Thursday, 11 September 2003

iPhoto Library Manager (Mac) If you use Apple iPhoto, you may have been frustrated by the fact that iPhoto forces you to keep all of your pictures in a single library folder and does not let you easily change the location of that folder. With iPhoto Library Manager, you can split your photos up into any number of separate libraries, store them on any disk connected to your computer, and switch back and forth between them easily. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.1.2 or higher and iPhoto 1.x or 2.0 Works great and is free. Now I can easily split my database of 3,000 images into handy chunks that are easier organized and work faster.... 4:41:32 PM    comment []; Distortion 04 4:38:49 PM    comment []; The GPS Age is Coming... Motorola launches a new dime sized GPS chip that promises to make cheap GPS ubiquitous in all sorts of devices including cell phones, pagers, PDA's, etc. This is good stuff. I have long been predicting the convergence of GPS and the Internet. You should be able to use your portable device to see location-relevant content as you move around -- for example, when you go to Times Square, you could suddenly see geographically-relevant news, ads, restaurant reviews, broadway ticket offers, and other content, etc. -- all related to where you are standing. [Minding the Planet] Double-edged sword...it could also mean that a government could track every single citizen...Philip K. Dick predicted this in the sixties: taylor-made advertising that works with a huge database of your personal choices, likes and dislikes that is compared with the data from your GPS receiver and bingo you walk by a billboard that changes for your gaze and announces: Ottmar (see, it already knows I don't like to be called Mr. Liebert), you work too hard. Take a vacation - or maybe, as I am walking through Time Square on my way to a show at B.B.King's I would read: Ottmar, the new book by Neal Stephenson is out. Turn right at the next intersection and you will find a book store within a hundred feet..... well, as long as there is an off switch we'll be OK. 2:04:01 PM    comment []; Tour bus bunks..... This is the interior of a tour bus, in this case the crew bus, rarely seen and mostly kept secret but nevertheless revealed here by Canton's camera. Note: the crew is so much neater than the band! 12:52:53 PM    comment []; Drawing 66 12:44:17 PM    comment []; Yesterday's Sunset - comment Just so you know - I don't manipulate my sunset photos at all, merely cut them to size and compress them for the web. Yesterday's sunset was the most amazing sunset of the year and it made me remember something I said when I first moved to Santa Fe in 1986: If I had seen a painting with a sunset such as this one, I would have considered it kitsch and obviously dramatized - but now I know they really look like that! And it is free super wide-screen entertainment! 12:40:49 PM    comment []; Chandra "Hears" a Black Hole In musical terms, the pitch of the sound generated by the black hole translates into the note of B flat. But, a human would have no chance of hearing this cosmic performance because the note is 57 octaves lower than middle-C (by comparison a typical piano contains only about seven octaves). At a frequency over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing, this is the deepest note ever detected from an object in the Universe. Nada Brahma (Sound is God) - Hinduism The ear is the way - from the Upanishads Hear, and you shall live - Isaiah Merely looking at something cannot develop us - Goethe The eye takes a person into the world. The ear brings the world into a human being - Lorenz Oken 12:30:41 PM    comment []; Space Elevator Conference in Santa Fe Sir Arthur C. Clarke, world-renowned science fiction author, will address the Second Annual Space Elevator Conference held Sept. 12-15 in Santa Fe. The event is co-sponsored by Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Institute for Scientific Research Inc. (ISR). Clarke, the author of "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Fountains of Paradise" and many other novels, will open the conference with a live address via satellite at 8 a.m., Saturday, Sept. 13, from his home in Sri Lanka. What is a Space Elevator? A space elevator capable of lifting 5-ton payloads every day to all Earth orbits, the Moon, Mars, Venus or the asteroids could be operational in 15 years. The first space elevator would reduce lift costs immediately to $100 per pound, as compared to current launch costs, which are $10,000-$40,000 per pound, depending upon destination and choice of rocket launch system. Additional and larger elevators, built utilizing the first one, would allow large-scale manned and commercial activities in space and reduce lift costs even further. Why do we need the arts? Because artists (and I am including writers in this generalization) imagine a future that scientists and engineers can then use as a road map. Clarke has written about space elevators for years...now it looks like it can become reality in under two decades. This will change everything! 12:17:41 PM    comment []; Wednesday's Sunset 12:00:04 AM    comment [];

© Copyright 2003 Ottmar Liebert. Last update: 25.09.03; 8:23:58.