Google earth

Google Earth has been released (at last).There is a free version (unlike keyhole which was a 7 day trial) and a plus version which supports gps imports. The funny thing is that if you have keyhole installed, earth detects it, says it MUST be uninstalled and offers to remove it. I said yes, uninstall and it then said it couldn’t uninstall and that I should uninstall it later and did I want to continue with the installation of earth? A bit weird if keyhole MUST be uninstalled. Hopefully I can have both installed as I like the facilities of keyhole that I have at the moment and hope earth has these too (the import of kml files (geocache points) is a must have for me.
Update It’s funny how the streaming is always at 99% complete! It also supports kml files which is great 🙂

Sitebar

I’ve been playing around with :: SiteBar :: The Bookmark Server for Personal and Team Use which is a pretty useful app in consolidating all your bookmarks onto an online application hosted on my webspace. Using php and mysql it contains all my bookmarks imported from 3 pc’s and 5 browsers with search, MRU and availability on any pc that I use – very handy. It can be installed to host different peoples bookmarks, although in my case it just hosts my own. It integrates with ie and firefox (among other browsers) via extensions or bho’s to give right click functionality to add bookmarks to sitebar and uses the sidebars for main navigation. There are a couple of things that would be nice – synchronisation of the bookmarks back to the browser, 1-click addition of a bookmark to my local bookmarks and sidebar and bookmark validation – I just know loads of mine are dead links.
All in all I’m pretty impressed. If you want to try it yourself I think you can sign up for a free account at sitebar or download the free copy to install yourself.

Flickr Mosaics

Theres a nice tool to make mosaics out of pictures uploaded to flickr sets. It will make mosaics out of other pictures but its quickest with sets. Here’s one I made earlier from Angela’s photos of Mike’s Birthday party
mosaic.jpg
1. clay group, 2. Working, 3. surprise_mary, 4. surprise_howardbowl, 5. surprise_group2, 6. surprise_group, 7. surprise_chat, 8. suprise_sherry, 9. surprise_andykristen, 10. surprise_mikemug, 11. surprise_myplate, 12. surpriseak, 13. surprisebrsh, 14. surprisemike, 15. surpriseworking, 16. surprisemike1

Shared computer toolkit from MS

Microsoft have released a beta of Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP that is suitable for computers in shared access such as libraries etc. It has features such as resetting the boot partition back to the administrator saved configuration each time the machine is rebooted (unless the administrator specifies that changes should be saved), Windows restrictions, policies etc. Looks like it could be handy (although I’d need another machine to try this out on). The local library had a copy of limewire installed on their desktop machine the other day that managed to persist after a reboot. Seeing as though this machine is *meant* to be locked down I’d like to know how that managed to get installed on the machine.

Mike’s surprise.

Mike McBride's Birthday group photoAngela had secretly organised a pottery painting event at Clay Cafe Columbus for Mike’s birthday last night. Kristen and I went over as the cover for persuading Mike to go and when we got there, some more friends were waiting. We had a really good time and this is the group photo after we had finished. For more photo’s go to https://absoblogginlutely.net/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=51 or Angela’s photos.

AntiLeeching.

I’ve stopped (hopefully) people using my bandwidth to host their forum signatures by preventing hotlinking on this site. Hopefully that will reduce the amount of people requesting images without affecting anything else weird on the site. If you spot anything that is wrong then please let me know!

The real cost of vb.net programming

I’m doing some vb.net programming and really missing my dual screen capabilities that I used to have. I’m trying to follow MS’s online tutorial but its practically impossible to work with the help file and the ide on the screen at the same time and get some productive work done as the screen just isn’t big enough. I’m already running at 1280*1024 pixels – any larger and it would get really hard to read the text on the screen. Don’t think it will be long before I get a cheap graphics card and a second monitor (although this would will be a crt display). I’ll also need a proper computer desk to put the screen on (and some more memory would be nice)…..not forgetting the full cost of vb.net when it comes out of beta – ouch.

odeo download

I got an email from the odeo team inviting me to join their beta program. This is a standalone podcast reader that will download podcast items individually or synchronise them on a scheduled basis. At the moment it looks like it has potential but needs more features. I’ve sent them an email with my initial thoughts and suggestions on how to improve it. Worth signing up for their beta to try it.