do not require any kind of additional setup. There is also a FreeBSD package and the source available for download. So, if you want to experiment with it, check it out on the eyeOS download page.
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Fun with Microsoft Virtual PC
First of all, in case you are not familiar with what Virtual PC is, it is basically a software which emulates a PC and its associated hardware. For more details check out the wikipedia entry. It obviously has its business uses, but that does not mean that one cannot have fun with it.
It can be useful for running different operating systems on the same machine without making any changes to the host machine configurations. I have been reading up on different linux distributions over the last few days, and was looking for a way to try out some, especially now that many of the distros have live CDs. So, I gave it (Microsoft Virtual PC) a try yesterday. It’s quite simple to use and you can customize the configuration of the virtual PC to a fair extent, including the RAM, hard disks and other drives. Once I had set up a couple of virtual PCs, I needed some OSes to run on them. This is where the linux live distros (Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux being the smaller ones) and FreeDOS came in handy.
Once you start up your virtual PC, you need to have a bootable device (virtual hard disk/floppy/CD) in place so that you can actually use it. In case of the linux live distros, they can be run directly off the CD, and you do not really need to install them on the virtual hard disk. In case of FreeDOS, you can mount the CD image and install it on the virtual hard disk. So, setting up a virtual PC is pretty much like setting up an actual PC, only much faster. As for network/internet access from the virtual PC, it is possible to configure a network adapter for it, but I haven’t tried it out.
So, what do you do with it once you’ve set up a virtual PC? Well, anything you like. Use it like a real PC, try out different stuff (including playing games). This way you can try out a new OS (granted it is available as a CD image), without actually reconfiguring or messing up your existing system. -
Computers I’ve used – The Spectrum
My experiences with computers has been largely restricted to micro computers (considering the fact that I was born in 1983). There’ll be lots of people who would have dealt with all kinds of machines I have never even seen (maybe heard of), but let me do my best.
One of the first computers that I happened to work on was the Spectrum (Sinclair – wikipedia entry) which belonged to my grandfather, which he had purchased around 1987 (PCs were quite expensive then, especially in India). There were quite a lot of varieties of the Spectrum available (started from 16K and went up to 128K), with this one being a 64K db Spectrum model. Some of it’s contemporaries would be the BBC, Atari, Commodore 64 and quite a few others (I hope I’m right). The machine used ordinary tapes/cassettes for storage, and you had to wait for 3-5 minutes to load a program from them. There were floppy drives for the Spectrum though (in fact the person from whom my grandfather used to purchase software for the spectrum had one.
The machine itself was just a basic keyboard cum CPU unit to which you had to attach the tape recorder, joystick and other peripherals. The machine used Sinclair BASIC for programming, and the keywords were typed from preset keys and other special keys (not sure if I explained it properly – maybe this picture will help). What made the Spectrum special was probably it’s graphics capabilities. I used to play a lot of games on it, ranging from Arkanoid to Batman, tennis, cricket and lots more. We had quite a few books with programs for the Spectrum, and I wrote & stored a few of them with some help from my father and grandfather. My grandfather used the machine primarily for storing his contacts, journals etc (writing programs for each).
It’s been a very long time since I last worked on it – my grandfather gave the machine away to one of my cousins when he bought a new PC (as late as 1998). With that he also had he give up all the daat stored on the old tapes.
However, it’s still possible to go back to the spectrum environment right on our PCs using emulators. I’ve tried out a few of them. Some of them even seem to have support for reading tapes (I had tried it a long time ago by hooking up the tape player to the PC’s line-in without much success though). So, if you are one of the persons who used the Spectrum, do check out the following sites (in fact you might have already):
There are quite a lot of others available containing both emulators and tape images (not sure about the legal issues though, if any). Also in case you want to have a look at old computer photos, if those old computer names made you nostalgic, check out the following links (all from TechRepublic – might require you to register):
- Dinosaur Sightings: Computers from the 1970s
- Dinosaur Sightings: Computers from 1980-1983
- Dinosaur Sightings: Computers from 1984-1989
- Dinosaur Sightings 2
- Photos: Dinosaur Sightings 3
So, what are the computers you’ve worked on?
