This Flickr map thing is a cool concept, I’ve been geotagging my images, Yahoo map sucks though, it’s slow and it doesn’t know landmarks or business names. But of course Yahoo! pays their bills so it probably isn’t possible to use Google Map. 🙂
Technorati Tags: flickr
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are hoping to do for speech recognition what graphics cards did for gaming — that is, make it better. The idea being to use specialized computer chips in order to overcome the problems inherent with software-based solutions, which’ll also lower the power consumption required and allow for better speech recognition in things like cellphones. And according to the researchers, it’s working, although currently limited to a not-very-practical 1,000 word vocabulary. The technology isn’t just for dictating your email though; one of the many possible noted examples of applications is making search available on a specific piece of dialog from a movie. Wonder if they’ve been having any secret back room meetings with a certain rumor-happy video game company?
Better speech recognition through chipsets – Engadget
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This is not new info or anything, so if you already know how to get feeds from vB forums then you can ignore this entry.
I am registered at a fairly large number of forums, I only actively monitor a few of them, which ones of them depends on what I’m into or what I’m looking into buying. 😉 A majority of these Internet forums are powered by vBulletin, and IIRC, RSS feed is enabled by default. Most owners of these forums don’t provide links or advertise the fact that these feeds are enabled, probably because they don’t know about this feature (and Feedburner), or they have board sponsors and assume when people come in via feeds it would bypass their ads. Anyway, since RSS is enabled on most of these boards, here is how you can get to them:
If the URL of the site looks like http://forums.foo.com, the feed for the entire site should look like http://forums.foo.com/external.php?type=rss2 (use just “rss” if you want RSS 0.91).
You can also get the feed for a particular forum, go to the forum you want and note the forum ID, if the end of the URL looks like forumdisplay.php?f=23 then the ID is 23. The feed for that forum is http://forums.foo.com/external.php?type=rss2&forumids=23
Carnegie Mellon’s Ballbot could teach Segway a thing or two:
Those humanoid robots are all well and good if you’ve got 30 minutes to watch ASIMO manage a 360 degree turn, but some researchers at Carnegie Mellon have been spending some time trying to figure out a bot that could actually be useful in the here and now. Their result is the Ballbot, a 95 pound unit that balances on a single metal sphere, and is tall enough to look a person in the eye. The robot can manage a smooth floor easily, and is designed for navigating human environments. When it isn’t moving, the Ballbot has retractable “kickstands” to hold it up. The next step for the Ballbot is a head and pair of arms to help the robot balance and turn, and the eventual goal is a robot that is a useful helper to the elderly, disabled, or those in an office environment. We’re just looking forward to shouting “Ballbot, beer me!”
Technorati Tags: carnegie mellon, cmu
Sherry finally got herself a Flickr “pro” subscription so I just helped migrated her snapshots from gallery to flickr, using my hacked version of gallery2flickr. It still works, so if anyone’s interested in ditching Gallery (1) for Flickr, check out the hack.
I also found a really nifty tool to backup your Flickr pics to your Mac.
Technorati Tags: flickr, gallery, photography, php
Was checking out Leopard, nothing really revolutional like when they introduced Dashboard, but virtual desktop is nice, especially coz I got used to having them with window managers in X.
technorati tags:leopard, spaces, virtual desktops
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Good vibrations, Bad vibrations it?s all about vibrations!! RAM would like to introduce a new signature level knob developed for the mighty Silver Rock potentiometer. The standard bakelite knob is certainly the best sounding compromise… but now Audio Consulting has taken this aspect of the Silver Rock much further. The new knobs are custom made with beech wood and bronze where the bronze is used as the insert to mount to the stem of the volume pot. The beech wood is coated several times with C37 lacquer for best sound as pointed out by Dieter Ennemoser. How can this make a difference??? Well, hearing is believing as we always say. The sound becomes much more open and free flowing with a nice improvement in resolution. Dynamics are better and overall naturalness is improved. Here is a test for all you Silver Rock owners. Try removing the bakelite knobs and listen. You will be shocked by this! The signature knobs will have an even greater effect?really amazing! The point here is the micro vibrations created by the volume pots and knobs find their way into the delicate signal path and cause degradation (Bad vibrations equal bad sound). With the signature knobs micro vibrations from the C37 concept of wood, bronze and the lacquer itself compensate for the volume pots and provide (Good Vibrations) our ear/brain combination like to hear?way better sound!!
Silver Rock Signature Knob: Reference Audio Mods
technorati tags:hifi
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