Yet another reason I wish I could be a photographer. Well, whenever I start earning some real money I'll take it up as a more serious hobby. My camera just doesn't quite have the kinda power to do really cool stuff.



The image above is one of 1500 'astrophotographs' that Trevor Paglen has taken. What is it? A satellite which doesn't officially exist. I'm not sure if I'm impressed that he's so cool or disappointed that 'black ops' could be picked up by a civilian with a camera. Granted, he seems to be pretty amazing, but a civilian nonetheless.

Definitely read the story off Wired, it's pretty amazing. I know that satellites have solar cells by which they are powered, and those are fairly reflective, but I had no idea it left it so brightly visible. That's star bright; well not really, because it's a hell of a lot closer, but nonetheless.

Astronomy is cool, that's another expensive hobby I'll pick up someday.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: technology, space, art]

First off, you only have about two hours left to download Firefox 3 if you want it to count towards their world record.

I downloaded it, and am pretty impressed. This is a huge upgrade; not so much in terms of features, but mostly in terms of performance. I find that it starts up, and runs, much faster than it used to. Additionally, it seems to be taking up less memory (those two kind of go together anyway).



Originally, I had intended to go over some of the nice, new feature, but it's already been done, so I'm just going to link you to an article which does a really good job. The image above is from that article. I especially am enjoying the smart location bar, which is feature #2 in that article.

You can see a graph of Firefox's market share during the course of this 24 hour release. It went up 3%. That may not seem like too much, but this is 3% of all of the internet browsers being used everywhere at any given time. It started above zero because Firefox 3 has been beta released (RC1 - release candidate 1, RC2, etc.) for some time now, but this was the final release yesterday.

On one of the developer's blogs of Firefox, I found an article about some features that may or not make it into Firefox 3. I took a screenshot of a description of one of the features; this one seemed particularly nice to me, and I'm disappointed it's not implemented.



Overall, well done Mozilla, well done.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: firefox, technology]

As you can see from Mozilla's twitter, Firefox 3 will be available for download in 3 hours. They're going for a world record for the most downloads in one day.

So far the browser has gotten great reviews, and expect to see my thoughts on it later today.

The download will be available: here.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: technology, firefox, twitter]

I've been using Twitter recently. I'm really not sure what the appeal is, but I enjoy it. I came across an article from The Daily Galaxy about how the Phoenix Mars Lander is Twittering from the moon.



NASA gets major points for this one. Not only for keeping with the times and embracing things like Twitter, but for the brilliance of it. They're not dully writing about how the Phoenix is doing, but they're actually writing from the perspective of the lander. When referring to NASA they talk about them in the 3rd person. Here are two examples:

"I'm sending about 116 Mb of data home each day (over 100 images plus other data), transmitting 128 kbps"

"Sci team is done with today's news briefing. They'll be back on the clock to start the Martian work shift at 9:30pm PDT. Mars time is rough."



Well played NASA, well played.

Photo: NASA
Photo: Flickr

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: space, technology, techy tuesday, twitter]

I honestly haven't used Vista too much, so there will be little to no Vista bashing from me in this post. With that said, you don't really hear many people praising Vista. I read an article from an ex-Microsoft employee who posted his perspective on Windows 7. Very interesting stuff.

A big issue is reworking backwards compatibility. It's important to keep it; people would flip out without it. Vista's method is to keep old Windows frameworks in libraries, and bring up the library as needed. This is pretty resource intensive. Windows 7 compiles this all into a Legacy Library, and can work from that, much more efficiently than Vista.



When will we get Windows 7? It was projected for 2010, but Bill Gates told investors that it would be around next year. Some analysts seem to have pretty low hopes for Windows 7, but I see this as moving from Windows ME to XP. Hopefully at least.

During all this I've been monitoring WSJ's All Things Digital conference via a liveblog from Engadget. It's been about 45 minutes now, and it's still pretty boring, they're just including semi-interesting clips from their conversations. It's just Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer reminiscing about old times. We're supposed to get a preview of Windows 7. Though, it gave me time to write everything up to this, so when they finally get to the preview, I have all this written. I'm watch Troy as I wait.



Good quote:
"Is Vista a failure? Is it a mistake?" Ballmer: "It's not a failure, it's not a mistake. Are there things we'll modify and improve going forward? Sure."
Gates is mum, smiling off into the distance.

Multitouch! Not surprising; they kind of had to include it, but it's still comforting to see them including it. Teamed up with the Microsoft Surface project. Real multitouch? Hopefully, since the Surface team is there. None of this iPhone multitouch. That's not multitouch, it's dualtouch. 2 isn't multi. You don't say a comic strip is drawn in multiple dimensions, or that you have multiple hands, you say 2!



Anyway, doesn't seem like too much of a preview. Once there's a video posted somewhere I'll link it here, and maybe write some more, but that's it for now.

Photo: Flickr
Photo: Flickr
Photo: Engadget

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: technology, techy tuesday]

Over on Raisu.net, Jailu has embedded a video of one of Microsoft's projects, Photosynth. I recommend you go watch it, or else this idea will seem nowhere near as impressive.



What you see above is "Gyeongbokgung (Gyeongbok Palace) is one of South Korea's finest national treasures. Originally built in 1394, it is the largest palace of the Joseon Dynasty." That's the information that Photosynth gives about this 'collection'. Essentially they combine a ton of photos together and match them based on their orientation. You're able to zoom in, and if you want further zoom, you just switch to a photo that's was taken closer in. You can navigate with the arrow keys, or use your mouse to click on an area to select an image from there.



Above is a shot taken at Grassi Lakes up in Canada. The same idea applies. Here I left the panel on the left open for you to see. You're able to see a bunch of information about the collection. At the moment it's just information that Microsoft has provided, but as the video explains, when this is really implemented, the idea is that the program would search out metadata from all of the photos that compose the shot. As Blaise Aguera explains in the video, this could take data from Flickr - compile all of the images, then include data about the site from tags and descriptions. Alternatively it would search the web for these images, then take the metadata from surrounding text.



This is actually my favorite implementation. Photosynth is able to be used to take us on a tour through Gary Faigin's art studio in Seattle. Enough pictures were taken that you can go on a fairly seamless tour, and since the focus is on the art, you're able to click on some really nice, clear images of the art itself. This seems like a perfect application that galleries, museums, etc. could put to good use.

Again, if you didn't watch the video, here is the link again - watch it.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: art, technology, techy tuesday]

For this week’s Techy Tuesday, I will be reviewing a purchase I made a couple of month’s ago from Woot.com, the Razer Pro|Type Multimedia Keyboard with iPod Dock (but no, I did not pay this much for it). I bought it because I wanted a keyboard I could move around apart from my laptop, because it had a built-in iPod dock, and it had keys which could be assigned to macros; all in all, some excellent features.

The keyboard was pretty high quality, it felt nice and solid, although it was pretty big. Its size was due to it having macro keys on both sides of the regular keyboard, in addition to other useful keys, such as play/pause/rewind/etc. for use with a media player, as well as zoom/rotate buttons for image manipulation, as well as some nice shortcut keys.



Additionally, you could setup multiple profiles; the macro and shortcut keys would have different uses in different profiles. A really nice feature was that you could set the software to auto-switch to different profiles when different programs were loaded up. As you see in the picture above, there were pretty bright blue lights on it. You may have noticed that this review has been in the past tense; that is intentional. Enough with the positive aspects, time to show you its flaws.

The Macro Keys/Profiles:
Very nice idea, but poor implemented. There are a maximum of 8 keys per macro, and they go very slowly, without the ability to adjust the speed. An eight key macro would take about 2-3 seconds to perform. Profiles are nice, but without good macro keys, it’s not that great of a feature, especially when the profile switching can take up to 10 seconds to recognize a program is active.

Durability:
It’s a keyboard, so you shouldn’t really have to worry about it being mistreated. I treated mine well, but did it return the favor? I will use the keyboard itself to write this next paragraph.

Well, as you can see, hee ae some eos. You can' quie ead eeyhin ha I'm ypin, ecause no all o he keys work anymore. There is no real consistency - sometimes keys work, and sometimes they don't; you can see this in the past line. In fact, this is the best the keyboard has performed in a while, which is nice, but not so good for proving my point. I'll continue, and hope that the keyboard stops working, as strange as that may sound. Well, damn - I could go through and cheat by removing random characters, but I'd feel bad about that. Regardless, it's useless unless it can consistently type all of the characters.

The customer service blows. I sent them two emails. The first email, they responded to. I was complaining about the macro stuff that I wrote about above. They essentially said, yeah, that’s how it is; you can’t change it. The second email I sent was about the consistency that I spoke of above. That email is below:

Hi,

I saw that there is a two-year limited warranty on your products. I purchased a RazerPro Keyboard (the one with the iPod dock) in December and it has stopped working properly. Not all of the keys work properly (I am typing this from the laptop directly rather than the keyboard).

The following keys no longer function: b, f, g, r, s, t, v, w, x, backspace, 2, 4, 5. Possibly others as well. Occasionally some of those work, (and probably some others don't work at other times), however as you can imagine, this is no longer able to be used.

How do I go about getting this replaced?

Thanks!

They didn’t respond. My response to their lack of response is below. This also summarizes my review of their product.



I wish I had read more reviews. Maybe I can make this into a snake?

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: technology, techy tuesday, ranting]

In an attempt to make sure I do more work on Will and Beyond, I'm going to try and do a weekly column: Techy Tuesday. It will be up at some point on Tuesday every week. (East coast time.) I haven't decided on any sort of strict formula for this, and I don't think I will, but it will be techy related.

NES Hacking



Everyone remember their days of NES. Unless you're too young. Or you were deprived as a child. But really, if you didn't have any friends growing up who had one, you were too sheltered, where was your ambition?

Anyhow, the image you see is someone putting an entire NES system in a cartridge. See that indention in the middle? That's where you put the game - yes, a cartridge in a cartridge. The obvious question is what happens when you get two and put them in each other - maybe they make little Game Boys?



Now here is someone putting the NES in a controller. This one's cool because not only does it have a cartridge slot in the back, it comes with 70 games built-in to it. If you have any moral qualms with using emulators and ROMs, then go away stick with that first mod. I wish I had this kind of talent.

Geeky Jewelery



In case you're having troubles declaring your geekdom, here are a couple options. The first option will only work for men. (Because women don't wear cufflinks, right?) I'm not a fan of most cufflinks, I'm usually satisfied with just the buttons that come on the shirt, but for these Wiimote cufflinks, I'd make an exception. They look like they are really well done.



Finally, we have a pair of ethernet wedding rings. In case any of you are getting married, give it some thought. I pitched it to Micah to use these for his, but I wouldn't put money on it. Just imagine, as you kiss the bride, when you lean in, you could connect them, and your geekiness would be immortalized.

That's it. I'll work to get this up every week, and we'll see how this goes. If you have any suggestions (or especially if you want to write a column of your own), feel free to contact me. (webmaster @ the website name)

Godspeed.

[Comments: 2] [Tags: technology, video games, techy tuesday]

Back in some techy engineering'ish class I took in high school, we got to make a Rube Goldberg machine. It was a good time. I don't remember how many steps it had - probably 15 or so. The idea was to put toothpaste onto a toothbrush. I forget how it started, but I know it ended with dominoes falling onto a rat trap, which pulled out pegs from underneath a brick, which landed on the toothpaste tube. It was a lot of fun.

It was far less impressive than the 156 steps that a team at Purdue used to assemble a hamburger. On the other hand, we didn't spend about 5,000 man hours on it.



Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: food, technology]

So, I was going through my Google Reader, and I came across the headline: "Border virtual fence project delayed again until at least 2011". What do you think of when you see this? My first thought was: "LOST!" Why LOST? Well, on the island, there is a Sonar fence that senses when anything crosses its virtual path and sends high powered sound waves into it which either stuns or kills it.



I was really disappointed when I read through the article and clicked on a link to the original article that Engadget had posted about the fence. That article is titled: "Border Patrol's mobile sensor tower passes first test". How does sensor tower get changed into virtual fence? People really need to work on their deceptive writing.

Image: Lostpedia

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: technology]

The future is here. Well, almost - there's no jetpacks, space colonies or robotic maids (though Roomba's a nice step). However, we now have underwater cars.



I recommend checking out the super-cheesy video that accompanies the post. It's James Bond'esque, but even cheesier. One final comment: "They made the first underwater car a convertible???"

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: technology]

First off, it's Super Tuesday, so I have the New York Times automatically refreshing every minute, hoping to see some news. It won't get exciting 'til around 7pm or so, but I'll keep it open in the background for now anyway.

Edit:
Well, this will be updated throughout the night.


Final Note for the Night:
I'm signing out of politics for the night, I'll do a summary post sometime tomorrow. Good luck Obama.

11:45pm:
As I've mentioned quite a few times, this is about delegates, not the number of states. For instance, Obama did better in New York than Clinton did in Illinois. Chuck Todd at NBC is saying that at the moment it looks like Obama and Clinton might end up splitting today's delegates right down the middle. In this case, Clinton would just have her 70 delegate lead from yesterday, which really isn't too big of a deal.

11:16pm:
Clinton is leading Arizona, California (though this is only 1% reporting), and Utah. No more states for Obama yet. This isn't going how I wanted it to, but there's still time...

10:27pm:
Air America says that Clinton is up 299-219 in terms of delegates. This 80 delegate lead is up 10 from her 70 delegate lead that she had before today. California will be big, and they don't close for another half an hour. We'll see...

10:10pm:
More polls have closed. Current democrat status:
Obama: Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota.
Clinton: Arkansas, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee.
Obama has eight states, while Clinton has only seven. However, some of Clinton's states are big, such as New York, so we'll see how this turns out. Again, these are just who's taking first place in the results from these states. The important thing is the number of delegates, and we don't know that quite yet.

9:25pm:
No changes for the democrats yet, so let's have a quick Republican count.
McCain: Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Tennesee.
Romney: Massachusetts.
Huckabee: Arkansas, Georgia, Missouri, West Virginia.
Paul: (Tumbleweeds roll by...)
Again, this is coming from Air America and the New York Times.

9:01pm:
13 out of 22 democratic polls are closed.
New York went for Clinton, as to be expected. Her being the senator helps a lot. Massachusetts went for Clinton despite the governor, Ted Kennedy, and John Kerry all endorsing Obama there... Shows you that endorsements really matter.

8:46pm:
So far:
Obama: Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois.
Clinton: Arkansas, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Tennessee.
I'm thinking (and hoping) it will be a good night for Obama - we shall see.

8:31pm:
Only 3 states have been called so far: Georgia and Illinois for Obama and Arkansas for Clinton. Results are still pouring in...
Looks like Georgia is going for Huckabee - 15% reporint and he's at 36% followed by McCain at 32%.

8:04pm:
Georgia: 53% Obama / 41% Clinton.
Alabama: 24% Obama / 58% Clinton / 18% Edwards.
These number will be changing a lot, especially this early since we're dealing with pretty low percentage reporting, but that's what keeps this exciting.

7:55pm:
Georgia: 56% Obama / 38% Clinton.
Alabama: 3% Obama / 63% Clinton / 34% Edwards.
Edwards, really? Are people forgetting that he dropped out of the race? I guess they're waiting for him to endorse someone? C'mon!

7:37pm:
Georgia: 64% Obama / 30% Clinton.
Republicans are leaning towards McCain, but with the three candiates in the race still, their numbers are lower, at 36% McCain / 29% Romney /31% Huckabee.

7:25pm:
Georgia: 65% Obama / 29% Clinton.

7:11pm:
CNN, MSNBC, and the NYTimes have called Georgia for Obama.




And for something completely different...
Public toilets, that you have to text message to enter? This is genius. First off, the idea of text messaging a bathroom lets me know that the future is here. The idea is to prevent vandalism, since you can't get in without giving them your phone number, and if you do vandalize - they have you on record. I approve, and I want it here in America. I want it in my house. Granted, it would serve no purpose, and would quite a nuisance when I wake up in the middle of the night, but I still want it.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 1] [Tags: politics, technology]

Apple had a keynote today and announced a bunch of changes.
Summarized (with links to Engadget):

Shuffle: New Colors, that's it. Size/Price: Eh, who cares.

Nano: They made it shorter and stumpier, and it can now play video. Sizes: 4gb/8gb. ($149/$199)
http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/05/apple-announces-new-ipod-nano/

Regular: Nothing too new; bigger size, longer battery life. New navigation apparently. Sizes: 80gb/160gb. ($249/$349)
http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/05/apples-new-ipod/

iPhone: $200 price slash, (haha sucks for early adopters) discontinued smaller model. Size: 8gb ($399)
http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/05/apple-cuts-iphone-price-to-399/

Touch: Completely new: iPod Touch. It's like an iPhone... without the phone. Still has Wifi. Slightly thinner, but other than that, it's an iPhone. Sizes: 8gb/16gb. ($299/$399)
http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/05/ipod-touch-gets-official/



If you don't care too much, just look at the pictures then close the links; not too much said other than what I summarized.

I like the regular iPod myself, others still don't hold enough for me.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: music, technology]