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Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping, and always have a mountain in life to climb

  • This tool, from Augmented Reality Software, allows you to do the following:

    • Capture your Google Maps offline and store them as images on your hard drive
    • Print out maps of entire cities at zoom levels that would take hours to put together with the current Google facility
    Best of all, this tool is completely FREE!

    If you have ever spent hours print screening your Google maps into Paint and stitching them together you NEED this program!

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  • Windows Explorer in Windows 95
    Image via Wikipedia

    This week in utilities I am trying and find to be useful I have Commands in Demand from Vasilios Freeware.  This is available here on Download.com.  While I notice the Quick Start key sequence is the same as AutoHotKey, resetting it to something useful is fairly easy.  I am to lazy and Launchy finds it rapidly enough for me.

    • A collection of commands that may be needed instantly for a purpose.

    • Commands in Demand provides non-technical users with easy access to more than 100 Windows commands and features that can be hard to find or time consuming to get to. The program includes shortcuts to terminate non-responsive applications, restart Windows Explorer, view/clear the clipboard, open a command prompt in a selected folder, access system folders, view TCP/IP configuration settings, etc.

    • It has a selections menu (sections) according to were its commands are related. If a command is related with more than one section and in order to be less confused, you may find the same command buttons more than one times.

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  • Image representing Storytlr as depicted in Cru...
    Image via CrunchBase

    XBMC was a bust for me to use.  It simply had too many issues with configuring my graphics for very little payback.  I continue to use my HPMediaVault with extra software.

    This week I am installing Fedora 12 and Storytlr In The Shop.

    From the Storytlr Site:

    Storytlr is an open source lifestreaming and micro blogging platform. You can use it for a single user or it can act as a host for many people all from the same installation.

    What we offer to user
    What does Storytlr offer to its users?
    Bring your content together:
    * Import your web 2.0 life: Pick your sources and they will appear as a lifestream directly on your site. We currently support the following services: Delicious, Digg, Disqus, Flickr, Google Reader, Identi.ca / Laconi.ca, Last.fm favorites, Picasa, Qik, RSS Feeds, Seesmic, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Twitpic pictures in Twitter tweets, Twitter, Vimeo, Youtube Favorites
    * Post anything you want: In just a few simple steps you can update your status, share a song you liked, give your opinion or link to an interesting site.

    Mashup your data into stories

    Tell your stories in a new way: Photo albums are old school! Pick your sources, start and end date and your story is good to go. If necessary you can tweak it for a better flow.

    Reinvent your homepage

    Choose your own style: Pick from a range of compelling templates that are easy to customize.
    No prominent service branding: It is all about you, so you will not find big logos or fixed brand colors on storytlr.
    Pick or use your own domain name: You are free to use any domain you want.

    Quotes

    What did others think of Storytlr:

    “They’ve done a fantastic job with both concept and implementation.” – ReadWriteWeb
    “Put it all together, and you?ve got a serious competitor to Tumblr and other lifestreaming applications.” – Mashable
    “Storytlr remains a unique service among so much social media noise.” – Ars Technica
    “This is a cool and different visual approach to lifestreams.” – TheNextWeb

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  • In the shop today:

    Playing with XBMC to see if I like it to stream media from a variety of sources including an HP MediaVault.  Check back in a couple of days and see how it is going.

    From the XBMC website:

    XBMC is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media. XBMC is available for Linux, OSX, Windows, and the original Xbox. Created in 2003 by a group of like minded programmers, XBMC is a non-profit project run and developed by volunteers located around the world. More than 50 software developers have contributed to XBMC, and 100-plus translators have worked to expand its reach, making it available in more than 30 languages.

    While XBMC functions very well as a standard media player application for your computer, it has been designed to be the perfect companion for your HTPC. Supporting an almost endless range of remote controls, and combined with its beautiful interface and powerful skinning engine, XBMC feels very natural to use from the couch and is the ideal solution for your home theater.

    Currently XBMC can be used to play almost all popular audio and video formats around. It was designed for network playback, so you can stream your multimedia from anywhere in the house or directly from the internet using practically any protocol available. Use your media as-is: XBMC can play CDs and DVDs directly from the disk or image file, almost all popular archive formats from your hard drive, and even files inside ZIP and RAR archives. It will even scan all of your media and automatically create a personalized library complete with box covers, descriptions, and fanart. There are playlist and slideshow functions, a weather forecast feature and many audio visualizations. Once installed, your computer will become a fully functional multimedia jukebox.

    It is difficult to put into words all that XBMC can do, head to the gallery to see some examples, or take the plunge and Try it Today.

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  • Cory Doctorow, photographed by Jonathan Worth
    Image via Wikipedia

    Content by Cory Doctorow

    Content ebook Image

    Cory Doctorow, one of the voices behind the uber-blog Boing-Boing, is well-known for his opinions on technology, DRM and the future of content. Content is a collection of some of his best work and is an insightful read. Truly a man that practices what he preaches, the book is available for free in multiple formats.

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  • I left my Shoei Helmet on the parking strip when I pushed my bike home from the neighbors house.  For those not familiar with Portland (and I assume many other cities and towns), something left on the curb indicates that it is available for FreeCycling.  So off it went to a new home in less than the five minutes it took to slip out of my jacket, put the bike up on the stand and walk back to get it.  A new friend mentioned New Enough as his favorite place to get an economical but solid helmet and I am going to look into and pick one up.  I have the info from the site below.  I wonder who else has purchased from here?

    Need new riding gear? New Enough is a dealer for many brands of apparel, boots, gloves, helmets and accessories: Joe Rocket, Alpinestars, FirstGear, Icon, Scorpion, Shoei, HJC, Power Trip, Cortech/Tour Master, Sidi, TCX, and Held. From these quality makers, we personally evaluate and hand pick products that provide the best mix of quality, fit, style and value. We frequently offer great prices on discontinued items since we have built a reputation with our sources as being a buyer of large quantities of closeout gear.

    All apparel styles have been tried on by our staff and models in our shop and we present them to you with our personal impressions of their style, fit and function. We never present new apparel items with only scanned images and sales verbiage from our suppliers’ brochures. You’ll also know at a glance what sizes and styles are in stock as our inventory is displayed and is always up-to-date.

    (more…)

  • Introducing Google Public DNS: A new DNS resolver from Google

    Thursday, December 03, 2009

    Today, as part of our efforts to make the web faster, we are announcing Google Public DNS, a new experimental public DNS resolver.

    The DNS protocol is an important part of the web’s infrastructure, serving as the Internet’s “phone book”. Every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup. Complex pages often require multiple DNS lookups before they complete loading. As a result, the average Internet user performs hundreds of DNS lookups each day, that collectively can slow down his or her browsing experience.

    We believe that a faster DNS infrastructure could significantly improve the browsing experience for all web users. To enhance DNS speed but to also improve security and validity of results, Google Public DNS is trying a few different approaches that we are sharing with the broader web community through our documentation:

    • Speed: Resolver-side cache misses are one of the primary contributors to sluggish DNS responses. Clever caching techniques can help increase the speed of these responses. Google Public DNS implements prefetching: before the TTL on a record expires, we refresh the record continuously, asychronously and independently of user requests for a large number of popular domains. This allows Google Public DNS to serve many DNS requests in the round trip time it takes a packet to travel to our servers and back.
    • Security: DNS is vulnerable to spoofing attacks that can poison the cache of a nameserver and can route all its users to a malicious website. Until new protocols like DNSSEC get widely adopted, resolvers need to take additional measures to keep their caches secure. Google Public DNS makes it more difficult for attackers to spoof valid responses by randomizing the case of query names and including additional data in its DNS messages.
    • Validity: Google Public DNS complies with the DNS standards and gives the user the exact response his or her computer expects without performing any blocking, filtering, or redirection that may hamper a user’s browsing experience.

    We hope that you will help us test these improvements by using the Google Public DNS service today, from wherever you are in the world. We plan to share what we learn from this experimental rollout of Google Public DNS with the broader web community and other DNS providers, to improve the browsing experience for Internet users globally.

    To get more information on Google Public DNS you can visit our site, read our documentation, and our logging policies. We also look forward to receiving your feedback in our discussion group.