Paul's Blog

With all of the 80,000 folks in Japan sitting outside of stores praying to who-knows about their possibilities of actually getting their hands on a PS3, Sony has gone ahead and recently posted the PS3 manual on their site.

At least the interface between the PS3 and the PSP (and other Sony products, as of late) has been matched. The icons are the same and they actually mean the same things; that's something for the greater good! People identify pictures faster and more accurately than words, so the visual consistency is a definite plus.

There are so many fun things out there on the web. There are those great MeMes that everyone does, there are phone blogs, text blogs, and journals that teens love. Why not spice up your pages with a little fun? Who doesn't like to hear the sound of their own voice, right?

Well, if you want to say something witty, stupid, or just silly, you can make a recording with something and post it. But what if you want to actually change the sound of your voice and add some neat effects? Maybe you're like me and don't actually LIKE the sound of your spoken voice. ... or maybe I'm a liar and do my own podcast and don't mind hearing myself talk? Either way, why not check out this fun little toy for that MySpace generation: The RAZZ Mixer.

The other day, I was reading an article about whether or not it made sense to use more technology in the classroom. Some of the arguements for it were that it would be easier to deal with carrying so many books around and always having the content at your fingertips, along with the ability to do research very quickly.

Digital classroom learning tools might have made it easier for my near-sightedness growing up, as well. Imagine being able to actually SEE what's "on the board" right there in front of your face? Imagine being able to interact with the teacher more easily, and not have to walk up to the board to jot your answers, but to write or draw from your desktop. The best part? How about, you've already got the notes from the board which you can translate into digital text, rather than just a graphic. ... and you didn't even have to type/write it! Now that's cool! Imagine also being able to always have the latest updates to your history books?

The argument on the other side is how difficult it would be for kids to keep from destroying this equipment and who it would cost when these things did get destroyed. Kids notoriously drop things. Things break. Books can weather that storm, but notebook computers and tablet PCs can't. So, what's the alternative? Don't ever update to technology, or find a way to reduce the cost of hardened pieces of equipment? I mean, come-on, we use these things on shop floors, manufacturing plants, and on construction sites. It's obvious that we can overcome these issues. Of course, the other side of that is how heavy they are... hmmm... back to square one, aren't we?

So, I was just reading one of my favorite blogs, JKonTheRun (with my pals James and Kevin!), and Kevin pointed out a piece of technology that should have made perfect sense to me, since I was already using it for something like this: Digital Magazines on a stick! I thought, "Duh! I have the simple answer, in my hands!" Why not give the kids their books on USB drives? THAT's a whole lot lighter than those gigantic science and math books my kid brings home! Besides, you can even change the size of the type to make it easier to read, for us old folks when we're helping out with the homework.

It doesn't solve the whole problem, or question, I mentioned at the top of this post, but it does bring us a little closer to what makes some sense. With PCs in the classroom, and PCs at home, kids can really get what they need and not need a chiropractor from lugging those books around! (no offense to you back-doctors out there!) Besides, the teachers can certainly send the kids home with encrypted notes for the parents to read, and we could digitally sign-off on homework and the like. Lesson plans could be delivered this way, too.

There's a world of good technology out there for education, why don't we use it? What's your take?

You're like me, I know you are. You like to play MMORPG games and you like to have everything on your PC reflect that you do. I love games like World of Warcraft and Guildwars, and I also really love Anime stuff; it's so cool!

If you're interested in checking out a free anime download blog and forum for MMORPG stuff, you should check out Trickster Online and the urAnime forums with Free Anime Downloads.

They've got all kinds of stuff out there, including forums about Naruto, One Piece, Gundam, and Bleach. You can get pictures, manga, wallpaper, music, downloads and have great discussions (of which some are really intriguing, I might add) on the site. You can even catch up on an Anime Blog that they've got.

So, if you like Anime (and you KNOW you do, you pwned haxorz!), you should check out some anime download stuff at urAnime and Trickster!

[Sponsored Post - Disclaimer]

Video conferencing is something that many companies have been doing for years. I've been in the IT industry for many years and have found my way to many conferences both in the office on TV screens, as well as with little tiny web-cams between collegues. The biggest problem, for me, at least has been the quality of the conference. Sometimes the picture is good, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes the sound is just a mess. Often times, forget trying to read those slides they transmit!

The company, LifeSize, has an interesting Video Conferencing System out there for you corporate warriors who would much rather not travel and still have efficient meetings. LifeSize Room is a HDTV for your video communications needs. It combines quality and user simplicity to make remote communications a more productive, and realistic, experience. The fully integrated system connects to most displays in any size conference room and provides crystal clear video clarity, along with high fidelity audio - which, I think I already mentioned, is key!

Jia Li, a mathematician at Pennsylvania State University, in State College, who created a piece of software with colleague James Wang, a member of the College of Information Sciences and Technology, have started to find a way for pictures to be tagged by computers.

The new software, called ALIPR (Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures), uses a combination of statistical techniques to process an image and assign it a batch of 15 words, arranged in order of perceived relevance. These words may refer to a specific object within the picture, such as a "person" or "car," or to a more general theme, such as "outdoors" or "manmade."

"Recognizing what an image is about semantically is one of the most difficult problems in AI," says Jia Li. "Objects in the real world are 3-D," Li explains. "When showing up in an image, they can vary vastly in color, shape, gesture, size, and position, and a computer usually has no prior knowledge about the variations."

ALIPR analyses an image pixel by pixel and applies a novel statistical method to calculate the probability that a particular word may describe its content. This involves examining the distribution of color and texture within the image and comparing these features with a stored database of words and images. Li and Wang trained their program using a commercial database containing around 50,000 images that had already been tagged.

Recently, they tested ALIPR on 5,411 previously unseen images available on the popular picture-sharing site Flickr. For 51 percent of these images, the first word generated by ALIPR appeared in users' tags. The program also produced at least one accurate word 98 percent of the time. The researchers employed images made publicly accessible by Flickr users, which were also openly accessible through Flickr's own Application Programming Interface.

[Via: Technology Review]

The people at Like.com (Riya) have come up with a really cool idea. You know how many times you look at a picture and you say to your significant other "I wish I had [some item in the picture] like that! Buy me that!" Well, now it's so much easier to get some help finding what you wanted, or they wanted.

Metalosis Maligna is a fictitious documentary, by Floris Kaayk. It's a story about an amazingly "disabling disease which affects patients who have been fittedwith medical implants. Sourcing from such implants a wild metal growth ultimately transforms human patients into mechanical looking constructions."

In a report by the BBC (way back around the first of November - I haven't gotten out site reviewing much), there is news about how "a think-tank has called for outdated copyright laws to be rewritten to take account of new ways people listen to music, watch films and read books."

The article (BBC Report) discusses how the digital age may now have us re-thinking the way we regard copyright laws. It's true that things have definitely changed since the early days of copyright when "all rights reserved" had made perfect sense. In those early days, you had more print material than anything, and digitally retrieving anything was not even quite a dream as of yet.

It's good to see there are "thinkers" out there whom actually agree with the technologically advanced folks, as well as the teenagers (Sometimes, one in the same).

[Via: My Buddies At MobileRead]

If you have Windows Media Center Edition, and you still have an iTunes library 'cause you like your iPod, and don't have one of those fancy PlaysForSure devices, wouldn't you like to be able to hear your DRM'd material through WMCE? Of course you would! Enter MCETunes!

So, what is this MCE Tunes, of which you speak? Well, MCE Tunes is a special plug-in developed exclusively for Microsoft Windows Media center which enables it to play iTunes music (m4a and m4p) files right from the easy-to-use Media Center music navigation interface. Now you're asking: is this legal? Absolutely! MCE Tunes does not "decrypt" any iTunes music and is 100% legal. Your PC must be authorized to play all protected music before you can use MCE Tunes.

Today, Blockbuster Inc. announced that it is giving online renters unprecedented access to movies through the introduction of BLOCKBUSTER Total Access.™ This is Blockbuster's movie rental program that gives its active online customers the option of returning their DVDs through the mail OR exchanging them at one of their more than 5,000 participating BLOCKBUSTER® stores for free in-store movie rentals.

Given that I'm drummer, I love things connected to drums and drumming; technology is no exception. So, when I saw this coolness from Hammacher Schlemmer, I thought... Neat!!