If you’re in love with Google and want to extend its all-seeing gaze to the intimate recesses of your hard drive, Google Desktop Search is the way to go. Google Desktop runs on your PC, but you access it via your web browser, submitting queries exactly as you would to www.google.com.… Read the rest
Month: May 2005 (Page 1 of 2)
If you’re a bit more serious about your digital photography, you probably want something that puts all of your camera’s manual controls right at your fingertips, like the Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D. This impressively large, traditional-looking digital SLR lays it all out, with a profusion of dials, knobs, and buttons for controlling shooting modes, white balance, flash and exposure compensation, and more.… Read the rest
Some things a man just can’t explain: What drives him to drink. Why he can’t stop a-cussin’ and a-brawlin’. And why he lugs around a big, beefy digital SLR when there are pocketable cameras aplenty.
But when you start taking pictures with an SLR, you’ll understand.… Read the rest
What happens if oil isn’t cheap anymore? Our farming and food systems collapse, the suburbs implode, a period of violence ensues, and in the end, we’re all living in small farming communities, riding bikes and milking cows by hand. So says James Howard Kunstler, who predicts this all may start to happen as soon as three years from now.… Read the rest
Plus 1,439 other minutes–all illustrated with multiple photos–at the curiously engrossing Human Clock. A new shot every minute, of course.… Read the rest
Bodies embedded in plastic for display in San Francisco’s Masonic Center are now decomposing, while on display, and they’re leaking.
“The bodies were not degreased properly before they were filled with plastic,” says ABC News.
(via BoingBoing)… Read the rest
I’ve sat through Wagner operas that moved the plot forward faster.
Sure, the computer generated imagery is amazing–but overwhelming. It quickly become so ubiquitous that it’s no longer all that impressive (Coruscant looks a bit like Las Vegas at night, oh and look, here comes another floating droid), and without a really strong storyline, the story gets boring fast.… Read the rest
Sci fi author and EFF publicist Cory Doctorow (see my 2003 interview with him) has some good advice on writing. “Every morning I get up and I spend half an hour writing 250 words on the novel and a year later I have a book.”… Read the rest
Wired News reviews Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good For You and wonders: If video games are making us smarter, why can’t we solve problems like Iraq and Social Security?
The answer’s easy: Make a killer first person shooter called Iraq: The Game and a gripping multiplayer online game called Social Security: Quest for Power.… Read the rest
John Scalzi is not worried about the state of book publishing in an age of easily made, widely-distributed digital copies:
… Read the restI write books, but you know what? I’m not a book writer, any more than a musician is an LP musician or an MP3 musician.