Chris May

I saw this over on Halsted on Friday.

This slideshow was created with http://flickrslidr.com/.

I read that there are only 20 or so of these on the streets at the moment. 

Pretty nice!

This 2nd slideshow was created with PictoBrowser.

This one was created with http://www.slideflickr.com/

Amazons S3 service already had crazy cheap bandwidth and storage.

Today I got an email that they are LOWERING the price even more!

Current data transfer price (through April 30, 2008)
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.180 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.160 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

New data transfer price (effective May 1, 2008)
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB

I was having problems getting streaming media to play on my old messed up laptop.

So now that I am finally on my new machine, I can again listen to launchcast (music.yahoo.com).

Launchcast was doing what Pandora Radio is doing, way before Pandora became popular.

Launchcast learns from your ratings and plays music it thinks you would like.  In addition, you can setup other users as "Influencers," which I have done with my brother who also users Launchcast.

So for example, when my brother ranks a song up, eventurally it will play on my station.

See this image for example:

Pretty sweet.

I love this service.  I have found so much music this way. 

This is pretty cool.  Simply alter the search parameters for some Amazon.com URLs and you can filter the results to only show things that are 90% off!

Nice!

This is really cool.

I did a project just like this in 7th grade, but I only did it for the (then) 9 planets.

This is a really neat example of how to use the advanced search abilities of Google to narrow down your search to specific files.

From the article:

The following is a Google search string for searching open web directories containing downloadable Nirvana music files.  Substitute the term Nirvana in the search string for any other band of your liking.  You can always bookmark the search result for future use.

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “Nirvana”

With some very slight modifications the same search string can easily be used to search for ebooks in DOC and PDF format:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(pdf|doc) “george orwell 1984″

Or perhaps your looking for some specific video file:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(mpg|wmv) “towelie”

This picture is really cool!

This individual took a picture of the Sun at the same time of day and this is the resulting overlap:

Very neat!

This site has a pretty cool application.

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

You type in a word, and it will show you simliar words, along with definitions and pronounciations.  You view them in an unrooted tree format, showing their relationships.  You can then navigate this tree by clicking on a word, which expands the nodes around that word.

Pretty cool.

About time!

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Chris+May

This is pretty cool.

It shows how you can use some software to create a giant picture made up of many pieces of paper.

Alpha Geek has an interesting article on how to level the volume of your MP3 collection so that you don't end up with some songs being too loud and some being too quiet.

Basically they suggest you use MP3Gain and show you how it works.

I would like to try this, but I don't even own one any more.

I should see if they have one on ebay or the dollar store.

Here is a neat little collection of 10 different magic tricks and how to do them.

Pretty cool.

SeaLand (not the one in Florida) is basically an old WWII fort that some guy claimed as his own "Country."

Now it is up for sale.

This site is getting hammered right now, but I will really want to check back later and see all the pictures.

This is awesome!

(Click 2 times in the space below to get the video to show)

This is a pretty interesting idea.

You agree to serve up some ads on your site, and in exchange, your ad will be served up on others site, w/o any cost to either party.

Pretty interesting idea.

I wish I coudl take credit for that line, but it was from Colbert.

So now Pluto is going to be a Drawf Planet, along with UB313 (Xena) and Ceres.

To see the full image you might need to expand your window or use the scrollbar at the bottom of this article.

UB313 is larger than Pluto, and farther out in orbit.

I kinda liked the idea of calling Pluto and Charon a "dual planet," as Charon is so large that it was somewhat unfair to say that it orbits Pluto, but they aren't going to do that.

Ceres is the largest asteroid in the Asteroid Belt but because it hasn't swept the area clear of other asteroids (and I guess it never will b/c of its close proximity to Jupiter) it will never meet the new definition of a planet:

“a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.”

I figure I should put up a review of my Sansa e200 incase anyone else is thinking of getting one.

I had a couple trips I had to take last month and my old Archos mp3 player decided to die on me.  Luckly for me I was able to find a Sankdisk Sansa e200 or e220 or e2XX whatever.  My model is the 6GB version, which is the largest they offer at the moment.

The unit cost $280 at Circuit City and while I could have got it online for $250 or so, I was going to be on a plane the next day so I didn't mind paying a little extra to have it with me on the trip.  Have I mentioned that I hate Circuit City?  Why is it that every time I got there I end up getting frustrated or pissed off?  I guess the one time I went there to see a TiVo demoed was ok... except now that I think about it they didn't know how to work the Tivo.  I ended up buying one and loving it though (this was back in '99).

Anyway, I have to say I am very pleased with the Sansa.  It was exactly what I hoped it would be in almost every way.

Battery life is awesome.  I think I read somewhere that it does 15 hours, which sounds about right.  I haven't had it run out on me yet.  Oh, this does bring me to one of the few things I don't like about it.  You can't listen to it while you have it connected to your computer, which means you can't listen to it while you are charging it thorough the USB.  Maybe you could "disconnect" through windows and have it still get power, but I don't know.

Playback quality and volume are good.

Navigation is IPod-like, which is ok, but rather than use a "touch wheel" they have an actual wheel you can turn that makes navigating easier in my opinion.  The only thing I don't like about navigation is that if you want to change to a song on another album by the same artist, you have to click Menu (down), Back To List (Middle), and then "Back" (Right).  I guess there is not obvious way to improve that, so overall I can't really complain.

FM Radio / Video: Well I will never be using the video, and I am sorry to say that as soon as I started using the FM radio I realized how much I would have rather had AM.  Oh well.

Audio Recorder: Haven't used it.

Graphics: I was a little suprised that there were now "Themes" to choose from, only the 1 default theme.  It's not bad, just something I would have figured they would do.  They show the album cover if you downloaded it, which is cool.

PC Integration: Awesome.  My winXP computer saw it right away as some kinda media device, no driver installs or anything.  You go to My Computer, click on the Sansa icon (it's almost like an external hard drive), and you just drag over your folders.  Once loaded, the Sansa will look at your MP3 tag info and index them all like the IPod does.

My wife bought me a little rubber case for it that I leave on all the time, and I have no worries about it breaking.  The thing feels really solid. 

Size: It looks bigger in these pictures than it is.  It's smaller than a large pack of gum.  Very nice.

Overall I am very happy with it!!  I would really recommend it to anyone who wants a great MP3 player, but doesn't want to get stuck with an IPod.

This website www.MusicBrainz.org has a great piece of software called "Tagger" and a not so great, but supposedly getting great program called "Picard."

I am still trying to figure out Picard, to see if it can download album covers for me, but I am not having much luck as of yet.

But Tagger is awesome.  You basically point it to your MP3 collection, and it will attempt to match up your MP3s with their database based on a "music fingerprint" and then it will automatically set all the tag info as well as rename the file.

So this means if you have an MP3 of Pink Floyd's Breath from Dark Side of the Moon but the MP3 has no ID3 info and is named PinkF.-Breath.mp3, it will most likely look at the audio and match up the mp3 with their database and put it into \Pink Floyd\Dark Side Of The Moon\01 - Breath.mp3 or however you tell it to rename files.

Pretty sweet!

I just need to find a similar program to get album covers too.

Ever wish you knew how to get around those stupid automated messages and talk to a human?

Enter www.GetHuman.com

This website keeps a list of companies, and the shortcuts to get to a human (e.g. "don't press or say anything", "press '#' 3 times", or "press 1, 0, 0")

Ichiro Suzuki has a cannon for an arm.

I wish this guy was on the Sox!

Almost all of my friends have IPods, but I have held off. 

There are a number of reasons why:

1) ITunes:  It sucks.  I hate it.  My current MP3 player simply allows you to drag and drop the files you want onto your MP3 player.  No syncing, no problems.

2) User interface.  I know a lot of people think the wheel is really cool, but I think it overly involves the user.  Tell me what is wrong with up/down buttons before you redesign the interface to use a wheel.

3) Batteries.  As noted at http://www.ipodsdirtysecret.com/.  The battery in an IPod can not be removed, and some say they start to fail after 18 months.

Well I came across a site called http://www.idont.com/, which went live today (before today it had some anti-ipod message up there). 

Turns out it is a site for the new SanDisk MP3 player.

The e200 (really catchy name... not) looks pretty cool, and might be worth me looking into more: http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives/2006/03/sandisk-sansa-e200-series-review.php

I think this is pretty cool.

Check out the image below.  Then use the link below to open up just the image in a new browser window.

Resize the image (make it smaller) to see the secret message.

secret.gif (139.54 KB)

I just finished watching Over the Years and Through The Woods which I first blogged about here.

It was pretty cool!  If you like Queens of the Stone Age, then you should really get it.

The performances reminded me of the one thing that they do live that I don't like, and that is take an adlib section too far.  It's like, oh cool, normally this part only goes on 4 times but they are doing it more, ok, thats 12, 16, ...  ok 24 times ... ok... this is getting stupid, I lost track of the count, are they ever going to jump back into the song?

But the DVD is pretty cool.  There are some cool bonus footage of a bunch of the songs I really like with their old bass player that they don't play live anymore, which sucks.  I think they were a lot better w/ him in 2003 than w/o.  But whatever.

I found this other CD by them that I might end up getting called The Desert Sessions. 

Cool stuff.