Montag, 3. Januar 2005

Eye of Science: Velcro. Looks organic, right? Like something you'd see in a nook on a coral reef? It's actually velcro. Oliver Meckes and Nicole Ottawa are microphotographers who founded Eye of Science in 1994. Capturing everything from insects to velcro, their images help scientists (and the rest of us) make sense of the things too small to see with the naked eye. It's all done with Transmission-Electron Microscopy and Macintosh computers. Posted in: Future [Eyebeam reBlog] 1:37:28 PM    comment []

LED floods, need we say more?. We[base ']re not entirely sure why it took so long to do this (we here at Engadget would look forward to a future where all articifial light is LED or fiber-based), but an Arizona-based company named Enlux clustered un-housed LEDs on a head-spreading circuit board (matched also with aluminum fins) to make LED-based floodlights. The geek-over-practical quotient is pretty out of control though: while each bulb lasts 50,000 hours (used 8 hours a day that[base ']s 17 years) and uses less than half the wattage of similarly bright incadescent bulbs, each Enlux flood will set you back $80 bones. Yes, that[base ']s eighty dollars. [Via MetaEfficient] [Engadget] 1:32:48 PM    comment []

Craigslist vs. the Newspapers. Report: Craigslist costing newspapers millions: Interesting information on the phenomenon that is CraigsList. I wonder how long until the newspapers file a lawsuit for unfair competition? Free community Web site Craigslist has cost San Francisco Bay Area newspapers up to $65 million in employment advertising revenue, according to a report released Monday. Craigslist, which generates more than 1 billion page-views each month, also has cost the newspapers millions more in merchandise and real estate advertising, and has damaged other traditional classified advertising businesses, according to a report published by Classified Intelligence. [Gadgetopia] 12:28:44 PM    comment []

Lightning: Mozilla Strikes Again. Given the growing success of Firefox, a new Mozilla-based project code-named 'Lightning' may be worth keeping an eye on. Lightning is the working project name for an extension to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird. [...] Q. Is Lightning meant as a competitor to Outlook? A. With Lightning, Mozilla Thunderbird will have a set of user features that is much more competitive with Outlook, especially in enterprise usage. The primary goal of Lightning is to provide a pleasant and productive user experience for both email and calendaring tasks, largely independent of specific competitors' product plans. If the result of the Lightning project is an acceleration of users' migration from Outlook to Thunderbird, though, very few tears will be shed. Thunderbird with calendaring features would be very cool. [Gadgetopia] 12:27:30 PM    comment []

Enigma Machine in Java. Enigma Machine Applet: Here's a Java implementation of the Enigma encoding machine, used in World War II. While it's fun to play with, unless you know how Enigma worked, it's not going to make much snese. Simon Singh's "The Code Book" provides the clearest explanation of Enigma that I've ever read. Via MetaFilter. [Gadgetopia] 12:25:25 PM    comment []

Wikipedia and the Tsunami Disaster. 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake: If you haven't looked yet, Wikipedia is [~] once again [~] doing an insane job keeping track of developments in the Southeast Asia tsunami disaster. Currently on the page is scads of information about what caused the tsunami, what a tsunami is, what the currect effects are, what every country is going to help, and what phone numbers and URLs you need if you want to assist. It's an amazing level of detail and it should be your first stop for information, rather than any of the news outlets. We've previously raved about Wikipedia's abilities in this respect with Hurricane Ivan, the Madrid Bombings, and the 2004 Olympics. [Gadgetopia] 12:24:02 PM    comment []

FrontPage Code Cleaner. Frontpage Code Cleaner: Here's a handy service, though FrontPage 2003 is a lot better with code than its predecessors. Our Frontpage Code Cleaner will read the page you specify, and clean a lot of the un-needed code created by Microsoft Frontpage. This helps to shrink the size of the actual page, which has many benefits. Just for fun, I fed Gadgetopia's front page into it, and it dropped it from 70K (yikes) to 66KB. [Gadgetopia] 12:21:18 PM    comment []

Flash Done Well. Asia's Deadly Waves: The Impact on India: Here's a really great example of Flash design to show pictures and graphics of the tsunami disaster. It's very non-linear, very exploratory. The pictures may seem simple enough, but click on the "Graphics" link to really get a feel for how Flash can be done right. [Gadgetopia] 12:19:55 PM    comment []

MT Wiki Vandalism. MT Wiki . MT . WebHome: This note was posted on the front page of the Movable Type wiki. Depressing. THANKS TO EVIL PEOPLE, SEARCH HAS BEEN DISABLED AND PAGES ARE NO LONGER EDITABLE - NOT MUCH FUN HUH? [Gadgetopia] 12:18:19 PM    comment []

ccPublisher 1.0. After six busy months, I'm very pleased to announce the release of ccPublisher 1.0. ccPublisher 1.0 is a feature complete, stable tool which allows users (that's you) to easily license your work, and optionally upload it to the Internet Archive for free hosting and cataloging. You can download ccPublisher for Windows (.msi) or Mac OS X (.dmg) from our servers or from the SourceForge.net project. Linux distributions will be available soon. We're not done developing ccPublisher, and have lots of improvements planned. But I'm confident there are features and ideas we haven't thought of. So write them down or join the discussion. [Creative Commons Blog - rss] 11:47:58 AM    comment []